The substantial accuracy of Mr. Blair’s report is confirmed by the memorandum of the same interview which Jefferson Davis wrote at the time.  In this conversation, the rebel leader took little pains to disguise his entire willingness to enter upon the wild scheme of military conquest and annexation which could easily be read between the lines of a political crusade to rescue the Monroe Doctrine from its present peril.  If Mr. Blair felt elated at having so quickly made a convert of the Confederate President, he was further gratified at discovering yet more favorable symptoms in his official surroundings at Richmond.  In the three or four days he spent at the rebel capital he found nearly every prominent personage convinced of the hopeless condition of the rebellion, and even eager to seize upon any contrivance to help them out of their direful prospects.

But the government councils at Washington were not ruled by the spirit of political adventure.  Abraham Lincoln had a loftier conception of patriotic duty, and a higher ideal of national ethics.  His whole interest in Mr. Blair’s mission lay in the rebel despondency it disclosed, and the possibility it showed of bringing the Confederates to an abandonment of their resistance.  Mr. Davis had, indeed, given Mr. Blair a letter, to be shown to President Lincoln, stating his willingness, “notwithstanding the rejection of our former offers,” to appoint a commissioner to enter into negotiations “with a view to secure peace to the two countries.”  This was, of course, the old impossible attitude.  In reply the President wrote Mr. Blair on January 18 the following note: 

“SIR:  You having shown me Mr. Davis’s letter to you of the twelfth instant, you may say to him that I have constantly been, am now, and shall continue ready to receive any agent whom he, or any other influential person now resisting the national authority, may informally send to me, with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.”

With this, Mr. Blair returned to Richmond, giving Mr. Davis such excuses as he could hastily frame why the President had rejected his plan for a joint invasion of Mexico.  Jefferson Davis therefore had only two alternatives before him—­either to repeat his stubborn ultimatum of separation and independence, or frankly to accept Lincoln’s ultimatum of reunion.  The principal Richmond authorities knew, and some of them admitted, that their Confederacy was nearly in collapse.  Lee sent a despatch saying he had not two days’ rations for his army.  Richmond was already in a panic at rumors of evacuation.  Flour was selling at a thousand dollars a barrel in Confederate currency.  The recent fall of Fort Fisher had closed the last avenue through which blockade-runners could bring in foreign supplies.  Governor Brown of Georgia was refusing to obey orders from Richmond, and characterizing them as “despotic.”  Under such circumstances a defiant cry of independence would not reassure anybody; nor, on the other hand, was it longer possible to remain silent.  Mr. Blair’s first visit had created general interest; when he came a second time, wonder and rumor rose to fever heat.