“Again, my dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape.  He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war.  As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely.  If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so south of the river, when you can take with you very few more than two thirds of the force you then had in hand?  It would be unreasonable to expect, and I do not expect [that] you can now effect much.  Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.

“I beg you will not consider this a prosecution or persecution of yourself.  As you had learned that I was dissatisfied, I have thought it best to kindly tell you why.”

* * * * *

There was an odd coincidence during this momentous first week in July.  During the preceding winter Mr. Lincoln had been exceedingly bothered by certain Democrats, notably that gentleman of unsavory repute, Fernando Wood, who had urged upon him all sorts of foolish schemes for “compromising” or “settling the difficulties,”—­phrases which were euphemisms of the peace Democracy to disguise a concession of success to the South.  The President endured these sterile suggestions with his wonted patience.  But toward the close of June, Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, was seized with the notion that, if he should go to Washington on a personal mission to Mr. Lincoln, purporting to be about prisoners of war, he might then “indirectly ... turn attention to a general adjustment.”  Accordingly he set forth on his way to Fortress Monroe; but very inopportunely for his purposes it fell out that the days of his journey were the very days in which General Lee was getting so roughly worsted at Gettysburg.  So it happened that it was precisely on the day of the Southern retreat, July 4, that he notified the admiral in Hampton Roads that he was the “bearer of a communication in writing from Jefferson Davis, commander-in-chief of the land and naval forces of the Confederate States, to Abraham Lincoln, commander-in-chief of the land and naval forces of the United States;” and he asked for leave to proceed to Washington.  But his ingenious phraseology was of no avail.  Mr. Lincoln said:  “The request of A.H.  Stephens is inadmissible.  The customary agents and channels are adequate for all needful communication and conference between the United States forces and the insurgents.”  Thus the shrewd instinct of the Northerner brought to naught a scheme conceived in the spirit of the old-time Southern politics, a scheme which was certainly clever, but which, without undue severity, may also be called a little artful and insidious; for Mr. Stephens himself afterward confessed that it had, for its ulterior purpose, “not so much to act upon Mr. Lincoln and the then ruling authorities at Washington as through them, when the correspondence should be published, upon the great mass of the people in the Northern States.”  The notion, disseminated among the people, that Mr. Lincoln would not listen to proposals for peace, would greatly help malcontents of the Fernando Wood school.