incoln, as requested, for a conference. He wrote the President
on the 8th and again on the 9th of August, 1864, abusing certain
Cabinet officers, reiterating his reproaches of Mr. Lincoln for
not receiving Mr. Stephens, censuring him for not sending, after
Vicksburg, a deputation to Richmond to ask for peace, complaining
to him for not sending the "three biggest" Democrats in Congress to
sue for peace, saying, however, little of his Niagara Falls fiasco,
but adding: "Do not let the month pass without an earnest effort
for peace," and closing his last letter thus:

"I beg you, implore you, to inaugurate or invite proposals for
peace forthwith. And in case peace cannot now be made, consent to
an _armistice for one year_, each party to retain, unmolested, all
it now holds, but the rebel ports to be opened. Meantime, let a
national convention be held, and there will surely be no more war
at all events."

This suggestion of an armistice for one year and the opening of
the rebel ports, was equivalent to proposing to give one year for
the Confederacy to recuperate at home and from abroad; to strengthen
its credit, to arrange new combinations, and to tie the hands of
its friends of the Union and the Administration, to say nothing of
the confession of failure to suppress the insurrection.

While Mr. Greeley was a Union man and had, throughout his public
life, opposed slavery, he had no faith in war, nor did he have any
of the instincts of a soldier to enable him to discern its tendencies.
He was personally friendly, it may be assumed, to the President,
but hostile to Mr. Seward, Secretary of State, and probably intensely
jealous of all the distinguished generals of the army. Greeley
had long been, through the _Tribune_, a recognized factor in moulding
public opinion, and now that war had come to absorb all other
interests, his power and influence through the press had waned.
He was wholly impracticable in executive matters. His failure to
inaugurate a peace and to attain prominence in administrative
affairs during the war embittered him through life towards his old-
time party friends.

A review of Mr. Lincoln's course relating to Mr. Greeley's attempts
to negotiate a peace shows the former acted with the utmost candor,
and submitted, for the time, to the latter's dictatorial course
and the unjust charge of wavering and acting in bad faith, rather
then crush his old friend or endanger the general cause for selfish
gl