Lessons from history (2 of a series)

Here is another great excerpt from the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. I’m piecing together several sections from the same event.

On the last of January, 1865, peace commissioners from the so-called Confederate States presented themselves on our lines around Petersburg, and were immediately conducted to my headquarters at City Point. They proved to be Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, Judge Campbell, Assistant-Secretary of War, and R. M. T. Hunter, formerly United States Senator and then a member of the Confederate Senate….

I was instructed to retain them at City Point, until the President, or some one whom he would designate, should come to meet them. They remained several days as guests on board the boat…

I had never met either of these gentlemen before the war, but knew them well by reputation and through their public services, and I had been a particular admirer of Mr. Stephens. I had always supposed that he was a very small man, but when I saw him in the dusk of the evening I was very much surprised to find so large a man as he seemed to be. When he got down on to the boat I found that he was wearing a coarse gray woolen overcoat, a manufacture that had been introduced into the South during the rebellion. The cloth was thicker than anything of the kind I had ever seen, even in Canada. The overcoat extended nearly to his feet, and was so large that it gave him the appearance of being an average-sized man. He took this off when he reached the cabin of the boat, and I was struck with the apparent change in size, in the coat and out of it…

Right here I might relate an anecdote of Mr. Lincoln. It was on the occasion of his visit to me just after he had talked with the peace commissioners at Hampton Roads. After a little conversation, he asked me if I had seen that overcoat of Stephen’s. I replied that I had.

“Well,” said he, “did you see him take it off?” I said yes.

“Well,” said he, “didn’t you think it was the biggest shuck and the littlest ear that ever you did see?”

Long afterwards I told this story to the Confederate General J. B. Gordon, at the time a member of the Senate. He repeated it to Stephens, and, as I heard afterwards, Stephens laughed immoderately at the simile of Mr. Lincoln.

[Here I will explain the simile, in case some of my readers are unfamiliar with the term. Lincoln was referring to the process of removing the husk from an ear of corn. The process of removing the husk is called shucking. So Lincoln was making a droll agricultural reference by comparing the giant coat that Stephens used, and when he removed it revealing his very small stature, with shucking the husk off from an ear of corn, to find a very small ear inside. It’s a great story, especially when one reads with what good humor Mr. Stephens took hearing about it. Also I am always thrilled to read a historic corn reference!

To keep continuity of that event, I had skipped over what Grant wrote about Lincoln’s reaction to the peace commission. Here it is, and very moving reading it most certainly is.]

After a few days, about the 2d of February, I received a dispatch from Washington, directing me to send the commissioners to Hampton Roads to meet the President and a member of the cabinet. Mr. Lincoln met them there and had an interview of short duration. It was not a great while after they met that the President visited me at City Point. He spoke of his having met the commissioners, and said he had told them that there would be no use in entering into any negotiations unless they would recognize, first: that the Union as 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. He always showed a generous and kindly spirit toward the Southern people, and I never heard him abuse an enemy. Some of the cruel things said about President Lincoln, particularly in the North, used to pierce him to the heart; but never in my presence did he evince a revengeful disposition-and I saw a great deal of him at City Point, for he seemed glad to get away from the cares and anxieties of the capital.