to be quite honest, was somehow convinced that Southern agents at Niagara, who had really come to hold intercourse with the disloyal group among the Democrats, were “two ambassadors” from the Confederacy seeking an audience of Lincoln.  He wrote to Lincoln, begging him to receive them.  Lincoln caused Greeley to go to Niagara and see the supposed ambassadors himself.  He gave him written authority to bring to him any person with proper credentials, provided, as he made plain in terms that perhaps were blunt, that the basis of any negotiation should include the recognition of the Union and the abolition of slavery.  The persons whom Greeley saw had no authority to treat about anything.  Greeley in his irritation now urged Lincoln to convey to Jefferson Davis through these mysterious men his readiness to receive them if they were accredited.  In other words, the North was to begin suing for peace—­a thing clearly unwise, which Lincoln refused.  Greeley now involved Lincoln in a tangled controversy to which he gave such a turn that, unless Lincoln would publish the most passionately pacific of Greeley’s letters, to the great discouragement of the public with whom Greeley counted, he must himself keep silent on what had passed.  He elected to keep silent while Greeley in his paper criticised him as the person responsible for the continuance of senseless bloodshed.  This was publicly harmful; and, as for its private bearing, the reputation of obstinate blood-thirstiness was certain to be painful to Lincoln.

The history of Lincoln’s Cabinet has a bearing upon what is to follow.  He ruled his Ministers with undisputed authority, talked with them collectively upon the easiest terms, spoke to them as a headmaster to his school when they caballed against one another, kept them in some sort of unison in a manner which astonished all who knew them.  Cameron had had to retire early; so did the little-known Caleb Smith, who was succeeded in his unimportant office as Secretary of the Interior by a Mr. Usher, who seems to have been well chosen.  Bates, the Attorney-General, retired, weary of his work, towards the end of 1864, and Lincoln had the keen pleasure of appointing James Speed, the brother of that unforgotten and greatly honoured friend whom he honoured the more for his contentedness with private station.  James Speed himself was in Lincoln’s opinion “an honest man and a gentleman, and one of those well-poised men, not too common here, who are not spoiled by a big office.”

Blair might be regarded as a delightful, or equally as an intolerable man.  He attacked all manner of people causelessly and violently, and earned implacable dislike from the Radicals In his party.  Then he frankly asked Lincoln to dismiss him whenever it was convenient.  There came a time when Lincoln’s re-election was in great peril, and he might, it was urged, have made it sure by dismissing Blair.  It is significant that Lincoln then refused to promote