Historians tend to prefer to examine how wars start rather than how they end, and historians of the American Civil War tend to focus on the decisions made by President Abraham Lincoln while slighting those made by his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis. One way to reverse both of these trends is to ask why Davis did not accept the deal Lincoln was willing to offer the Confederacy in February 1865: namely, immediate surrender, followed by compensated emancipation, possibly implemented in stages. That’s basically what Lincoln offered at the Hampton Roads Conference in 1865. Fresh from having seen the passage through Congress of a proposed Thirteenth Amendment designed to abolish slavery constitutionally across the entire United States, Lincoln, largely at the urging of Ulysses S. Grant, traveled to Hampton Roads, Virginia, the site of the engagement between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia in March 1862, to talk to a trio of Confederate commissioners led by his old acquaintance, Alexander H. Stephens, then vice president of the Confederacy. Although historians sometimes debate exactly what Lincoln proposed as terms of a final peace settlement, it is clear that he was willing one last time to return to compensated emancipation as part of a settlement based upon Confederate capitulation. Davis rejected the offer out of hand, and the war continued.
Did Davis make the right choice? Much depends on what one believes was at stake. By February 1865 the Confederacy was clearly not in great shape. Grant continued to pin Robert E. Lee against Richmond and Petersburg, while William T. Sherman was just starting to make his way through South Carolina. What were the prospects that the Confederacy might still achieve independence? Would such independence come at the cost of everything that such independence was supposed to achieve? After all, with the door now open to enlisting slaves in the Confederate army, slavery was more vulnerable than ever; the Davis government was proving less than adept at defending state rights, southern homesteads, and a particular way of life. Continued conflict would simply erode what was left of these ends.
No one should question Davis’s commitment to Confederate independence. Still, the fact remains, was it better to go down swinging on behalf of that commitment, or decide to cut one’s losses, get some needed capital to help in postwar reconstruction, and spare his countrymen the impact of more destructive war? Or was Confederate triumph still possible in February 1865, which would call into question the usual assumptions about the election of 1864 as sounding the death knell for the Confederacy?
What do you think?