a peace.  Mr. Greeley urged, in his over-fervid letter of transmittal, that the President make overtures on the following plan of adjustment:  First.  The Union to be restored and declared perpetual.  Second.  Slavery to be utterly and forever abolished.  Third.  A complete amnesty for all political offenses.  Fourth.  Payment of four hundred million dollars to the slave States, pro rata, for their slaves.  Fifth.  Slave States to be represented in proportion to their total population.  Sixth.  A national convention to be called at once.

Though Mr. Lincoln had no faith in Jewett’s story, and doubted whether the embassy had any existence, he determined to take immediate action on this proposition.  He felt the unreasonableness and injustice of Mr. Greeley’s letter, which in effect charged his administration with a cruel disinclination to treat with the rebels, and resolved to convince him at least, and perhaps others, that there was no foundation for these reproaches.  So he arranged that the witness of his willingness to listen to any overtures that might come from the South should be Mr. Greeley himself, and answering his letter at once on July 9, said: 

“If you can find any person, 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.”

This ready acquiescence evidently surprised and somewhat embarrassed Mr. Greeley, who replied by several letters of different dates, but made no motion to produce his commissioners.  At last, on the fifteenth, to end a correspondence which promised to be indefinitely prolonged, the President telegraphed him:  “I was not expecting you to send me a letter, but to bring me a man or men.”  Mr. Greeley then went to Niagara, and wrote from there to the alleged commissioners, Clement C. Clay and James P. Holcombe, offering to conduct them to Washington, but neglecting to mention the two conditions—­restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery—­laid down in Mr. Lincoln’s note of the ninth and repeated by him on the fifteenth.  Even with this great advantage, Clay and Holcombe felt themselves too devoid of credentials to accept Mr. Greeley’s offer, but replied that they could easily get credentials, or that other agents could be accredited, if they could be sent to Richmond armed with “the circumstances disclosed in this correspondence.”