Free Our One Common Country by James B. Conroy

Sherman had begun his march to the sea.

    Uniquely distinguished as a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s and an unapologetic Copperhead with a brother in the Rebel Congress, James W. Singleton had been born into an old Virginia family and moved to Illinois. He had made himself wealthy in business and influential in Whig politics, forged ties to Lincoln, and kept them in good repair after he defected to the Democrats. In 1861, John Hay had called him the idol of his friends. Four months later, when Hay told the president that his friend was behaving badly, Lincoln called Singleton “a miracle of meanness.”Railing against the war in the 1864 campaign, he had crossed a forbidden line. When Lincoln called him to task for it and told him that some were calling for his arrest, he said it was nothing personal.
    On Thanksgiving Day, Singleton told Orville Hickman Browning, a former senator from Illinois and another old Lincoln man, that he had just come from Clay and Tucker, the Rebel agents in Canada who had charmed Horace Greeley but not John Hay. Now he was in Washington to see Lincoln about peace, Clay and Tucker having told him that the South would accept reunion if amnesty were given and slavery let alone. Lincoln had confided in him before the election, Singleton said, that after it was won he would not insist on abolition if the South rejoined the Union. He would leave it to the courts. His letter in the Niagara Falls fiasco, making the abandonment of slavery a condition of peace, had been a mistake, he said. Slavery would not prevent a settlement. Now that the election was over, Singleton was going to see him again.
    Two days later, Singleton told Browning that he had not yet seen the president but had received a message from him, repeating that slavery would not stand in the way of an adjustment. After Congress reconvened in December, Singleton said, Lincoln would decide whether to send an envoy to Richmond. If anyone could influence “those people,” the president had told Singleton, “you are the man.”

    Lincoln was struggling with his annual message to Congress. None of the others had troubled him so. To Gideon Welles it “seemed to dwell heavy on his mind.” With the election safely behind them, the victors were warring among themselves on whether to coax the Rebels home or simply to club them down, pitting Jacobins like Wade and Davis against moderates like Lincoln and Seward, and Democrats against both. It was plain to the Secretary of the Interior, John Usher, a potbellied man with heavy-lidded eyes who had ridden the judicial circuit with Lincoln in the 1840s, that his friend was weighted down by the disconcerting thought that many Republicans who had helped him win the war despised his plans to win the peace. On the issue of reconstruction, Usher said, there were “as many minds as there were men,” every one sure he was right, and passionateabout it, “without regard to the opinions of Mr. Lincoln or any one else; yet he felt that the responsibility all rested upon him.”
    On Friday, November 25, Lincoln read his Cabinet an unimpressive draft of his message to Congress. Uncle Gideon heard “nothing very striking” in it, “and he evidently labors in getting it up.” With the war all but won, what seemed to try him most was how to end it quickly, how to stop the waste of lives and reconcile the people. The question of whom to deal with seemed to worry him most of all. “He says he cannot treat with Jeff Davis and the Jeff Davis government, which is all very well, but who will he treat with, or how commence the work?” If the war were to end short of abject conquest, if Southern voices were to be heard on the shape of the postwar future, someone must speak for the South. If not Jeff Davis, who?
    Welles was pleased that the president refused to negotiate with the Rebel government, and the rest of the Cabinet agreed, but Uncle Gideon thought the