"...invited to the Mount Vernon Congress, along with Herman Hall, as personal guests of Bliss and March by virtue of their status as the two theater-level commanders on the day of the war's conclusion. Liggett and Farnsworth, for their own considerable contributions in the early phase of the war, were also asked to attend; Pershing took more than a little personal satisfaction that Treat was not extended the same courtesy.
The military contingent to the Mount Vernon Congress were invited to stay at the relatively-intact plantation house once owned by Robert E. Lee not far from Mount Vernon, which overlooked the remains of Washington and the massive military camp there, and every day starting on January 11 they were escorted to George Washington's property at five o' clock sharp by convoy, at which point their participation as mainstays of the event largely ended, except for Bliss, who advised Secretary of War Stimson on concerns around defense pertinent to a final treaty. Nonetheless, Pershing was given "a seat in the first row to the unfolding of history, the unmaking of the Crime of Havana one day, one memorandum, at a time," and his contemporaneous notes that he and Liggett cross-referenced as they edited each others' memoirs present one of the best first-hand accounts of Mount Vernon not dependent on the opinions of biases of the men who served as architects of the Treaty of Mount Vernon.
Pershing in the 1910s seldom if ever spoke of politics beyond those related to veteran's issues, but he was privately a moderate, perhaps even progressively-minded, Liberal despite his Nebraskan roots (or perhaps because of them) who had written in his diary his dismay at the news that Hughes would not "seek to win the peace as he has most assuredly won the war." This considerable admiration for Hughes did not extend to Root or Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts Senator who was already measuring the drapes to take over as Secretary of State, and Pershing's observations at Mount Vernon of both men at work were in many ways the beginning of that.
The British dispatched as a mediator the Lord Chelwood, the elder brother of the incumbent Prime Minister regarded as a talented, level-headed diplomat who would have, but for the identity of his sibling, made a capable Foreign Secretary (and likely a considerable improvement over Sir Ian Malcolm, who had nonetheless brokered the treaties that ended the wars with Brazil at Asuncion and Halifax). This had been done, curiously, at Philadelphia's insistence, with Root's thinking being that the presence of an ostensibly neutral third party would make the affair more palatable in the courts of old Europe, many of which had quietly sympathized with the elite autocratic instincts of the Bloc Sud. This was, in the end, window dressing - Chelwood was, unlike many of his High Tory tradition, fully in the camp of the United States and while he did privately shape some proposals to be less harsh than they could otherwise have been, saw Mount Vernon as a potential launch of his project of a grand international diplomatic order that would prevent war and hostilities out of "one of the most terrible slaughters Man has ever seen," and hoped to earn American support for such a cause..."
- Pershing
"...Treaty of Lima had placed substantive limits on Chile's future military size and its economic rights, and it was seen as a likely blueprint for what the United States would seek to accomplish at Mount Vernon. Like the Confederacy, Chile had exited the war as a fully conquered and supine party rather than getting out while there was a chance for leniency, as with Mexico and Brazil, and Chile's fractious civil conflict and economic near-collapse suggested what would come next, if not worse. Patton, Martin, Heflin and Secretary of State James McReynolds arrived at Mount Vernon expecting disaster; they were forced to swallow apocalypse.
With the deteriorating situation in the states, Patton was eager to cut a quick deal, ideally by the end of January, so that he could start enforcing some kind of state control over the country as starvation, riots and paramilitary violence spiraled across the Confederacy, and Martin, ever the survivor, had begrudgingly accepted political reality that the Confederacy needed to move quickly. With these needs in mind, the inclusion of McReynolds was a bad blunder for the Confederate delegation; the two more pragmatic Virginians were frequently humiliated by the rudeness, intemperate attitude, and stubbornness of their chief diplomat who particularly angered Lodge, a man with Root's ear whom the Confederates could not afford to alienate.
The United States entered the Congress with four chief concerns - the removal of the Confederacy's ability to pose a military threat to American territory, full freedom of navigation in Confederate waters such as the Mississippi or the Chesapeake, the economic vassalization of Richmond, and assigning the full and total "guilt" of the war to the Confederacy for all time. They also sought to avoid a repeat of the Havana Conference fifty-three years earlier, and as such only the British were permitted to represent European interests at the table, and even then only as window dressing despite a number of German and French interests in the Confederacy.
The first piece of defanging the Confederate war capabilities was one Patton had anticipated - territorial concessions, drawn almost entirely from Virginia and phrased in a way that sought to "recompense" the states of West Virginia and especially Maryland for the "atrocities" carried out against their populaces in the course of the war. Northampton and Accomack were obvious candidates to be added to Maryland, but Lodge pressed on, demanding that Marylander territory be extended all the way to the Rappahannock, carving off the counties of Loudoun, Prince William, Stafford and Fairfax as well as the swampy, fairly uninhabited Northern Neck. Massive territorial demands for West Virginia were dialed back, partially thanks to Patton's acquiescence to the Maryland claims; in the end, Pocahontas, Greenbrier, Pendleton, Hampshire, Hardy, Morgan, Berkely, Jefferson, Frederick and Clarke were attached to the American state to create a broader buffer from West Virginia's coalfields, but vast swaths of the Shenandoah Valley and southwest of the state were retained within the Confederacy almost purely out of luck.
It would be the last time at the Mount Vernon Congress that any developments could be described as being lucky for the Confederacy..."
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
