This, of course, meant that Mr. Lincoln should take the initiative in suing the Richmond authorities for peace on terms proposed by them.  The essential impossibility of these terms was not, however, apparent to Mr. Greeley, who sent them on to Washington, soliciting fresh instructions.  With unwearied patience, Mr. Lincoln drew up a final paper, “To Whom it may Concern,” formally restating his position, and despatched Major Hay with it to Niagara.  This ended the conference; the Confederates charging the President through the newspapers with a “sudden and entire change of views”; while Mr. Greeley, being attacked by his colleagues of the press for his action, could defend himself only by implied censure of the President, utterly overlooking the fact that his own original letter had contained the identical propositions Mr. Lincoln insisted upon.

The discussion grew so warm that both he and his assailants at last joined in a request to Mr. Lincoln to permit the publication of the correspondence.  This was, of course, an excellent opportunity for the President to vindicate his own proceeding.  But he rarely looked at such matters from the point of view of personal advantage, and he feared that the passionate, almost despairing appeals of the most prominent Republican editor of the North for peace at any cost, disclosed in the correspondence, would deepen the gloom in the public mind and have an injurious effect upon the Union cause.  The spectacle of the veteran journalist, who was justly regarded as the leading controversial writer on the antislavery side, ready to sacrifice everything for peace, and frantically denouncing the government for refusing to surrender the contest, would have been, in its effect upon public opinion, a disaster equal to the loss of a great battle.  He therefore proposed to Mr. Greeley, in case the letters were published, to omit some of the most vehement passages; and took Mr. Greeley’s refusal to assent to this as a veto on their publication.

It was characteristic of him that, seeing the temper in which Mr. Greeley regarded the transaction, he dropped the matter and submitted in silence to the misrepresentations to which he was subjected by reason of it.  Some thought he erred in giving any hearing to the rebels; some criticized his choice of a commissioner; and the opposition naturally made the most of his conditions of negotiation, and accused him of embarking in a war of extermination in the interests of the negro.  Though making no public effort to set himself right, he was keenly alive to their attitude.  To a friend he wrote: 

“Saying reunion and abandonment of slavery would be considered, if offered, is not saying that nothing else or less would be considered, if offered....  Allow me to remind you that no one, having control of the rebel armies, or, in fact, having any influence whatever in the rebellion, has offered, or intimated, a willingness to a restoration of the Union, in any event, or on any condition whatever....  If Jefferson Davis wishes for himself, or for the benefit of his friends at the North, to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and reunion, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.”