When Abe Met ‘Aleck’ at Hampton Roads
the Confederacy was teetering toward collapse. Its main Western force, the Army of Tennessee, had been routed at Nashville in mid-December, and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia huddled in the Petersburg, Va., trenches—“Lee’s Miserables” were shivering and starving. So why would Abraham Lincoln, reelected to carry the war to victory, decide to meet with Confederate commissioners to talk about peace? And what did those commissioners, with so little
