that the President,
for all his semblance of vacillation, was a great man. Seward was
undeniably vain. That the President with such a Secretary of
State should judge the strength of a Cabinet vote by counting
noses--preposterous! But that was just what this curiously simple-minded
President had done. If he went on in his weak, amiable way listening to
the time-servers who were listening to the bigots, what would become of
the country? And of the Secretary of State and his deep policies? The
President must be pulled up short--brought to his senses--taught a
lesson or two.

Seward saw that new difficulties had arisen in the course of
that fateful March which those colleagues of his in the
Cabinet--well-meaning, inferior men, to be sure--had not the subtlety to
comprehend. Of course the matter of evacuation remained what it always
had been, the plain open road to an ultimate diplomatic triumph. Who
but a president out of the West, or a minor member of the Cabinet, would
fail to see that! But there were two other considerations which, also,
his well-meaning colleagues were failing to allow for. While all this
talk about the Virginia Unionists had been going on, while Washington
and Richmond had been trying to negotiate, neither really had any
control of its own game. They were card players with all the trumps out
of their hands. Montgomery, the Confederate Congress, held the trumps.
At any minute it could terminate all this make-believe of diplomatic
independence, both at Washington and at Richmond. A few cannon shots
aimed at Sumter, the cry for revenge in the North, the inevitable
protest against coercion in Virginia, the convention blown into the air,
and there you are--War!

And after all that, who knows what next? And yet, Blair and Chase
and the rest would not consent to slip Montgomery's trumps out of her
hands--the easiest thing in the world to do!--by throwing Sumter into
her lap and thus destroying the pretext for the cannon shots. More than
ever before, Seward would insist firmly on the evacuation of Sumter.

But there was the other consideration, the really new turn of events.
Suppose Sumter is evacuated; suppose Montgomery has lost her chance to
force Virginia into war by precipitating the issue of coercion, what
follows? All along Seward had advocated a national convention to
readjust all the matters "in dispute between the sections." But what
would such a convention discuss? In his inaugural, Lincoln had