d
hope, Greeley had persuaded himself that both North and South had lost
heart for the war; that there was needed only a moving appeal, and they
would throw down their arms and the millennium would come. Furthermore,
on the flimsiest sort of evidence, he had fallen into a trap designed
to place the Northern government in the attitude of suing for peace. He
wrote to Lincoln demanding that he send an agent to confer with certain
Confederate officials who were reported to be then in Canada; he also
suggested terms of peace.(4) Greeley's terms were entirely acceptable
to Lincoln; but he had no faith in the Canadian mare's nest. However,
he decided to give Greeley the utmost benefit of the doubt, and also
to teach him a lesson. He commissioned Greeley himself to proceed
to Canada, there to discover "if there is or is not anything in the
affair." He wrote to him, "I not only intend a sincere effort for peace,
but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made."(5)

Greeley, who did not want to have any responsibility for anything that
might ensue, whose joy was to storm and to find fault, accepted the duty
he could not well refuse, and set out in a bad humor.

Meanwhile two other men had conceived an undertaking somewhat analogous
but in a temper widely different. These were Colonel Jaquess, a
clergyman turned soldier, a man of high simplicity of character, and J.
R. Gilmore, a writer, known by the pen name of Edmund Kirke. Jaquess
had told Gilmore of information he had received from friends in the
Confederacy; he was convinced that nothing would induce the Confederate
government to consider any terms of peace that embraced reunion, whether
with or without emancipation. "It at once occurred to me," says Gilmore,
"that if this declaration could be got in such a manner that it could
be given to the public, it would, if scattered broadcast over the
North, destroy the peace-party and reelect Mr. Lincoln." Gilmore went
to Washington and obtained an interview with the President. He assured
him--and he was a newspaper correspondent whose experience was worth
considering--that the new pacifism, the incipient "peace party," was
schooling the country in the belief that an offer of liberal terms would
be followed by a Southern surrender. The masses wanted peace on any
terms that would preserve the Union; and the Democrats were going to
tell them in the next election that Lincoln could save the Union by
negotiation, if he