egraph, not even the mild suggestion of their original instructions to maintain the status and appeal to Congress, but a meek inquiry whether they would be allowed to make a sort of back-door visit to the State Department. To describe it in their own words: "We availed ourselves of the kind consent of

Senator Hunter of Virginia to see Mr. Seward, and learn if he would consent to an informal interview with us.": Mr. Seward of course received Senator Hunter politely, for he still professed to be a loyal senator representing a loyal State, and gave him the stereotyped diplomatic reply, that "he would be obliged to consult the President." The next morning Seward sent Hunter a note of irreproachable courtesy but of freezing conclusiveness. "It will not be in my power," he wrote, "to receive the gentlemen of whom we conversed yesterday. You will please explain to them that this decision proceeds solely on public grounds and not from any want of personal respect." t

This was a cold bath to the commissioners, and the theories of their own finesse, and of the torturing perplexities into which Seward had been thrown, became untenable.

To-day at 11 o'clock [so runs their own report] Mr. Hunter brought us the promised reply, a copy of which is appended to this dispatch. It is polite; but it was considered by us at once as decisive of our course. We deemed it not compatible with the dignity of our Government to make a second effort, and took for granted that having failed in obtaining an unofficial interview with the Secretary of State, we should equally fail with the President. Our only remaining course was plain, and we followed it at once in the preparation of a formal note to the State Department informing the United States Government of our official presence here, the objects of our mission, and asking an early day to be appointed for an official interview.

They then repeat the gossip of the day what Mr. Lincoln was said to have told a gentleman from Louisiana, that "there would be no war and that he was determined to keep the peace"; also what Crittenden told Crawford, "that General Scott was also for peace and would sustain Mr. Seward's policy." Finally, showing in what complete ignorance they were of events happening about them, they ask with bewildered curiosity, "Can it be that while they refuse to negotiate with us to keep the Republican party in heart, they mean to abandon both forts on military grounds and thus avoid the occasion of a collision, or do they mean to refer the questions raised by our note to the Senate? Time only can determine, and we await the result.

We are still of the opinion that Fort Sumter will be evacuated. The opinion gains ground here that Lieutenant Slemmer and garrison will also be withdrawn from Fort Pickens."* Toombs was ready to sue or bluster as occasion demanded.

States [he wrote back to the commissioners] with commendable promptness and becoming dignity that you were not supplicants for its grace and favor, and willing to loiter in the antechambers of officials to patiently await their answer to your petition; but that you are the envoys of a powerful confederacy of sovereignties, instructed to present and demand their rights.

You have shown to the Government of the United

Nevertheless, instead of recalling these neglected envoys, he instructs them to "communicate freely and often," and to employ a secretary to assist them, "at such monthly compensation as you may deem reasonable."

The hint to remain was hardly necessary. The commissioners apparently had no idea of abandoning their intrigues, unpromising as they were.

Their secretary, John T. Pickett, now besieged the State Department for an answer to the commissioners' formal note. Seward re

plied (March 15th) in a lengthy and courteous but dignified memorandum that he did not perceive in the "Confederate States" a rightful and accomplished revolution or an independent nation; that he could not act on the assumption or in any way admit that they constituted a foreign power with which diplomatic relations ought to be established; that he had no authority, nor was he at liberty, to recognize the commissioners as diplomatic agents, or hold correspondence or other communication with them.§

This paper, if delivered, would have terminated the labors and functions of the commissioners. But they were in no hurry to return empty-handed to Montgomery, and still fondly nursed the theory so elaborately described in their long dispatches. One of them repeated it with emphasis in a private letter to a member of the Montgomery cabinet:

We are feeling our way here cautiously. We are playing a game in which time is our best advocate, and if our Government could afford the time I feel confident of winning. There is a terrific fight in the Cabinet. fight, and at least blow up the Cabinet on the quesOur policy is to encourage the peace element in the tion.

This dispatch is a frank confession that the rebel embassy was so far a complete failure,

Toombs to commissioners, March 20, 1861. Unpublished MS.

MS.

Seward, memorandum. "Rebellion Record." Forsyth to Walker, March 14, 1861. Unpublished

and that its future opportunity lay solely in the barren regions of hotel gossip and newspaper rumors. The commissioners would have merited no further historical mention had they not unexpectedly secured a most important ally-John A. Campbell, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, appointed from Alabama, and therefore in the confidence and, as it soon turned out, in the secret interest of the South and the rebellion. Justice Campbell now made himself the voluntary intermediary between the commissioners and the Secretary of State. Owing to his station and his professions, Seward gave him undue intimacy and confidence, enabling Campbell, under guise of promoting peace, to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States, in violation of his oath and duty. The details of the intrigue rest entirely upon rebel statements, and mainly upon those of Campbell himself, who gave both a confidential and a semi-official version to Jefferson Davis; the latter Davis transmitted in a special message to the Confederate Congress to "fire the Southern heart." Campbell having thus made his share of the transaction official, and having for a quarter of a century stood before the public accusing Seward and the Lincoln administration of "equivocating conduct" and "systematic duplicity," history must adjudge the question as well as it may with the help of his own testimony.

It has already been stated that Seward's official refusal to receive the commissioners was being prepared at the State Department. The Assistant Secretary had promised to send it to the commissioners' hotel. The commissioners thus relate the beginning of Campbell's intrigue :

The interview between Colonel Pickett and the Assistant Secretary of State occurred on Friday morning the 14th inst. Immediately thereafter, and within a brief space of time after Colonel Pickett's statement to us, the Hon. John A. Campbell, of the Supreme Court of the United States, sought an interview with he knew to be the wish and desire of Mr. Seward to preserve the peace between the two Governments, asked if there could be no further delay for an answer to our note to the Government, stating at the same time that he had no doubt if it were pressed that a

Mr. Crawford of this commission, and after stating what

most positive though polite rejection would be the

result. t

Commissioner Crawford's official reply to this overture is best described by Toombs's formula that he should "pertinaciously demand" the evacuation of Sumter and maintenance of the "status" elsewhere; the alterna

*The almanac shows that Friday was the 15th. There is, therefore, an error either in the day of the week or day of the month.

Campbell to Seward. "Rebellion Record."

tive and confidential reply we can only conjecture. But it may well be presumed that Campbell fully revealed to Crawford his sympathy with the rebellion and his purpose to aid it, and that he was in return thoroughly instructed in the game, which was "to encourage the peace element in the fight, and at least blow up the Cabinet on the question."

Thus instructed and prepared, Justice Campbell on the same day (March 14th or 15th) made a voluntary call on Mr. Seward, and in the general conversation which he induced evidently played his part of the game of peace and reconciliation with consummate ability. He probably painted the "dreams which we know are not to be realized" in such rosy colors as to call forth from Seward the hopeful observation " that a civil war might be prevented by the success of my [Campbell's] mediation." The impression upon Seward that Campbell was laboring honestly for the preservation of the Union was also strengthened by his having brought Justice Nelson with him, to whom the slightest suspicion of disloyalty has never attached. It seems clear that these professions of patriotic zeal threw Mr. Seward off his guard as to Campbell's motives, and that he accepted his intervention as a Union peacemaker, not as a rebel emissary.

Seward replied confidentially, "that it was impossible to receive the commissioners in any diplomatic capacity or character, or even to see them personally." Campbell adds that he said "it was not desirable to deny them or to answer them."§ As part of a general policy of delay and avoidance of conflict he may have said and meant it: as an immediate and urgent diplomatic step he certainly did not mean it, because his Assistant Secretary had already promised to send the answer to the commissioners' hotel, when for mere temporary delay dozens of expedients might have been used. Continuing his conversation and unguardedly enlarging his confidence, Seward, in answer to Campbell's direct inquiry, ventured the opinion that Sumter would be evacuated and collision avoided at Charleston. The idea was not new; the rumor had been openly and half-officially printed in the newspapers nearly a whole week; the commissioners had telegraphed it to Montgomery. Campbell, however, caught eagerly at the suggestion, and proposed to write the peaceful news to Jefferson Davis; and Seward, with a momentary excess of enthusiasm, authorized him (so Campbell relates) to write: "Before this letter

+ Commissioners to Toombs, March 22, 1861. Unpublished MS.

Campbell to Jefferson Davis, April 3, 1861. Unpublished MS.

reaches you Sumter will be evacuated, or the orders will have issued for that purpose-and no change is contemplated at present in respect to Pickens."* Campbell rushed off in a fever of delight to tell the commissioners, and magnified the confidence to the proportions of a pledge. The incident began to grow more rapidly than the story of the three black crows. The commissioners, on their part, hurried a telegram to Montgomery:

By pressing we can get an answer to our official note to-morrow. If we do, we believe it will be adverse to recognition and peace. We are sure that within five days Sumter will be evacuated. We are sure that no steps will be taken to change the military status. With a few days' delay a favorable answer may be had. Our personal interests command us to press. Duty to our country commands us to wait. What shall we do?t

To all of which Toombs answered laconically, "Wait a reasonable time and then ask for instructions."

It is needless to point out the absurd variance of this announcement with Seward's alleged statement, which was simply an opinion that orders would be issued to evacuate Sumter within five days. He undoubtedly believed every word of this at the moment. Seward was then, as he declared to Lincoln in writing, in favor of evacuation; ‡ and Scott's written draft of an order to that effect, under date of the 11th, was in the President's hands. The President had as yet announced no decision. On the 15th, for the first time, the Cabinet voted-five to evacuate, two to attempt to supply. Seward still had every reason to suppose that the necessity, the Cabinet majority, General Scott's influence, and Lincoln's desire to avoid war would, acting together, verify his prediction. Presuming that he was talking to a friend and not an enemy, to a judge and not an advocate, to a Unionist and not a rebel, he undoubtedly and properly thought his words were received as a prediction, and not as a pledge.

The five days elapsed, but Lincoln sent no order to Anderson, and announced no decision to the Cabinet. He was still patiently seeking, and had not found his way out of the dilemma. He had not yet beheld "the salvation of the Lord." He was neither optimist nor pessimist. He wished to decide, not upon impulse or even necessity, but upon judgment and advantage. He was neither stubbornly headstrong nor cravenly submissive. If, like the farmer in his favorite illustration, he could not plow through the log, perhaps he might plow around it. He

Campbell to Jefferson Davis, April 3, 1861. Unpublished MS.

+ Commissioners to Toombs, March 15, 1861. Unpublished MS.

Seward to Lincoln, March 15, 1861. Opinion on Sumter.

was meditating on the visit of Fox to Sumter, of Lamon and Hurlbut to Charleston; he was deliberating about a diversion upon the Virginia convention; above all, he was waiting to hear from his order to reënforce Pickens, dispatched on the 12th of March. His Cabinet ministers did not yet understand him. Seward on the one hand, and Blair on the other, unused to men of his fiber, began to fear this was vacillation, indecision, executive incompetence. The atmosphere of Washington had hitherto largely produced two classes of men-those who bluster and domineer, those who protest and yield. Lincoln belonged to neither class; and his persistent non-committal, his silent hopefulness, his patient and wellconsidered inaction, baffled their prophecy. Such tenacity of purpose, combined with such reticence of declaration, was an anomaly in recent Federal administration.

The hopes of the rebels, so unexpectedly inflated, began once more to collapse. Governor Pickens sent inquiries to the commissioners. Toombs telegraphed them, "We can't hear from you."§ Campbell was summoned and dispatched post-haste to the State Department. He had interviews on March 21st and 22d. But in reality Seward was no wiser than he had been in the previous interviews, and could only repeat his beliefs and his predictions, and declare, in his philosophic vein, that "governments could not move with bank accuracy." ||

For a third time the conspirators grew impatient, and again Campbell, on Saturday, March 30th, and Monday, April 1st, went to the State Department as the messenger of rebellion. By this time Seward had real information. A second Cabinet vote had been taken, on March 29th, in which the majority was reversed. The President had ordered the preparation of the Sumter expedition; and Seward himself, though still advising the abandonment of Sumter, was personally preparing an expedition to reënforce Fort Pickens.

Seward at this point must have realized how injudicious he had been to give Campbell any confidence whatever, since to preserve secrecy for his own project he must abruptly break off the intimacy. Perhaps he had by this time divined that he was dealing with a public enemy. At all events, whatever may have been his reasons, he took occasion to correct any misunderstanding which might previously have sprung up by giving Campbell a written mem

orandum (April 1st), as follows: "The President may desire to supply Sumter, but will not do so without giving notice to Governor Pickens"; adding verbally (Campbell says) that he still did not believe the attempt would be made, and that there was no design to reënforce Sumter. Campbell acknowledges that he took notice of this very important correction and definition. "There was a departure here from the pledges of the previous month," he writes; "but with the verbal explanation I did not consider it a matter then to complain of."*

The commissioners and their game here drop into the background, and Mr. Justice Campbell takes up the rôle of leading conspirator. History will ask, Of what had this high minister of the law any right to complain? Two days afterward we find him making a confidential report to the insurrectionary chief at Montgomery, as follows:

I do not doubt that Sumter will be evacuated shortly, without any effort to supply it; but in respect to Pickens I do not think there is any settled plan, and it will not be abandoned spontaneously, and under any generous policy, though perhaps they may be quite willing to let it be beleaguered and reduced to extremities. I can only infer as to this. All that I have is a promise that the status will not be attempted to be changed prejudicially to the Confederate States without notice to me. It is known that I make these assurances on my own responsibility. I have no right to mention any name or to pledge any person. I am the only responsible person to you, I consenting to accept such assurances as are made to me and to say, "I have confidence that this will or will not be done." I have no expectation that there will be bad faith in

the dealings with me.

Now I do not see that I can do more. I have felt them in a variety of forms as to the practicability of some armistice or truce that should be durable and would relieve the anxiety of the country. But at present there can be no compact, treaty, recognition of any kind. There will be no objection to giving the commissioners their answer; but if the answer is not called for it will not be sent, and it is intimated that it would be more agreeable to withhold it. So far as I can judge, the present desire is to let things remain as they are, without action of any kind. There is a strong indisposition for the call of Congress, and it will not be done except under necessity. The radicals of the Senate went off in anger, and Trumbull's coercion resolution was offered after a contumelious interview with the President. My own notion is that the inactive policy is as favorable to you as any that this Administration could adopt for you, and that I would not interrupt it.

Here the learned judge might have stopped, and perhaps would have left posterity to question his method rather than his motives. But inexorable History demanded her tribute of truth under her master-spell he went on, and in the concluding paragraph of the letter his own hand recorded a confession little to have * Campbell to Seward. "Rebellion Record."

+ Campbell to Jefferson Davis, April 3, 1861. Unpublished MS.

Jefferson Davis to Campbell, April 6, 1861. Unpublished MS.

been expected from an officer whose duty it was to expound and to administer the law of treason as written in the Constitution of the United States and the acts of Congress.

The great want [he continued] of the Confederate States is peace. I shall remain here some ten or fifteen days. My own future course is in some manner depending upon circumstances and the opinions of friends. At present I have access to the Administration I could not have except under my present relations to the Government, and I do not know who could have the same freedom. I have therefore deferred any settlement on the subject until the chance of being of service at this critical period has terminated. This letter is strictly confidential and private. †

There is no need of comment on this "aid

and comfort" to the enemies of his Government by a member of the highest court of the United States. It only remains to note the acknowledgment and estimate of it by Jefferson Davis, replying from Montgomery under date of April 6th:

Accept my thanks for your kind and valuable services to the cause of the Confederacy and of peace between those who, though separated, have many reasons to feel towards each other more than the friendships common among nations. Our policy is, as you say, peace. . . . In any event I will gratefully remember your zealous labor in a sacred cause, and hope your fellow-citizens may at some time give you acceptable recognition of your service, and appreciate the heroism with which you have encountered a hazard from which most men would have shrunk.

While this direct correspondence between Davis and Campbell was being carried on, the commissioners, to whom Mr. A. B. Roman had been sent as a reënforcement, were, partly as a matter of form, partly for ulterior purposes, kept in Washington by the Montgomery cabinet to "loiter in the ante-chambers of officials." The occupation seems to have grown irksome to them; for, nowise deceived or even encouraged by Campbell's pretended "pledges," they asked, under date of March 26th, "whether we shall dally longer with a Government hesitating and doubting as to its own course, or shall we demand our answer at once?"§ On April 2d, Toombs gave them Jefferson Davis's views at length. He thought the policy of Mr. Seward would prevail. He cared nothing for Seward's motives or calculations. So long as the United States neither declare war nor establish peace, "it affords the Confederate States the advantages of both conditions, and enables them to make all the necessary arrangements for the public defense, and the solidifying of their Government, more safely, cheaply, and expeditiously than they could were the attitude of the United States more definite and decided." || The commis§ Commissioners to Toombs, March 26, 1861. Unpublished MS.

Toombs to commissioners, April 2, 1861. Unpublished MS.

A. B. ROMAN, CONFEDERATE COMMISSIONER. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY.)

sioners were therefore to make no demand for their answer, but maintain their present position. In view of this confident boast of the chief of the rebellion of "the advantages of both conditions," his subsequent accusation of bad faith on the part of the Lincoln administration is culminating proof of the insincerity and tortuous methods of the rebel game.

VIRGINIA.

CIVIL war, though possible, did not at the moment seem imminent or necessary: Lincoln had declared in his inaugural that he would not begin it; Jefferson Davis had written in his instructions to the commissioners that he did not desire it. This threw the immediate contest back upon the secondary questionthe control and adhesion of the border slaveStates; and of these Virginia was the chief subject of solicitude. The condition of Virginia had become anomalous; it was little understood by the North, and still less by her own citizens. She retained all the ideal sentiment growing out of her early devotion to and sacrifices for the Union; but it was warped by her coarser and stronger material interest in slavery. She still deemed she was the mother of presidents; whereas she had degenerated. into being, like other border States, the mother of slave-breeders and of an annual crop of black-skinned human chattels to be sold to the cotton, rice, and sugar planters of her neighboring commonwealths. She thought herself the leader of the South; whereas she was only a dependent of the Gulf States. She yet believed

VOL. XXXV.-82.

herself the teacher of original statesmanship; whereas she had become the unreasoning follower of Calhoun's disciples-the Ruffins, the Rhetts, and the Yanceys of the ultra South.

The political demoralization of Virginia was completed by the John Brown raid. From that time she dragged her anchors of state; her faith in both constitution and liberty was gone. The true lesson of that affair was indeed the very reverse. The overwhelming popular sentiment of the North denounced the outrage; the national arms defended Virginia and suppressed the invasion; the State vindicated her local authority by hanging the captured offenders. Thus public opinion, Federal power, and State right united in a precedent amounting of itself to an absolute guaranty, but which might have been easily crystallized into statute or even constitutional law. Sagacious statesmanship would have plucked this flower of safety. On the contrary, her blind partisanship spurned the opportunity, distrusted government, and sought refuge in force. Her then governor confesses that from that period

fully to the State armory; and whilst we had the we began to prepare for the worst. We looked careselection of the State quota of arms we were particular to take field ordnance instead of altered muskets; and when we left the gubernatorial chair, there were in the State armory at Richmond 85,000 stand of infantry arms and 130 field-pieces of artillery, besides $30,000 worth of new revolving arms purchased from Colt. Our decided opinion was that a preparation of the Southern States in full panoply of arms, and prompt action, would have prevented civil war."