"...massive rally in the snow in Philadelphia in front of Independence Hall in support of "total abolitionism," and similar, albeit smaller, protests were held in Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco the next day, February 18th. In the span of a week, it seemed that the discussion around ending slavery in the Confederacy for good had swung massively in favor of the maximalist positions taken by politicians such as Henry Cabot Lodge - nobody's idea of a moderate, let alone a progressive, on any other question of the time - or longtime activists such as WEB Dubois or William Trotter. The final push seemed to come when President Hughes, influenced by his friend Richard Ely, gave his farewell address in Baltimore - symbolic due to it being the place where he had addressed the nation while fleeing Washington on September 9th, 1913, and its proximity to Mount Vernon and status as a former bastion of pro-slavery sentiment - in which he declared, "The war has been won through the blood of our sons, but the peace shall be lost if we do not honor that bloodshed with the shackles broken off every last man, woman and child enslaved across Dixie." For a moment, American politics seemed to have coalesced in a remarkable place of total and complete sympathy with the plight of the Negro.
It would be foolish to think that the same public that within a few years would produce the American Defense League and smaller outright paramilitaries such as the Anglo-Saxon Protective Organization, Protestant Protective Organization, Patriots for the National Defense and other such groups was suddenly void of all racial animus or held Negroes as their equal, but the Slave Question was one area in which bipartisan support was remarkably strong around the end of chattel slavery as a functional economic and social model, and European public opinion had strongly swung in favor of such a move, too. For men like Lodge who had viewed slavery's eradication as his life's work, there was no other moment to seize. Mount Vernon would be the place, and President Hughes was arriving on hand to help deliver the killing blow..."
- Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31
"...Root cleverly put forth the Turner Proviso's general language as the "final settlement" but left the specifics vague; McReynolds immediately balked and left Mount Vernon on the 19th, already offended at the displays of abolitionist sentiment pouring across American cities as rumors flew that the Yankee negotiators were "going soft." The entire Congress seemed likely to implode at that moment, and Hughes was brought under heavy military watch to meet face-to-face personally with Patton to attempt see if a "meeting of the minds" could secure a solution.
The Hughes-Patton Summit at Mount Vernon made for a strange and curious visage but is one that has stuck with the public mind on both sides of the Ohio in the decades since; to the Confederates, it was the moment at which Patton sealed the betrayal of their way of life, and to Yankees it proved the moment that elevated Hughes into the upper echelon of great Presidents. Neither of these conclusions is the right inference. As will be elaborated upon below, by late February of 1917 Patton was in little position to refuse American demands on much of anything, and Hughes' reputation is bolstered, particularly amongst Liberals searching for their great man of history, by the spectacular disaster that was his successor Root's four-year Presidency.
But nonetheless, walking the grounds of Mount Vernon under close eye of Hughes' Secret Service bodyguards - to the point that Patton felt uncomfortably like a prisoner getting his exercise in the yard - the two Presidents felt something of an odd camaraderie. It was the first time a Confederate President was meeting in person with his American counterpart while in office, in a time when the chief executive simply did not travel out of the country (indeed, Hughes had been the first American to do so at Niagara in 1913). Both men were exhausted and roughly of an age, with Patton having lost a son near Nashville and Hughes' namesake boy having taken a bullet to the leg outside of Petersburg in the last days of the war despite serving as an artillery officer that would leave him with a bad limp for the rest of his life. They were rather circumspect in their memoirs about what exactly was said on their three-hour stroll and two hours together in a drawing room away from the rest of the delegations, and there was probably far too much said to fully validate, leading to fantastical and fantasized versions of the conversation in both countries' historiography long thereafter. Whatever was the case, by the end of their five short hours together on February 21st, less than two weeks until Hughes would leave office, the deal was struck and the decision made: the Confederate States would yield on the question of slavery "for the salvation of the country."
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
"...offered Patton, Martin and the "gargoyle of Mount Vernon" James C. McReynolds little choice. Only in parts of southern Mississippi, the lower two-thirds of Louisiana, and Florida did any units of the Confederate Army represent anything close to a fighting force, and even then it was just a militia to keep public order. Slaves were walking off plantations and killing overseers when accosted; communities (often called colonies in Confederate historiography) of Negroes were springing up across the Cotton Belt. Dixie was awash in guns and after the armistice of November 11th, Yankee soldiers, especially those of the elite Hellfighter brigades, found their way to small Negro paramilitaries and began training them in small-arms tactics and how to work as a unit. In the fourteen weeks between the armistice and the completion of the Mount Vernon Congress, civilian authority evaporated across most of the Lower Confederacy before a settlement on Yankee military administration could be established. The country was in a state of total anarchy, and in such a state there was little practical way in which Confederates could reasonably force the institution of slavery back on a rebellious people.
Nor could the United States enforce its total abolition either, however, and the idea of importing millions of illiterate field slaves north as the refugee crisis in Kentucky only worsened was grievously unpopular amongst American politicians and the public alike, especially as the rapid wind down of war industries accelerated in the spring of 1917 and a time bomb of unemployment began to loom over the victorious Yanks. As such, Article Twelve of the Treaty of Mount Vernon - the triumph of emancipation - was less a commandment worthy of Moses and more a rough political compromise hashed out over the course of a few days once it was clear that the United States needed something, anything, to force the Confederacy to concede.
The "Turner Proviso" that had caused such consternation became the backbone of the Article in its first clauses, declaring that emancipation of slaves "in the course of war" was "permanent and irrevocable as a consequence of such war." The next articles thereafter demanded that "the Confederate States shall declare the births of all persons in her states hereafter irrevocably free," thus immediately ending the births of new slaves, modeled on the Free Birth Law of Brazil passed nearly fifty years earlier. These two provisions alone would have been a radical uprooting of the Confederate social order and essentially on their own ended slavery as a viable national economic order, what with less than in two of every ten slaves prewar still believed to be in the immediate hands of their owners. That was not all, though. At the urging of Hughes, Lodge and eventually Root, Patton agreed to a provision "that no state shall have revoked the military administration and occupation of the United States until it has abolished slavery with immediate effect within its borders," and that "amendments to the Constitution protecting the rights and privileges of all persons born free shall be expected in return for a suspension of occupation." The United States would reserve the right to "define" the "military administration" at its pleasure, and how exactly that was to interact with any Confederate civilian authority was left unclear as none of Root, Turner or Lodge themselves knew exactly how that would go.
Any hope amongst Confederates for a reprieve from Lord Chelwood, the British arbitrator, went nowhere; Chelwood was a reactionary landowner in the context of his domestic politics who surely sympathized with the Confederate planter but was no fool when it came to public opinion at home and had liberal instincts as a diplomat, and the British government had been firmly anti-slavery, even despite its recognition of Richmond as a fait accompli at Havana, for nearly a century. Chelwood politely informed Martin and McReynolds that in his view, the Confederacy "must reap what it has sown after choosing this path at Niagara," perhaps the bluntest tell he gave in his two months at Mount Vernon of how thoroughly in the American camp he and his aides were. Patton wept upon being informed of this and wrote in his diary, "For the survival of my country, it is I who must drink this poisoned chalice," predicting the hatred he would inspire form his countrymen.
The Twelfth Article of the Mount Vernon Congress was thus added to the peace treaty on February 28th, 1917, the last day of the month as Hughes and Root headed back for Philadelphia for the latter's inauguration, leaving Lodge and Turner to finalize any last clauses. The United States had done it - it had abolished slavery.
But it had also only abolished slavery on paper, for the Mount Vernon Congress depended heavily on the goodwill and cooperation of a people who very much were disinterested in seeing their way of life ended..."
- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
"...the enormous pride which Root had for what he regarded as his greatest achievement, especially his work with Turner and Lodge to craft Article Twelve to reflect both of their inputs and approaches into the final model. And, indeed, Root does deserve a fair deal of credit for not allowing Mount Vernon to implode and swallowing his pride to call in Hughes to close the matter at the very end.
It was the case, though, that the Treaty was still not finished. As Root and Hughes arrived in Philadelphia early on the morning of March 1st and began preparations for the swearing-in of not only Root but the 65th Congress with its narrow Liberal majorities, the Kentucky Question was still being answered in Mount Vernon, where men like Bliss, Pershing and Lodge were loathe to cede what was now essentially a freedman-majority state back to the Confederacy but also facing the pressure of potentially detonating negotiations with an outright annexation. Here, Turner's instinct for finding Solomonic compromises carried the day again, as he proposed that in addition to the Military Administration in Kentucky, a defined civilian entity known as the Free Commonwealth of Kentucky would be established to "cooperate with the Military Administration," and that the status of this Free Commonwealth - which had no sovereignty beyond that of an American or Confederate state but also established it as not an independent country, either - would be determined at a future date. The Kentucky state government was apoplectic from its place of exile outside of Charlotte and vowed not to recognize the Free Commonwealth and would adamantly maintain that the Kentucky civilian administration was thus fully illegal.
Much of the Mount Vernon Treaty was thus grab-bags of compromise and expediency, as with many treaties, even if its endeavor to end the threat of war between the Sister Republics and abolish slavery from the North American continent were meant to be permanent settlements. The slave matter was thus heavily dependent on Patton's ability to force the treaty through what remained of the Confederate Congress what with dozens of legislators in American captivity as something approximating hostages for good behavior and then the passage of such laws at gunpoint across Dixie, Kentucky was basically a punt to a future President on either side of the Ohio to deal with, and the status of Texas remained fully up in the air as an early issue for Root to address.
But for now, the Mount Vernon Congress had concluded, and Root was already in Philadelphia going over his notes one last time when its provisions were publicly published for the first time on March 3rd and engendered exactly the outrage and backlash across the Confederacy that most observers could have easily predicted..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
