On February 2, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and his Irish valet sneaked out of Washington City and took a steamboat down to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The next day he met with three representatives of the Confederacy to discuss ending the Civil War. The Hampton Roads Peace Conference, as it's known, is notable not for what was accomplished – nothing was – but for how, when, and why it took place at all.

In February, 1865, the Confederacy was clearly on the brink of collapse. The rebel armies were dogged but much diminished. General William Tecumseh Sherman had sacked Atlanta and was leaving a trail of devastation through Georgia. Ulysses S. Grant had Robert E. Lee pinned down at Petersburg, a rail center that was Richmond's last defense. A Union naval blockade had cut off all supplies. Everyone knew the end was a few months away at best.

With the war all but won, why would Lincoln go out of his way, literally, to parley with the enemy? The simplest answer is that he was looking already to the postwar future, and how best to deal with the insurgents. Many hardliners in his Republican Party and his Cabinet thought they knew the answer: utterly crush the rebels militarily, hang their leaders, free all their slaves, confiscate their other property, and subjugate the South as a conquered, occupied enemy. 

Lincoln believed that was no way to heal the nation. With the weight of more than half a million war dead on his soul, he "wanted to end the war quickly, peacefully if possible, not only to save lives, money, and property but also to build a stronger foundation for reconstruction," writes James B. Conroy, author of a detailed book about the conference, 

. "If the Confederacy could be persuaded to return to the Union voluntarily, enticed by reasonable concessions, the stage would be set for a more amicable, productive future than a military conquest could produce."

With the war all but won, why would Lincoln go out of his way, literally, to parley with the enemy? 

Still, Lincoln maintained some "indispensable conditions" to peace. The insurrectionists must agree to abandon the fiction of a legitimate Confederate States of America and rejoin the Union. And there would be "no backward steps by the chief executive" on slavery. 

Lincoln knew that Jefferson Davis would never agree to rejoining the Union. The Confederate president was exhorting Southerners to fight to the last drop of blood, declaring that the Confederacy would have independence "or extermination." But Lincoln also announced that the people of the South "can, at any moment, have peace simply by laying down their arms, and submitting to the National authority under the Constitution." Otherwise, the Union was prepared to "maintain the contest indefinitely."

February 1865 was not the first time Lincoln had entertained peace overtures. Some of the past proposals had been quite outlandish. 

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee had invaded the Union, attempting to frighten war-weary Northerners into demanding that Lincoln negotiate an end to hostilities. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens headed under a flag of truce to Union-held Fort Monroe at Hampton Roads, prepared to negotiate. Lincoln was willing to go meet him, but Lee's defeat at Gettysburg had the opposite effect on Northern morale. Stephens was turned back unmet.

That same year, Horace Greeley, the flighty founder of the 

, got involved in a crackpot scheme to have Queen Victoria or Napoleon III broker peace talks. Famously erratic, probably bipolar, Greeley went from being one of Lincoln's biggest boosters to one of his most aggravating and hectoring critics as the war dragged on. 

In July 1864, Greeley heard from a fellow eccentric that "two ambassadors of Davis & Co. are now in Canada, with full and complete powers for a peace." He excitedly dashed off a letter to Lincoln: "Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for peace… I entreat you to submit overtures for pacification to the Southern insurgents." 

Lincoln didn’t believe for a second that the "ambassadors" were bona fide, but was reluctant to turn down even an unlikely chance for peace. He directed his aide John Hay to accompany Greeley to Niagara Falls. Hay instantly determined it was a pipe-dream. Lincoln was annoyed but not surprised.

Later that year, privately goaded by Greeley, the newspaper man Francis Preston Blair had a go. "The Old Gentleman" had been advising presidents since Andrew Jackson, and mentored both Lincoln and Davis. He owned an estate outside the city he named Silver Spring, and had resided in the townhouse across Pennsylvania Avenue from the executive mansion for so long that it came to be known as Blair House. 

On December 28, 1864, Blair asked Lincoln for a pass through Union lines to go to Richmond. Lincoln approved the pass, but refused to hear his plans; after the Greeley embarrassment, Conroy surmises, the president wanted to maintain what we'd now call plausible deniability.

In Richmond on January 12, 1865, Davis listened politely as Blair described a ludicrous peace plan. In 1861, France had invaded Mexico and established Maximilian I as its emperor, clearly violating the Monroe Doctrine. In Blair's scheme, Lee and Grant would march their combined armies into Mexico and together drive the French out. Their joint victory would surely lead to a happy reunion of North and South. 

Lincoln scholar William C. Harris, author of 

, writes that Davis had no interest in Blair's scheme, but did send him back to Washington with a letter stating his willingness "to enter into negotiations… with a view to secure peace to the two countries." 

Lincoln read this letter and sent Blair shuttling back to Richmond with a letter authorizing him to tell "the insurgent leader" that he was "ready to receive any agent whom he, or any other influential person now resisting the national authority, may informally send to me with a view to securing peace to the people of our one common country." 

Harris notes that as long as Davis insisted on "the two countries" and Lincoln on "our one common country," the negotiation was doomed before it started. 

Lincoln's Cabinet shook their heads over the Blair escapade; Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, considered it one of Lincoln's "strange and incomprehensible whims." Nevertheless, it did produce some movement. 

The Confederacy’s President summoned his Vice President to him. Alexander "Little Alec" Stephens, slight and sickly, with the withered face of a preternaturally aged boy, had been an outspoken opponent of the war for four years, making himself reviled by the adamantinely hawkish Davis. 

Despite the 1863 misfire, Davis now instructed Stephens to lead a three-man commission to Fort Monroe to discuss peace with whomever came to represent the Union. The other commissioners were Judge John A. Campbell and Virginia senator Robert Hunter, who had also been leading voices for peace. 

Davis had no high hopes for the mission; if they talked the North into a cease-fire, it would buy him some time to maneuver, and if they failed, they'd bring shame to their peace movement and rekindle Southerners' fortitude for continued combat.

Lincoln sent his Secretary of State William Seward, who had been a shoo-in for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 before his bitter enemy Greeley and others engineered the rise of the dark horse rail-splitter. Lincoln told Seward to agree to nothing without his authorization. 

On January 31, while he was writing these instructions to Seward, the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery came up for a vote in Congress. It had failed once before, and rumors that Confederate peace commissioners were on their way to Washington could scuttle it again. "Democrats believed that an early peace could not be achieved if the North insisted on emancipation as a condition for negotiations," Harris writes. 

So Lincoln set aside his letter to Seward, took a fresh sheet of paper, and wrote to Congress: "So far as I know, there are no peace commissioners in the city, or likely to be in it." Then he resumed his letter to Seward. The subterfuge worked, and the amendment passed by two votes.

Lincoln decided he should join Seward for the talks after all. He and his valet slipped out of Washington on the morning of February 2. Welles wrote in his diary: "None of the Cabinet were advised of this move, and without exception, I think, it struck them unfavorably…" 

Seward awaited the President near Fort Monroe on the 

, a gleaming new double-sidewheel steamboat leased from its owner to be the presidential yacht. The Confederate commission arrived on the 

, a steamboat lent them by General Grant. (No one longed for an end to the fighting more than Grant.) 

 had tied up alongside, Seward sent over three bottles of fine whisky and told them the meeting would happen in the morning. Lincoln joined Seward that night.

On February 3, Lincoln and Seward met the three Southerners in the 

's plush saloon. There were no strangers present. Stephens had been a Whig colleague of Lincoln, protesting the Mexican War in 1848 during the latter's one term in Congress. Campbell had been one of the Supreme Court justices whose Dred Scott decision pushed the nation closer to schism in 1857. And Hunter was a former Speaker of the House. 

Lincoln, as was his wont, sought to ease tensions with a rustic joke. Watching the tiny Stephens struggle out of a mammoth woolen coat, he remarked that he had "never seen so small an ear emerge from so much husk." Despite being very sensitive about his birdlike appearance, Stephens laughed.

They got down to business and soon filled the saloon with cigar smoke (only the President did not partake). No one took notes; they wrote about the meeting later. Lincoln quickly made it clear that his "indispensable conditions" were still in place. The rebels must cease fighting and agree to rejoin the Union and obey its laws. He would hear none of Davis's guff about a peace between "two nations." There was only one. He also dropped the ominous hint that if the leaders of the rebellion – present company 

 excluded – chose to fight to the bitter end, he might not be able to restrain hardliners in the Union who insisted on hanging them.

The conference might have ended there, but Lincoln and Seward then offered enticements. If the insurgents did as Lincoln asked, he predicted they'd be welcomed back into the Union with leniency, with their rights restored and their properties intact. 

The talk of property led to the issue of slavery. Contrary to much of the mythology that grew up around him later, Lincoln abhorred slavery but was no radical abolitionist. He had never intended to end slavery in the South until the war forced his hand. The Emancipation Proclamation was not a humanitarian gesture, but a strategic tool – an economic and psychological blow against the Confederacy. 

Lincoln told the commissioners that what would be done about slavery after the war was up to Congress and the courts more than the president. 

 "None of the Cabinet were advised of this move, and without exception, I think, it struck them unfavorably…" 

Hunter, a slave-owning plantation aristocrat, said that to free all four million Southern slaves at once would be a cruelty, as they had no experience in fending for themselves. Lincoln himself favored a gradual release from bondage, over perhaps five years. 

To underscore the sentiment, Lincoln now employed another crude rusticism. It was a joke about a farmer who let his hogs feed by digging up his potatoes; asked what they would do when winter froze the fields, he replied that "it may come pretty hard on their snouts, but in the end it will be 'root hog, or die.'" That is, they'd either learn how to get by or perish. 

It was a folk witticism that went back at least to Davy Crockett's day. Seward, who had endured Lincoln's rough-hewn wit in many cabinet meetings, blanched, and even the Southerners thought it surprisingly callous.

Seward offered another incentive, telling the commissioners that Congress had just approved the Thirteenth Amendment. It was now up to the three-fourths of the states to ratify it. If the eleven states of the Confederacy stopped fighting and rejoined the twenty-five in the Union, they'd have enough votes to block it. 

It's maybe no surprise that this exchange is represented very differently in Steven Spielberg's reverential film 

. In that account, it is Stephens who raises the issue of the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln replies that its ratification is a fait accompli: "Slavery, sir? It's done." Rather than joking about rooting hogs, he lectures the Southerners on the meaning of democracy.

The actual meeting at Hampton Roads ended with one minor, digressive accomplishment: Lincoln and Stephens agreed that an exchange of prisoners of war should be arranged. Then, after nearly four hours, the two sides cordially parted ways. 

Back in Washington, Lincoln told his Cabinet he still had hopes, and outlined a plan to have the federal government compensate slave-owners for the loss of their human property. His Cabinet rejected it outright.

In Richmond, Jefferson Davis gloated at the failure of Stephens's doves. Three days later, on February 6, he held a thundering rally, ironically at the city's African Church.

 reported that "the greatest concourse of people assembled in that building last evening that ever before were at one time collected under its roof… Never before has the war spirit burned so fiercely and steadily. A firm resolve to resist to the very death the demands of the Northern tyrant that now animates the whole Southern people was plainly visible in that meeting." Davis rejected the demands of "his Majesty, Abraham the First," and called on Southerners to keep fighting until the North was forced to seek peace on Confederate terms.

It was rousing but empty speechmaking. Within less than a month, Lee requested a meeting with Grant to discuss a cease-fire. On March 4, the day of Lincoln's second inauguration, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered Grant to ignore Lee's request and press on. 

Davis and the tattered remains of his government fled Richmond a month later. When Lincoln toured the smoldering occupied capital on April 4, only Judge Campbell was there to meet with him. Remarkably, the president was still willing to negotiate, but there was no one left to do so. 

History was moving quickly to other destinations. Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9. Enraged and despondent over the collapse of the Confederacy, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln on April 15. Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10. In June, the Union army freed the last slaves in Texas; Juneteenth would become a federal holiday in 2021. The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December. 

City of Sedition: The History of New York City during the Civil War

Cover photograph: Matthew Brady's photograph of Richmond in ruins in 1865. (National Archives and Records Administration)

Ruins_in_front_of_the_Capitol,_Richmond,_1865.jpg

The Union and the Confederacy talked peace to the bitter end. Why didn’t it happen?

The Road Not Taken

In 1951, a young surgeon named Hiester Richard Hornberger was swept up in the so-called "doctor draft," enacted to address a shortage of medical professionals in the military, especially in Korea. That fall he was sent to Mobile Army Surgical Hospital 8055, one of seven such units, located just below the 38th Parallel. The conflict was settling into two years of grinding trench warfare along the 38th parallel, producing few tactical results, but much work for the doctors.

"The surgeons in the MASH hospitals," Hornberger wrote years later, "were exposed to extremes of hard work, leisure, tension, boredom, heat, cold, satisfaction and frustration that most of them had never faced before." The aggravated and exaggerated absence of consistency and routine "produced behavior in many of them that, superficially at least, seemed inconsistent with their earlier, civilian behavior patterns. A few flipped their lids, but most of them just raised hell, in a variety of ways and degrees." The tent where he and some other young doctors bunked and blew off steam earned the nickname “The Swamp.”

Sent home after eighteen months, Hornberger returned to Maine and started a private practice in the seacoast village of Broad Cove. Over the next few years the Korean conflict began to fade into the "forgotten war," but not for Dr. Hornberger. In 1956, he started working on a novel based on his Korean experiences. 

He finished it in three years, then waited several more while his agent pitched it unsuccessfully to more than 15 publishers. Eventually, Dr. Hornberger engaged a professional collaborator, W. C. Heinz, a highly regarded sports journalist and former war correspondent to improve the novel’s prospects. 

Their partnership resulted in success. The book was finally published in the fall of 1968 by William Morrow and Company, with Hornberger and Heinz using the nom de plume Richard Hooker. A paperback edition came out from Pocket Books the following year. 

The book was a modest effort, more a loose collection of anecdotes than a novel with a coherent narrative arc. It earned a few small notices, then might well have been forgotten itself. But, as a single-paragraph review in the New York Times noted, the novel had one saving grace. "There is little continuity here but plenty of multicolored vignettes. More than enough, I'd say, for a shooting script or a series."

Indeed there was. Over the next few years, Dr. Hornberger's humble little novel was adapted first into one of the most successful films of 1970, and then, from 1972 into 1983, one of the most popular television series in broadcast history. The successes of the film and TV show in turn spurred the publication of no fewer than 14 sequels.

The title of Dr. Hornberger's novel was, if you haven't guessed, 

Reading it half a century later, it's notable that for a book with such a legacy, 

. There's no scathing denunciation of the madness of war, no merciless spoofing of inept military bureaucracy. 

"I intended no messages in the book," Hornberger would later tell a reporter. "I am a conservative Republican. I don't hold with this anti-war nonsense." He simply wanted to tell some stories based on his time in Korea. Serious ones about doctors under pressure in the operating room, and humorous ones about doctors relieving the pressure with wacky hijinks outside of the OR. 

 is closer to the mild satires of army life in Mac Hyman's 1954 

 (which itself spun off a long line of adaptations) or Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe cartoons from World War II.

"There is little continuity here but plenty of multicolored vignettes. More than enough, I'd say, for a shooting script or a series."

Characters and other elements that became familiar to all Americans mostly through the long-running TV show are introduced. Hornberger modeled Hawkeye Pierce on himself, the 4077 on the 8055, Hawkeye's hometown of Crabapple Cove on Broad Cove, and The Swamp on, well, The Swamp. The rest of the characters – Trapper John, Duke, Hot Lips Houlihan, Frank Burns, et al. – were composites of people whom he served with. 

Hornberger's attempts at humor dominate, both in tone and in length. A tedious and ultimately pointless shaggy dog about a football match between the 4077 and another MASH unit, for example, accounts for more than a tenth of the book. Any fan of the TV show would notice that Hornberger's versions of Hawkeye and his pals have much harder edges and are generally less likeable than their small screen counterparts. Their frat-boy antics are often boorish and bullying, mean and cruel, sexist and racist. (The one significant black character is nicknamed Spearchucker Jones.) 

When the doctors of the 8055/4077 ridicule or rebel against military authority, it's simply because they know they are, in effect, the Big Men On Campus and can get away with it. They're never truly seditious. They're just acting out.

The book's strongest moments are Dr. Hornberger's memories of conducting "meatball surgery" in an OR that was like an assembly line of damaged youth when there was heavy fighting at the front. "And still they came,” he writes. “Bellies, chests, necks, arteries, arms, legs, eyes, testicles, kidneys, spinal cords, all shot to hell. Win or lose. Life and death." 

These vignettes don't lead to political or moral statements. They're war-is-hell observations, their emotional impact in the simple way he tells them:

The six o’clock chopper, either morning or evening, was always unwelcome because the very fact that the pilot was risking the trip in half-daylight meant that the soldiers lying in the pods were seriously wounded. So twice each day, at dawn and at dusk, as six o’clock approached, everyone – surgeons, nurses, lab technicians, corpsmen, cooks and mostly Lt. Col. Henry Blake – would listen…

Producer Ingo Preminger, Otto's brother, optioned the book for film, and hired Ring Lardner, Jr., 

. An interesting choice, given that Lardner was a former member of the American Communist party who was jailed and blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten. 

Robert Altman was said to be the 18th director whom Preminger approached with the project. He had directed dozens of episodes for various television series, but only a few small feature films, including the sci-fi 

. Unknown to Preminger, Altman was beginning to fancy himself a Hollywood rebel, and used filming the film (now 

, with asterisks) as a chance to prove it. He exaggerated the episodic nature of the novel (which he later said was "pretty terrible") to make a rambling, virtually plotless movie, and jettisoned much of Lardner's script for ad-libs and improv.

Lardner griped – until he won an Academy Award in 1970 for best adapted screenplay. Altman also amped up the book's mean-spirited sexism, as in the cruelly humiliating treatment of Hot Lips Houlihan in the film’s 

Altman made no attempt to have his actors look or act like it was the early 1950s; their long hair, hip speech and insouciant demeanor were all late-60s counterculture chic. He wanted audiences to think of the current Vietnam War, not the forgotten Korean one. In fact, the film's only references to Korea were added in by studio executives.

Altman exaggerated the episodic nature of the novel (which he later said was "pretty terrible") to make a rambling, virtually plotless movie, and jettisoned much of Lardner's script for ad-libs and improv.

Nervously released by those execs in March 1970, 

 startled them by becoming a tremendous hit with both critics and audiences. The antiwar, anti-authoritarian surliness was a perfect fit for the times. Made for under $4 million, it earned more than $80 million, making it the third highest grossing movie of 1970 (behind 

). It was nominated for five Oscars. It made stars not only of Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, but of Altman too. Even Hornberger liked it, despite its Commie pedigree and counterculture tendencies.

Given the smash success of the film, Morrow and Co. encouraged Hornberger to write a sequel. In 

, published in 1972, Hawkeye and his surgeon friends Trapper John and Duke muster out of the army and go to practice in Hawkeye's home state. Like the first novel, it's a loose-limbed gambol through variously implausible pranks and shenanigans. One gets the sense that whereas  the foundation of the first book was Hornberger's memories, this one was more a retreat into his fantasies. 

 feels so out of touch with the current events of 1972. It was a topsy-turvy year. Richard Nixon made his historic trip to China, got entangled in the Watergate scandal, and was handily reelected anyway. The war in Vietnam dragged on, and Jane Fonda made her infamous tour of the North. The Weather Underground exploded a small bomb inside the Pentagon, and George Wallace was shot. John Wojtowicz held up a bank in Brooklyn to pay for his lover's sex-change operation. 

Meanwhile, the original novel came to TV. The series was quite different from Hornberger's original conception. As played by the shaggy-haired, Groucho-imitating Alan Alda, Hawkeye had no hard edges, was never cruel, poked fun but never humiliated. At worst he was a smart aleck. After a few seasons he lost his wisecracking sidekick Trapper John (Duke was never in the series), who was replaced by an entirely new character, the relentlessly mild-mannered B. J. Hunnicutt. Over time, Alda's role expanded from starring to producing, co-writing, and sometimes directing, with the result that in its last several seasons, the show grew ever more liberal, feminist, antiwar and politically correct.

, the series, was another grand success. Tens of millions of households tuned in every week for 11 years. It racked up 14 Emmys. The two-hour finale that aired in February 1983 had almost 106 million viewers, the largest audience for a TV program until it was edged out by Super Bowl XLIV 27 years later. It spun off two sequels, 

, which enjoyed seven popular seasons (1979-1986), and the shorter-lived 

, Dale Sherman reports that Pocket Books, seeing early on how popular the TV show was, asked Hornberger to write more sequels. He said he was too busy with his medical practice, but agreed to the hiring of a ghostwriter, as long as he had approval of the writer and any manuscript. After rejecting several candidates Pocket Books sent him as "longhaired liberals," he liked William E. Butterworth, a prolific writer of military and detective fiction, and a fellow Korean vet. 

 in three weeks. He cranked out 11 more books by 1977 – 

, and to Hollywood, Las Vegas, and so on. These were all credited to Richard Hooker and William E. Butterworth, but in fact were entirely written by Butterworth. 

rolled on, from Emmy to Emmy. If there was one person in America who did not like the show, it was Dr. Hornberger. 

When he died in 1997 at the age of 73, his son William told the 

, ''He liked the movie because he thought it followed his original intent very closely. But my father was a political conservative, and he did not like the liberal tendencies that Alan Alda portrayed Hawkeye Pierce as having. My father didn't write an anti-war book. It was a humorous account of his work, with serious parts thrown in about the awful kind of work it was, and how difficult and challenging it was.''

Hornberger wrote one more MASH sequel on his own, 

, published in 1977. The whole book reads like a bitter refutation of the goody two-shoes Alda vehicle. Already by page 4, Hawkeye is lecturing the reader on why the use of the N-word and other ethnic slurs is not an automatic sign of bigotry. Four pages later, he chases Spearchucker Jones down a hospital hallway, cracking a whip. Further along, he and his pals brutally ridicule a rape counselor. "We understand you graduated summa cum laude from rape school," Spearchucker says to her. Trapper explains to her that Hawkeye is "planning to rape someone but he has no experience." 

Hawkeye asks "just what does your counseling service provide? Like, who selects the victim, you or me? Like do I whack her around a little first…" 

And so on. Even 40-odd years ago, it's unlikely that many readers took this as the rollicking, anti-PC fun Hornberger meant it to be. Like the humiliation of Hot Lips in Altman's film, it just is – and always was – mean, ugly and crass. But it's also impossible to imagine Alda's Hawkeye saying or doing any of these things, which must have been precisely Hornberger's point.

As the television show was coming to an end in 1983, Hornberger began appearing in interviews as the real Richard Hooker, and complaining. It was his last time in the limelight, and he came to bury 

 that the show "tramples on my memories." To UPI, he said: "If you're going to start a war, you might as well play to win. No one in their right mind would be pro-war, but I operated on a thousand or so wounded kids, and I know more about war than a bunch of undereducated actors who go around blithering those sanctimonious, self-righteous noises."

He went on, "My wife and I were in a hotel room in New Zealand one time and had the choice of watching T

, or an educational program on the artificial insemination of cows. I chose to watch the cow show." 

Reportedly Dr. Hornberger drafted another MASH sequel,  about Trapper John being elected president of the United States. It was never published.

 is an historiographer and journalist. His most recent books are 

Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers during World War II

, which has been optioned for television. 

(Cover photograph: The 8225th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, Korea, in October 1951. National Archives and Records Administration)  

(Video: National Archives and Records Administration)

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Hollywood didn’t dream up the Korean War’s most vivid U.S. cultural landmark. An irascible conservative doctor did.

John Strausbaugh