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James Conroy speaks to the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia about “The Hampton Roads Peace Conference” on October 10, 2017, at the Fort McNair Officers' Club in Washington, D.C.
More information about the topic and the speaker is available at cwrtdc-audio.blogspot.com/p/jbconroy-audio.html
About the Topic:
After nearly four years of war, over 600,000 young Americans were dead, the battered Rebel armies were cornered, and the rebellion was nearly broken, but no one knew when it would end. A Federal push to victory would kill tens of thousands more, humiliate the South, and delay for generations what Lincoln wanted most: a reunited nation healed of its painful wounds.
Reasonable men on both sides would meet in Hampton Roads on February 3, 1865, in search of a way out.
On the paddle-wheeler River Queen, the Air Force One of its day, Lincoln and his charming Secretary of State, William Seward, sat down with Davis’s emissaries: Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter and John A. Campbell. It was a gathering of old friends. Stephens, Davis’s eccentric Vice President, led the Southern delegation. Weighing less than 100 pounds, “Little Alec” had been Lincoln’s ally in the Congress of 1848 in a movement to end the Mexican War. The aristocratic Senator Hunter of Virginia had been Seward’s friend and colleague in the old Senate. The brilliant Alabamian Campbell, a former Justice of the United States Supreme Court, now the Confederacy’s Assistant Secretary of War, had worked hard with Seward to stop the fighting before it started.
Their reunion at Hampton Roads began in a glow of nostalgia, descended into threats, and ended with a glimpse of Lincoln’s startling compromise, which was sure to enrage his own party. In the end, the war dragged on for two more bloody, destructive months.
James Conroy will explore how the failure of the Hamptons Roads Conference shaped the course of American history and the future of America’s wars to come. He will discuss the peace conference’s origins, its failure, and its aftermath, including Lincoln’s alliance with Stephens in the old House; Seward’s friendship with Davis in the old Senate; Blair’s wartime maneuverings in Richmond with the leaders of the Southern peace movement; Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s attempts to sabotage the peace talks; the outrage they provoked in Congress and in Lincoln’s own cabinet; the Northern leaders’ moving conversations with their old Southern friends on the River Queen; Grant’s surreptitious efforts to negotiate peace with Lee and evade Stanton’s efforts to derail them; and Lincoln’s poignant search for a path to reconciliation in the smoking ruins of Richmond after the peace conference failed.
- Genre
- U.S. Civil War History