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

[Linda Anderson]

"The Stratford Library, 2203 Main Street in Stratford, will host former Stratford resident James B. Conroy for a special “Meet-the-Author” program on Tuesday, May 6 at 7 pm. The author will discuss his recently released book, “Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865”. The program is free and open to the public.

"The recipient of strong reviews, “Our One Common Country” is a work of popular history and the first book ever published on its subject. In February 1865, Abraham Lincoln slipped quietly out of the White House and traveled south to Virginia to meet Confederate leaders on a steamboat at Hampton Roads. Their goal was a peaceful end to the Civil War. Conroy’s richly detailed and massively researched work tells their story, the first book ever written about the only presidential peace mission in America’s wartime history."

http://blog.ctnews.com/connecticutpostin...rary-talk/

[James Conroy]

As the author of Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865, the only book ever written on its subject, I appreciate this opportunity to refer any interested readers to my web site, http://www.jamesbconroy.com, which presents, among other things, a synopsis, reviews, and news and events.

Famous in its day, the Hampton Roads Peace Conference had been all but forgotten until it was featured in Steven Spielberg's film, Lincoln. President Lincoln, his Secretary of State William Seward, and three senior officers of the Confederate government had been friends in "the old concern." Their reunion as enemies on a steamboat at Hampton Roads was full of human drama, and the failure of their mission presents useful lessons for our own dysfunctional time.

I appreciate Roger Norton's invitation to participate in the Lincoln Discussion Symposium and would welcome an online conversation with anyone who is interested.

[LincolnMan]

Welcome Mr. Conroy!

[BettyO]

Welcome Mr. Conroy - I think that you'll find our group intelligent, genial and very interesting. Your book sounds wonderful - it's on my "Must" list!

[Linda Anderson]

Welcome to the forum, Mr. Conroy! I'm looking forward to reading your book and attending your program next Tuesday.

[James Conroy]

Thanks to the several participants who have welcomed me. I look forward to some interesting discussions.

[LincolnToddFan]

I am a little late, but welcome Mr. Conroy! This Forum has the most interesting, funny posters.

Your book sounds right up my alley. I want to read it!

[James Conroy]

The remarkable thing about the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 was not its failure, near the end of the fourth year of a catastrophic civil war, but its success in bringing together in a reasonable, even cordial discussion five of the combatants' senior leaders, including the President of the United States and the Vice President of the Confederacy, who had been friends in the Congress of 1848, opposing the Mexican War. In researching and writing the book, I learned a great deal about Lincoln, the nature of negotiation, and the dysfunction of our current government.

[L Verge]

I suspect that I may be shot at sunrise by some of the posters on this forum, but many of them already know of my disappointments in the way our country is headed. Without revealing too much from your book, could you give us a brief summary to explain your last sentence?

[Eva Elisabeth]

Welcome Mr. Conroy! This is such an interesting topic!! It must have been a weird situation - with Stephens and Lincoln being friends and enemies at once, meeting to discuss while all knowing in advance it would be to no avail. Or did any of the five participants truly expect any success? Stephens called the mission a "humbug" from the outset (though he should at least have considered it a success that Lincoln promised Stephens to return his nephew, a prisoner on Johnson's Island), and for Lincoln there was no need to negotiate any of his positions as victory was near. Did Jefferson Davis believe in a success?

There's also one dialogue I especially like as I find it representative for A. Lincoln's diplomacy as well as his ready wit and humble personality. When Hunter urged “that the recognition Mr. Davis’s power to make a treaty, was the first and indispensable step to peace” and referred “to the correspondence of King Charles the First, and his Parliament, as a reliable precedent, of a constitutional ruler, treating with rebels”, Lincoln replied: “Upon questions of history, I must refer you to Mr. Seward, for he is posted in such things, and I don’t profess to be bright. My only distinct recollection of that matter is, that Charles lost his head.” (This “settled Mr. Hunter for a while.”)

It seems the book is not available in paperback, is it? Will it be sometime?

[Linda Anderson]

I went to Mr. Conroy's presentation at the Stratford Library. It was fantastic! He talked about the different personalities behind the Peace Conference as well as the events that led to it. He also showed colorized photos of people and places including one of General Grant that I had never seen before.

I highly recommend attending one of his future programs. You can also listen to his interviews.

http://jamesbconroy.com/news_events.html

[James Conroy]

Thanks for everyone's comments and for the gratifying review of my presentation last night. I will respond as briefly as I can.

In many ways, I admired Spielberg's film and Daniel Day Lewis's brilliant performance, but the film took more than a little artistic license with the peace conference. The three Southern peace envoys were nothing like the evil comic book characters portrayed in the film. Contrary to Spielberg's portrayal, on their way to see Lincoln, they were not confronted at the Union lines by grim Northern soldiers as if they were emissaries from Satan. They were moderate, accomplished, well-meaning men, and they were greeted at the lines by cheers and jubilation on both sides. All three of them took politically unpopular positions in Richmond in an effort to find a peaceful end to the war.

As the book details, I do not believe that Davis sent them in good faith in a genuine effort to negotiate a viable peace, but rather to discredit Richmond's growing peace movement, which he succeeded, temporarily, in doing. Alec Stephens said it was Davis whose approach to the peace conference was a "humbug," not that Stephens saw it that way. I believe that the three envoys themselves were sincerely trying to end the war, and continued to do so after the conference failed, most conspicuously John A. Campbell of Alabama, a brilliant former Justice of the United States Supreme Court. As the book describes, he was the only senior Confederate leader who stayed in Richmond after it fell, knowingly risking execution, in order to face the conquering Union officers, and eventually Lincoln himself, in Davis's very parlor, and do what he could for his people.

Third, my comment about our dysfunctional current government refers to the inability to compromise on workable solutions to the problems that polarize us instead of uniting us in a common effort to resolve them. Locked into their positions 150 years ago, radicals on both sides were intolerant of any resolution of the Civil War short of the South's independence or its military defeat. The issues that divide us now are not as intractable as those that divided them. We should work together to address them reasonably instead of accusing one another of bad faith or treason.

Finally, it was indeed storage for the participants at the peace conference, friends and colleagues before the war, to reconvene as enemies. They were gracious and respectful to one another and discussed the issues that divided them in a sensible, cooperative, even creative way. Their failure was not for lack of effort, away from newspapermen, cameras, and their inflamed base constituencies. If only we had such a political environment now.

[L Verge]

Thank you, sir. Your last two paragraphs are exactly what I was hoping your response to my query might be.

[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."

[BettyO]

Looks fascinating, Linda. I'll be looking for this to add to my growing "tower" of books to be read!