and forwarding to the Confederate government such information as they could.  In this they were aided by Judge Campbell of Alabama, a Secessionist, who still retained his seat upon the bench of the Supreme Court.  This gentleman now became a messenger between the commissioners and Mr. Seward, with the purpose of eliciting news and even pledges from the latter for the use of the former.  His errands especially related to Fort Sumter, and he gradually drew from Mr. Seward strong expressions of opinion that Sumter would in time be evacuated, even declarations substantially to the effect that this was the arranged policy of the government.  Words which fell in so agreeably with the wishes of the judge and the commissioners were received with that warm welcome which often outruns correct construction, and later were construed by them as actual assurances, at least in substance, whereby they conceived themselves to have been “abused and overreached,” and they charged the government with “equivocating conduct.”  In the second week in April, contemporaneously with the Sumter crisis, they addressed to Mr. Seward a high-flown missive of reproach, in which they ostentatiously washed the hands of the South, as it were, and shook from their own departing feet the dust of the obdurate North, where they had not been met “in the conciliatory and peaceful spirit” in which they had come.  They invoked “impartial history” to place the responsibility of blood and mourning upon those who had denied the great fundamental doctrine of American liberty; and they declared it “clear that Mr. Lincoln had determined to appeal to the sword to reduce the people of the Confederate States to the will of the section or party whose President he is.”  In this dust-cloud of glowing rhetoric vanished the last deceit of peaceful settlement.

About the same time, April 13, sundry commissioners from the Virginia convention waited upon Lincoln with the request that he would communicate the policy which he intended to pursue towards the Confederate States.  Lincoln replied with a patient civility that cloaked satire:  “Having at the beginning of my official term expressed my intended policy as plainly as I was able, it is with deep regret and some mortification I now learn that there is great and injurious uncertainty in the public mind as to what that policy is, and what course I intend to pursue.”  To this ratification of the plain position taken in his inaugural, he added that he might see fit to repossess himself of the public property, and that possibly he might withdraw the mail service from the seceding States.

The inauguration of Mr. Lincoln was followed by a lull which endured for several weeks.  A like repose reigned contemporaneously in the Confederate States.  For a while the people in both sections received with content this reaction of quiescence.  But as the same laws of human nature were operative equally at the North and at the South, it soon came about that both at the North and at the South there