The Peace Commission

The Hampton Roads Conference convened on February 3, 1865, in an attempt to find a negotiated settlement to the American Civil War (1861–1865). As Confederate prospects for survival deteriorated, leaders on both sides met aboard the River Queen at Union-controlled Hampton Roads, Virginia. They included U.S. president Abraham Lincoln and secretary of state William H. Seward, as well as Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, asssistant secretary of war John A. Campbell, and Confederate senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia. The meeting, caricatured here in the New York-based magazine Harper's Weekly, lasted only four hours and accomplished little.