ive system in the South. In the same spirit of
statesmanlike compromise, President Davis was careful to fill the
Cabinet and other important posts with men who represented all phases of
opinion, with former rivals and even decided opponents of the cause he
represented. So cautious and considered was this program of the new
administration that ardent secessionists declared before the fall of
Fort Sumter that a reunion with the older Federal Government was the
object. And the mild and conciliatory attitude of William H. Seward, who
was considered as a sort of acting president during the winter of
1860-61, strengthened this feeling in the South. The Southern
commissioners whom Davis sent to Washington to negotiate with the
Federal Government on the subjects of boundaries between the two
countries, the division of the public debt, and the surrender of forts
within Confederate territory were great favorites in the old national
capital. A friendly attitude toward the new South still further found
expression in the New York _Tribune_, supposed to speak for Republicans
in general, in the Albany _Journal_, Thurlow Weed's paper, and even in
the New York _Times_, Seward's organ.

In fact the people of the North preferred a permanent disruption of the
Union to a great war, the inevitable alternative. Nationalist sentiment
was strong in the North, but not strong enough to make men positive and
decided in their actions. President-elect Lincoln expressed this state
of the public mind in his inaugural, when he said that he would
faithfully execute the laws unless the people, his rightful masters,
should refuse their support, and he showed it still more clearly when he
adopted the policy of delay in determining the status of Fort Sumter
which his predecessor had so long followed. The Cabinet of Buchanan had
been undecided, that of Lincoln was for a whole month equally undecided.
Men hoped to avoid what all feared, civil war; and it is to the credit
of both sections and both cabinets that they hesitated to commit the
overt act which was to set free the "dogs of war"; and while public
opinion was thus halted at the parting of the ways, Virginia, still
thought of as the great old commonwealth and mother of statesmen, called
a peace congress of North and South. Delegates from twenty-one States
conferred together in Washington for six weeks, seeking a way out of the
difficult and perilous situation. Conservative members of Congress, John
J.