Free Our One Common Country by James B. Conroy Page A

states were different. “We are one country,” he said. Davis’s government was illegitimate, “but the States are entities and may be recognized and treated with.”
    On Saturday, Lincoln reconvened the Cabinet and read them another draft. Welles thought it much improved, and said so, but was not entirely satisfied. The president should invite the rebellious states to come home under their own powers, he said, appeal more earnestly to their people, assure them that they would not be outlaws—that their persons and property would be respected.
    The humorless Edwin Stanton, the Jacobins’ favorite Cabinet member, had decided to show up for the first time in a month and a half, with his nerve-chilling stare and his perfumed beard. Another former Democrat, he had served as James Buchanan’s Attorney General. In three grim years as Lincoln’s Secretary of War, he had done a formidable job. Lincoln sometimes called him Mars. Jefferson Davis called him venomous.
    Every other Cabinet member had spoken, and the subject had been changed when the war god thundered on peace. The president should include no new offers or sentiments on the subject, Stanton said. He should merely say that the door was open, invite the ordinary people to return to their duties, ask them if they would not be better off if they hadtaken his offer a year ago and come back to the Union with their lives, their liberty, and their property.
    Lincoln did not disagree. But how was he to know what those ordinary people were thinking? There was no mail service between the North and South. What impressions the occasional traveler brought back were anecdotal. The Southern journalism that made its way above the Mason-Dixon Line was little more than fiction, belching fire about the people’s will, but with almost no objective reporting. Many thousands of Southern soldiers were in Northern prisons. (In an effort to reach them, Southern papers ran notices of weddings, deaths, and missing men, accompanied by the legend, “New York papers, please copy,” which the New York papers did.) Still, no one knew much about the man in the Southern street, let alone the woman. Governor Francis Pierpont of “The Restored Government of Virginia” led a rump administration in a Washington suburb as if it were the real thing. Lincoln would soon tell Pierpont that he had no idea what the ordinary Southerner was thinking, implying inadvertently that Pierpont didn’t either.

    The president brought forth his message on the state of the Union on December 6, and had it sent to Capitol Hill. 2 * The election had confirmed that the loyal people’s purpose was never firmer, it said. Despite much debate over ways and means, not a single congressional candidate had proposed to give up the Union. The men and resources required to save it were “unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.” The public will to reestablish federal authority in the South was unchanged, “and as we believe, unchangeable. The manner of continuing the effort remains to choose.” It was here on the matter of choice that Lincoln said something new.
    * Not since Jefferson called the practice reminiscent of the crown had any president read it in person.
    â€œOn careful consideration of all the evidence accessible, it seems to me that no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader could result in any good. He would accept nothing short of severance of the Union, precisely what we will not and cannot give. His declarations to this effect are explicit and oft-repeated. He does not attempt to deceive us. He affordsus no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily re-accept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory. If we yield, we are beaten; if the Southern people fail him, he is beaten. Either way, it