"Our One Common Country" author talk in Stratford, CT

[Linda Anderson]

Our One Common Country is a very well researched, fascinating behind the scenes look at the Hampton Roads Peace Conference and the events leading up to it. I especially enjoyed Mr. Conroy's descriptions of the personalities involved. For example, Francis Preston Blair, "Longtime power-broker and cofounder of the Republican party" who initiated the peace talks, is described as "...a strikingly homely man, with the bald, boney look of a gaunt Dickensian undertaker, but his charm and his wits made his looks disappear." Blair's wife Eliza, "was known as a lioness.
"Their children were absurdly accomplished."

William Seward, Secretary of State - "Humility was not his strength. He had been known to raise his hat to tourists under the mistaken impression that they had recognized him. Self-righteous, humorless people thought him glib and insincere, both of which he was, but even his enemies never doubted the agility of his mind."
"He was generous and kind in his personal life and opened his home and his family to his critics as well as his friends."

Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, "a distinction he neither sought nor relished"- "Though his feeble, even freakish appearance could hardly be called an advantage ('Oh, what I have suffered from a look!'), it gave him the curious power of an animated corpse, an image often invoked."

Lincoln and Davis - "No one rejected peace without reunion more firmly than he [Lincoln]. The very name of the Richmond government was unutterable to him. He would speak of 'the Rebels' or 'the other fellow,' never of the Confederacy, but he spoke of the war in sadness, not in anger. He called it 'this great trouble.' For Jefferson Davis, the Yankees were 'brutes in human form.' True Southerners, he said, would prefer to combine with hyenas. For Lincoln, the people of the South were 'lost sheep.' He had issued a proclamation asking God not to crush them but to soften their hearts, enlighten their minds, and quicken their consciences, 'that they may not be utterly destroyed.'"

At the Peace Conference Lincoln said to the three Southern Commissioners, "'Whatever may have been the views of your people before the war, they must be convinced now that slavery is doomed. It cannot last long in any event, and the best course, it seems to me, for your public men to pursue, would be to adopt such a policy as would avoid, as far as possible, the evils of immediate emancipation. That would be my course, if I were in your place.'
"According to Stephens, Seward seconded this. A gradual end to slavery would be palatable if the war ended now and the South rejoined the Union freely. If not, the Thirteenth Amendment would end it abruptly, with the Southern states excluded from the process.
"it was Hunter who replied. Campbell had owned no slaves for years, and Stephens treated his own like tenants, professing to hold none against their will. But Hunter was the voice of the slaveholding aristocracy. It was the voice of the past, and he knew it. He made no case for slavery. He did condemn the 'cruelty' of freeing the slaves overnight. They could not provide for themselves, he said...They would find themselves helpless and suffering if the North freed them suddenly. They were accustomed to working only by compulsion. They would not work at all if the compulsion stopped. Slave and master would starve alike."

Seward remained silent and Lincoln gave one of his parables "of a distinctly rustic sort," about a man who "undertook a few years ago to raise a very large herd of hogs. It was a great trouble to feed them, and how to get around this was a puzzle to him. At length he hit upon the plan of planting an immense field of potatoes, and when they were sufficiently grown, he turned the whole herd out into the field, and let them have full swing, thus saving not only the labor of feeding the hogs, but also that of digging the potatoes."

All was fine until a neighbor came along and asked what the man was going to do when the ground froze in the near future.

The man "scratched his head and thought about it. 'Well, he eventually said, 'it may come pretty hard on their snouts,' but in the end it will be 'root, hog or die.'"

Conroy writes that, "The fable fell flat. Stephens replied obsequiously -'That, Mr. President, must be the origin of the adage, 'Root, pig, or perish,' - but the story came across as callous, toward the slaves and also, to Southern ears, towards the whites who would also suffer. Seward was visibly displeased. Stephens thought the parable was out of place in Lincoln's repertoire, but he understood its point. The slaves and poor whites could take care of themselves when slavery was gone. Though nothing would be easy, they would survive and eventually flourish as self-made men and women, as Lincoln and Stephens had. Freedom and poverty were better than slavery and security.
"But Hunter was deeply offended. For the planter elite, the 'inferior race' depended on noblesse oblige. It made the system respectable to its guilt-ridden beneficiaries, the hallmark of our 'Southern civilization.' Lincoln's story mocked it, mocked Hunter as the senator was hearing it, for the second time that morning. His red-faced rage boiled over as he summed up the president's position."