The Secretary of State was unable, therefore, to comply with the
request of Messrs. Forsythe and Crawford, and declined to appoint
a day on which they might submit the objects of their visit to the
President of the United States. He refused to recognize them as
diplomatic agents, and would not hold correspondence or further
communication with them. Lest the Commissioners might console
themselves with the reflection that Mr. Seward was speaking only
for himself, and that the President might deal with them less
curtly, he informed them that he had cheerfully submitted his answer
to Mr. Lincoln, who coincided in the views it expressed, and
sanctioned the Secretary's decision declining official intercourse
with Messrs. Forsythe and Crawford. The rejoinder of the Confederate
Commissioners to Mr. Seward was in a threatening tone, upbraiding
him with bad faith, and advising him that "Fort Sumter cannot be
provisioned without the effusion of blood;" reminding him also that
they had not come to Washington to ask the Government of the United
States to recognize the independence of the Confederacy, but for
an "adjustment of new relations springing from a manifest and
accomplished revolution."

Up to this time there had not been the slightest collision between
the forces of the Confederacy and the forces of the Union. The
places which had been seized, belonging to the Federal Government,
had been taken without resistance; and the authorities of Montgomery
appeared to a great many Southern people to be going through blank
motions, and to be aping power rather than exercising it. Their
defiant attitude had been demoralizing to the public sentiment in
the North, but their failure to accomplish any thing in the way of
concession from the National Government, and their apparent timidity
in refraining from a shock of arms, was weakening the Disunion
sentiment in the States which composed the Confederacy. Jefferson
Davis had been inaugurated with great pomp and pretension in
February, and now April had been reached with practically nothing
done but the issuing of manifestoes, and the maintenance of a mere
shadow of government, without its substance. The Confederates had
as yet no revenue system and no money. They had no armed force
except some military companies in the larger cities, organized long
before secession was contemplated. They had not the pretense of
a navy, or any power apparently to create one. While the adminis