onable and insolent. Probably the best fruit which Mr. Davis hoped
from them was that Mr. Seward, who was well known to be desirous of
finding some peace-assuring middle course, might be led into a
discussion of the situation, inevitably provoking divisions in the
cabinet, in the Republican party, and in the country. But though
Seward's frame of mind about this time was such as to put him in great
jeopardy of committing hurtful blunders, he was fortunate enough to
escape quite doing so. To the agent of the commissioners he replied that
he must "consult the President," and the next day he wrote, in terms of
personal civility, that he could not receive them. Nevertheless they
remained in Washington a few weeks longer, gathering and forwarding to
the Confederate government such information as they could. In this they
were aided by Judge Campbell of Alabama, a Secessionist, who still
retained his seat upon the bench of the Supreme Court. This gentleman
now became a messenger between the commissioners and Mr. Seward, with
the purpose of eliciting news and even pledges from the latter for the
use of the former. His errands especially related to Fort Sumter, and he
gradually drew from Mr. Seward strong expressions of opinion that Sumter
would in time be evacuated, even declarations substantially to the
effect that this was the arranged policy of the government. Words which
fell in so agreeably with the wishes of the judge and the commissioners
were received with that warm welcome which often outruns correct
construction, and later were construed by them as actual assurances, at
least in substance, whereby they conceived themselves to have been
"abused and overreached," and they charged the government with
"equivocating conduct." In the second week in April, contemporaneously
with the Sumter crisis, they addressed to Mr. Seward a high-flown
missive of reproach, in which they ostentatiously washed the hands of
the South, as it were, and shook from their own departing feet the dust
of the obdurate North, where they had not been met "in the conciliatory
and peaceful spirit" in which they had come. They invoked "impartial
history" to place the responsibility of blood and mourning upon those
who had denied the great fundamental doctrine of American liberty; and
they declared it "clear that Mr. Lincoln had determined to appeal to the
sword to reduce the people of the Confederate States to the will of the
section or party whose Presiden