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obtaining reinforcements led Lee to make a proposition to the Confederate government to arm the slaves as a last resort, but this was rejected.
I had anticipated this condition of want of reinforcements of the Confederacy, and in a conversation with General Grant many months before, I stated to him that Lee could get no more reinforcements unless they should arm the slaves.
I had long previously told him that by their conscription they had already robbed the cradle and the grave to get troops, which phrase Grant says in his Memoirs he copied from me.1
Although I had no command in the army assigned me and had not asked for any, I retained the full confidence of the President, and from time to time when I happened to be in Washington, where indeed I was much of the time, he talked with me very freely.
In those conversations I assured him that it was only a matter of months, if not of weeks, when the question would be before him on what terms a peace could be concluded.
He said he cared for but two things: That the power of the United States over its territory should be acknowledged by the several Confederate States, and thus the Union be preserved; and that his emancipation proclamation should be agreed by the rebels to be the law of the whole land.
Beyond these two things, but one question disturbed him, and that would not arise until peace was established.
He told me that he had-met, in the last of January, the Confederate commissioners who came to Hampton Roads to treat of peace, and that he informed them very distinctly of these terms, and that he stated to them he would substantially leave to them all other terms upon which they could come into the Union and consent to live with us as a part thereof.2
1 Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Vol. II., p. 435.
2 His proposition made to the rebel commissioners at Hampton Roads, as Grant reports it, (Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Vol. II., pp. 422, 423), was that “there would be no use in entering into any negotiations unless they would recognize, first, that the Union on a whole must be forever preserved, and, second, that slavery must be abolished. If they were willing to concede these two points, then he was ready to enter into negotiations, and was almost willing to hand them a blank sheet of paper with his signature attached, for them to fill in the terms upon which they were willing to live with us in the Union and be one people.”
These terms got into the newspapers in a more or less exaggerated form, and caused a great deal of excitement in the North. They were looked upon as being a giving up of the war in this, that these men who had fought us for four years, and whom we had conquered, should then say upon what terms they would come and live with us as one people (i.e., the terms upon which they would permit us to live with them as one people), so that many, many harsh things were said against Lincoln in the press of the country, and among the people, especially the radical portion who were now in majority, which pained him very much.
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
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