secede again if they felt aggrieved.  The invitation would in fact have been refused.  But, if it had been made and accepted, this would have been a worse surrender for the North than any mere acknowledgment that the South could not be reconquered; for national unity from that day to this would have existed on the sufferance of a factious or a foreign majority in any single State.  Lincoln had faced this.  He was there to restore the Union on a firm foundation.  He meant to insist to the point of pedantry that, by not so much as a word or line from the President or any one seeming to act for him, should the lawful right of secession even appear to be acknowledged.  Some men would have been glad to hang Jefferson Davis as a traitor, yet would have been ready to negotiate with him as with a foreign king.  Lincoln, who would not have hurt one hair of his head, and would have talked things over with Mr. Davis quite pleasantly, would have died rather than treat with him on the footing that he was head of an independent Confederacy.  The blood shed might have been shed for nothing if he had done so.  But to many men, in the long agony of the war and its disappointments, the plain position became much obscured.  The idea in various forms that by some sort of negotiation the issue could be evaded began to assert itself again and again.  The delusion was freely propagated that the South was ready to give in if only Lincoln would encourage its approaches.  It was sheer delusion.  Jefferson Davis said frankly to the last that the Confederacy would have “independence or extermination,” and though Stephens and many others spoke of peace to the electors in their own States, Jefferson Davis had his army with him, and the only result which agitation against him ever produced was that two months before the irreparable collapse the chief command under him was given to his most faithful servant Lee.  But it was useless for Lincoln to expose the delusion in the plainest terms; it survived exposure and became a danger to Northern unity.

Lincoln therefore took a strange course, which generally succeeded.  When honest men came to him and said that the South could be induced to yield, he proposed to them that they should go to Jefferson Davis and see for themselves.  The Chairman of the Republican organisation ultimately approached Lincoln on this matter at the request of a strong committee; but he was a sensible man whom Lincoln at once converted by drafting the precise message that would have to be sent to the Confederate President.  On two earlier occasions such labourers for peace were allowed to go across the lines and talk with Davis; it could be trusted to their honour to pretend to no authority; they had interesting talks with the great enemy, and made religious appeals to him or entertained him with wild proposals for a joint war on France over Mexico.  They returned, converted also.  But in July Horace Greeley, the great editor, who was too opinionated