1861 Peace Conference sought to avoid a fractured nation

Historian Harold Holzer’s essay on “Give Peace a Chance” borrows from the 1969 anti-war song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. 

Holzer, 72, obviously grew up listening to Lennon and The Beatles, but he was writing about the “Peace Conference of 1861,” not Vietnam.

 

Back in 1861, as a civil war loomed, many respected politicians assembled in Washington, D.C. They worked feverishly for nearly the entire month of February, trying to resolve divisive issues in order to preserve a united federal government.

Curiously, it was the only former living president from a southern state – John Tyler of Virginia – who spearheaded this last-ditch effort to “give peace a chance.” He had the blessing of lame duck president James Buchanan of Pennsylvania.

(Tyler became the 10th American president when William Henry Harrison died in April 1841, after only one month in office. Tyler was the first vice president to be elevated to the office of president due to the death of his predecessor.)

 

“Now 70, Tyler, ashen and frail, re-emerged onto the national stage to support compromise even as states of the Deep South began to leave the Union,” Holzer said. 

Indeed, six states had seceded and formed a Confederate States of America. They were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. 

Obviously, they did not participate in the Peace Conference that began Feb. 4, 1861, at Willard’s Hotel in Washington. 

The Peace Conference drew more than 130 delegates from 21 states, including seven that were considered “slave states” – Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri. 

Tyler was elected conference president, despite looking like “a man who has been in his grave a full month,” Holzer said. Newspaper publisher Horace Greeley dubbed the gathering as “a reunion of political fossils.”

Horace Greeley

 

Alas, one fellow, 77-year-old delegate John C. Wright of Ohio, died of natural causes nine days into the convention. 

Most southern delegates were committed to finding a way to save both the Union and slavery – even if it produced a “house divided,” Holzer said. 

Tyler and his Virginian colleagues were eager to reach a deal before Abraham Lincoln took office as the new president on March 4.” Their position, basically, was to “bar Congress from ever regulating or abolishing slavery where it once existed.” 

On Feb. 23, Tyler and other leaders received a message: “Mr. Lincoln is in this hotel.”

 

That evening, the president-elect invited key delegates to his parlor. Virginia’s William C. Rives warned Lincoln that “the clouds” hanging over the Union had grown “very dark,” and that compromise “now depends upon you.” 

But Lincoln shot back, “I cannot agree to that. My course is as plain as a turnpike road. It is marked out by the Constitution. I am in no doubt which way to go. Suppose now we all stop discussing and try the experiment of obedience to the Constitution and the laws.” 

Holzer said: “The president-elect ended the hour-long session with a final warning against any compromise that extended slavery.” 

Robert H. Hatton of Tennessee commented: “We are getting along badly with our work of compromise – badly. We will break, I apprehend, without any thing being done. My heart is sick.”

“After a month of fruitless work, Peace Conference delegates dispersed by the end of February. Its rooms suddenly vacated, Willard’s threw open its doors to Republicans swarming into town not to argue policy but to celebrate Lincoln’s inauguration,” Holzer wrote. “The last effort to compromise had failed.” 

“And,” as Lincoln sadly commented later, “the war came.”