n Canada with full and complete powers for peace,
and Mr. Sanders requests that you come on immediately to me at
Cataract House to have a private interview; or, if you will send
the President's protection for him and two friends, they will come
on and meet you. He says the whole matter can be consummated by
_me, you, them, and President Lincoln_.( 5)

Mr. Greeley was seemingly so impressed with this as an opening for
peace that he wrote a dictatorial letter to Mr. Lincoln reminding
him of the long continuance of the war; asserting the country was
dissatisfied with the manner in which it was conducted and averse
to further calls for troops; avowing that there was a widespread
conviction that the government did not desire peace; rebuking the
President for not having received Mr. Stephens the year before,
and prophesying that unless there were steps taken to show the
country that honest efforts were being made to secure an early
settlement of our difficulties the Union party would be defeated
at the impending Presidential election. Greeley suggested this
wholly impracticable and impossible plan of adjustment: (1) The
Union to be restored and declared perpetual; (2) slavery abolished;
(3) complete amnesty; (4) payment of $400,000,000 to slave States
for their slaves; (5) the slave States to have representation based
on their total population, and (6) a national convention to be
called at once. With a tirade on the condition of the country and
its credit and more warnings as to the coming election, Mr. Greeley
concluded by demanding that negotiations should be opened with the
persons at Niagara.

Mr. Lincoln, though without faith in either the parties in Canada
or Greeley's plan, wrote the latter, July 9th, saying:

"If you can find any persons, anywhere, professing to have any
proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing
the restoration of the Union, and abandonment of slavery, whatever
else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you, and that
if he really brings such proposition he shall at the least have
safe conduct with the paper (and without publicity if he chooses)
to the point where you shall have met him. The same if there be
two or more persons."

The President, thus prompt and frank, utterly surprised and
disconcerted Mr. Greeley. Mr. Lincoln had accepted two main points
in Greeley's plan--restoration of the Union and abandonment of
slavery, and waived all others for the time