Furthermore, if there was one fixed purpose in Seward, during March and early April, it was to avoid a domestic conflict; and the only way he could see to accomplish that was to side-track Montgomery’s expansive all-Southern policy.  Is it not fair, with so astute a politician as Seward, to demand in explanation of any of his moves ’he uncovering of some definite political force he was playing up to?  The old interpretation of the Thoughts offers no force to which they form a response.  Especially it is impossible to find in them any scheme to get around Montgomery.  But the old view looked upon the Virginia compromise with blind eyes.  That was no part of the mental prospect.  In accounting for Seward’s purposes it did not exist.  But the moment one’s eyes are opened to its significance, especially to the menace it had for the Montgomery program, is not the entire scene transformed?  Is not, under these new conditions, the purpose intimated in the text, the purpose to open a new field of exploitation to the Southern expansionists in order to reconcile them to the Virginia scheme, is not this at least plausible?  And it escapes making Seward a fool.

21.  Lincoln, VI, 23~237.

22.  Welles, 1,17.

23.  There is still lacking a complete unriddling of the three-cornered game of diplomacy played in America in March and April, 1861.  Of the three participants Richmond is the most fully revealed.  It was playing desperately for a compromise, any sort of compromise, that would save the one principle of state sovereignty.  For that, slavery would be sacrificed, or at least allowed to be put in jeopardy.  Munford, Virginia’s Attitude toward Slavery and Secession; Tyler, Letters and Times of the Tylers; Journal of the Virginia Convention of 1861.  However, practically no Virginian would put himself in the position of forcing any Southern State to abandon slavery against its will.  Hence the Virginia compromise dealt only with the expansion of slavery, would go no further than to give the North a veto on that expansion.  And its compensating requirement plainly would be a virtual demand for the acknowledgment of state sovereignty.

Precisely what passed between Richmond and Washington is still something of a mystery.  John Hay quotes Lincoln as saying that he twice offered to evacuate Sumter, once before and once after his inauguration, if the Virginians “would break up their convention without any row or nonsense.”  Hay Ms, I, 91; Thayer, I, 118-119.  From other sources we have knowledge of at least two conferences subsequent to the inauguration and probably three.  One of the conferences mentioned by Lincoln seems pretty well identified.  Coleman II, 337-338.  It was informal and may be set aside as having little if any historic significance.  When and to whom Lincoln’s second offer was made is not fully established.  Riddle in his Recollections says that he was present at an informal interview “with loyal delegates of the Virginia State Convention,”