specific line of conduct. What was it that kept him wavering at this
eleventh hour? Again, that impenetrable taciturnity which always
shrouded his progress toward a conclusion, forbids dogmatic assertion.
But two things are obvious: his position as a minority president, of
which he was perhaps unduly conscious, caused him to delay, and to delay
again and again, seeking definite evidence how much support he could
command in the North; the change in his comprehension of the problem
before him-his perception that it was not an "artificial crisis"
involving slavery alone, but an irreconcilable clash of social-political
idealism--this disturbed his spirit, distressed, even appalled him.
Having a truer insight into human nature than Seward had, he saw that
here was an issue immeasurably less susceptible of compromise than was
slavery. Whether, the moment he perceived this, he at once lost hope of
any peaceable solution, we do not know. Just what he thought about the
Virginia Compromise is still to seek. However, the nature of his mind,
the way it went straight to the human element in a problem once his eyes
were opened to the problem's reality, forbid us to conclude that he
took hope from Virginia. He now saw what, had it not been for his near
horizon, he would have seen so long before, that, in vulgar parlance, he
had been "barking up the wrong tree." Now that he had located the right
tree, had the knowledge come too late?

It is known that Seward, possibly at Lincoln's request, made an attempt
to bring together the Virginia Unionists and the Administration. He sent
a special representative to Richmond urging the despatch of a committee
to confer with the President.

The strength of the party in the Convention was shown on April fourth
when a proposed Ordinance of Secession was voted down, eighty-nine to
forty-five. On the same day, the Convention by a still larger majority
formally denied the right of the Federal government to coerce a State.
Two days later, John B. Baldwin, representing the Virginia Unionists,
had a confidential talk with Lincoln. Only fragments of their talk,
drawn forth out of memory long afterward--some of the reporting being
at second hand, the recollections of the recollections of the
participants--are known to exist. The one fact clearly discernible is
that Baldwin stated fully the Virginia position: that her Unionists
were not nationalists; that the coercion of any State, by impugning
the sovereig