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

[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.