Dusty Bookshelf: Edward Chase Kirkland, The Peacemakers of 1864

Edward Chase Kirkland, The Peacemakers of 1864. New York: AMS Press, 1969 (reprint of 1927 edition). 279 pages.

Edward Chase Kirkland (1894-1975) was a professor who taught at several prestigious universities. Though he ended up with a focus on American economic history, his first book, the book under review, covers various peace initiatives in the last year of the Civil War.

In 1864, after the loss of so many lives, the war looked like a stalemate. Morale was low in each section. Many people, North and South, turned their minds to the possibility of a negotiated settlement between the Union and the Confederacy. The two war leaders – Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis – did not fully buy the idea of a peace agreement, but they did not want to be seen as categorically opposed to negotiations.

It was a Presidential election year in the North, and Lincoln feared he might lose on account of many Northerners’ exhaustion with the war. The Confederates hoped to encourage a possible anti-Lincoln peace candidate, not only by fighting a successful defensive war, but by encouraging peace propaganda, or even antiwar uprisings, in the Union. Coordinating Confederate subversion efforts was Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, former Secretary of the Interior and one of Davis’ emissaries to Canada. From this base, watched by Northern spies, Thompson sought to foment dissent and insurrection against the Union government.

One drawback of this book is that Kirkland didn’t do a deep dive into numerous archives in order to find what could be found about these Confederate conspiracies. Of course, the relevant archives may not have been fully available in the 1920s. In any case, later historians did a lot of relevant archival research, though maybe the full details of Confederate secret service activity are still not known beyond doubt.

Kirkland did have the benefit of wartime newspapers and magazines, postwar memoirs of would-be peacemakers, and the Official Records of the war. These sources show much about the pressure for peace talks about how the Union and Confederate governments tried to channel that pressure.

One key talking point of Northern peacemongers, encouraged behind the scenes by Thompson and his agents, was that Lincoln had expanded his war aims beyond a mere restoration of the Union to include the abolition of slavery. Didn’t this new war aim prolong the conflict? Why not drop emancipation as a war aim and try to coax the Confederates back into the Union by promising to keep the slaves in bondage?

On the other hand, Lincoln and his supporters argued that the Union had to keep its promise to emancipate the slaves. And even if the Union broke its word and offered a compromise peace – a Union with slavery intact – the Confederates would reject it, due to their commitment to Southern independence.

Each side was able to confirm the intransigence of the other, in the wake of aborted peacemaking initiatives.

The influential New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley – an opponent of slavery from before the war – had by 1864 grown horrified at the bloodshed and willing to serve as an intermediary to sound out the Confederates on peace terms. He thought the Confederate agents in Canada were potential peace partners, and with Lincoln’s permission Greeley went to talk to them. Lincoln sent a letter “to whom it may concern” (obviously not recognizing the Confederate leadership) specifying that any peace would have to include abolition of slavery as well as reunion, a “revelation” of Northern war aims which the Confederate commissioners made sure to publicize.

At the same time, a mission to Richmond by other informal peace commissioners drew from Jefferson Davis a declaration that he  (Davis) would settle for nothing less than Confederate independence. No terms of reunion would be accepted, no matter how many proslavery assurances the North offered. The Lincoln administration eagerly publicized Davis’ stance, to show that it was the Confederacy, not expanded Northern war aims, which was the real obstacle to peace.

Lincoln won re-election, greatly helped by last-minute Northern victories which seemed to end the military stalemate and give hope for an unconditional defeat of the Confederates. Maybe the bloodshed could be ended by victory, not by negotiation.

But there was one last effort at peace talks. By way of background, Kirkland gives a lengthy account of the Blair family, whose political power in Maryland and Missouri they had leveraged into a powerful influence on the Lincoln administration. Though the Blairs had lost much of this influence by the time of the 1864 Presidential election, family patriarch Francis Preston Blair was still able to get Lincoln’s permission to visit Richmond to talk peace. This in turn led to the Hampton Roads (Virginia) conference of February 1865.

At these talks, Lincoln himself, with Secretary of State Seward, represented the Union, while several notable Confederate peacemongers – selected by Davis – represented the Confederacy. What we might call a “free and frank exchange of views” (to use the diplomatic euphemism) covered such subjects as the future of the Union and slavery, the possibilities of reconstruction, and Francis Blair’s curious project of a joint Union-Confederate expedition against the French in Mexico. Nothing came of these last-minute peace talks, and the Union pursued the war all the way to final victory.

Kirkland supports Lincoln’s stance throughout these events. To Kirkland’s way of thinking, Lincoln steadily pursued his course in the face of peace propaganda in the North as well as “extremists” in the President’s own party who distrusted anything which looked like concession to the rebellious South. Lincoln held Northern public opinion steady in the face of serious morale problems until the tide of war turned in the Union’s favor. He showed himself willing to talk to the Confederates, but not to give away the store. (Of course, the people Kirkland calls “extremists” had been in favor of a war of slave-liberation even before Lincoln adopted emancipation as a war aim. In part, they were guilty of being prematurely right.)