Greeley, who did not want to have any responsibility for anything that might ensue, whose joy was to storm and to find fault, accepted the duty he could not well refuse, and set out in a bad humor.

Meanwhile two other men had conceived an undertaking somewhat analogous but in a temper widely different.  These were Colonel Jaquess, a clergyman turned soldier, a man of high simplicity of character, and J. R. Gilmore, a writer, known by the pen name of Edmund Kirke.  Jaquess had told Gilmore of information he had received from friends in the Confederacy; he was convinced that nothing would induce the Confederate government to consider any terms of peace that embraced reunion, whether with or without emancipation.  “It at once occurred to me,” says Gilmore, “that if this declaration could be got in such a manner that it could be given to the public, it would, if scattered broadcast over the North, destroy the peace-party and reelect Mr. Lincoln.”  Gilmore went to Washington and obtained an interview with the President.  He assured him—­and he was a newspaper correspondent whose experience was worth considering—­that the new pacifism, the incipient “peace party,” was schooling the country in the belief that an offer of liberal terms would be followed by a Southern surrender.  The masses wanted peace on any terms that would preserve the Union; and the Democrats were going to tell them in the next election that Lincoln could save the Union by negotiation, if he would.  Unless the popular mind were disabused of this fictitious hope, the Democrats would prevail and the Union would collapse.  But if an offer to negotiate should be made, and if “Davis should refuse to negotiate—­as he probably would, except on the basis of Southern independence—­that fact alone would reunite the North, reelect Lincoln, and thus save the Union."(6)

“Then,” said Lincoln, “you would fight the devil with fire.  You would get that declaration from Davis and use it against him.”

Gilmore defended himself by proposing to offer extremely liberal terms.  There was a pause in the conversation.  Lincoln who was seated at his desk “leaned slightly forward looking directly into (Gilmore’s) eyes, but with an absent, far-away gaze as if unconscious of (his) presence.”  Suddenly, relapsing into his usual badinage, he said, “God selects His own instruments and some times they are queer ones:  for instance, He chose me to see the ship of state through a great crisis."(7) He went on to say that Gilmore and Jaquess might be the very men to serve a great purpose at this moment.  Gilmore knew the world; and anybody could see at a glance that Jaquess never told anything that wasn’t true.  If they would go to Richmond on their own responsibility, make it plain to President Davis that they were not official agents, even taking the chance of arrest and imprisonment, they might go.  This condition was accepted.  Lincoln went on to say that no advantage should be taken of Mr. Davis; that nothing should be proposed which if accepted would not be made good.  After considerable further discussion he drew up a memorandum of the terms upon which he would consent to peace.  There were seven items: