About this time Mr. Lincoln sent a messenger to Richmond, inviting a distinguished member of the Union party to come immediately to Washington, and if he could not come himself, to send some other prominent Union man, as he wanted to see him on business of the first importance. The gentleman thus addressed, Mr. Summers, did not go, but sent another, Mr. J. B. Baldwin, who had distinguished himself by his zeal in the Union cause during the session of the convention; but this gentleman was slow in getting to Washington, and did not reach there for something like a week after the time he was expected. He reached Washington on Friday, the 5th of April, and, on calling on Mr. Lincoln, the following conversation in substance took place, as I learned from Mr. Lincoln himself. After expressing some regret that he had not come sooner, Mr. Lincoln said, "My object in desiring the presence of Mr. Summers, or some other influential and leading member of the Union party in your convention, was to submit a proposition by which I think the peace of the country can be preserved; but I fear you are almost too late. However, I will make it yet.
"This afternoon," he said, "a fleet is to sail from the harbor of New York for Charleston; your convention has been in session for nearly two months, and you have done nothing but hold and shake the rod over my head. You have just taken a vote, by which it appears you have a majority of two to one against secession. Now, so great is my desire to preserve the peace of the country, and to save the border states to the Union, that if you gentlemen of the Union party will adjourn without passing an ordinance of secession, I will telegraph at once to New York, arrest the sailing of the fleet, and take the responsibility of evacuating Fort Sumter!"
The proposition was declined. On the following Sunday night I was with Mr. Lincoln, and the greater part of the time alone, when Mr. Lincoln related the above facts to me. I inquired, "Well, Mr. Lincoln, what reply did Mr. Baldwin make?" "Oh," said he, throwing up his hands, "he wouldn't listen to it at all; scarcely treated me with civility; asked me what I meant by an adjournment; was it an adjournment sine die?" "Of course," said Mr. Lincoln, "I don't want you to adjourn, and, after I have evacuated the fort, meet again to adopt an ordinance of secession." I then said, "Mr. Lincoln, will you authorize me to make that proposition? For I will start to-morrow morning, and have a meeting of the Union men to-morrow night, who, I have no doubt, will gladly accept it." To which he replied, "It's too late, now; the fleet sailed on Friday evening."
In 1866, the Reconstruction Committee of Congress got an inkling of this interview between Lincoln and Baldwin, called Baldwin as a witness, and questioned him about it. He testified that he had an interview with the President at the date mentioned, but denied that Lincoln had offered to evacuate Fort Sumter if the Virginia Convention would adjourn sine die. Thereupon Botts collected and published a mass of collateral evidence to show that Baldwin had testified falsely.
Botts says in his book that he had confirmatory letters from Governor Peirpoint, General Millson, of Virginia, Dr. Stone, of Washington, Hon. Garrett Davis (Senator from Kentucky), Robert A. Gray, of Rockingham (brother-in-law to Baldwin), Campbell Tarr, of Wheeling, and three others, to whom Lincoln made the statement regarding his interview with Baldwin, in almost the same language in which he made it to Botts himself. Botts quotes from two letters written to him by John F. Lewis in 1866, in which the latter says that Baldwin acknowledged to him (Lewis) that Lincoln did offer to evacuate Fort Sumter on the condition named. There are persons now living to whom Lewis made the same statement, verbally.
There is another piece of evidence, supplied by Rev. R. L. Dabney in the Southern Historical Society Papers, in a communication entitled "Colonel Baldwin's Interview with Mr. Lincoln." This purports to give the writer's recollections of an interview with Baldwin in March, 1865, at Petersburg, while the siege of that place was going on. Baldwin said that Secretary Seward sent Allan B. Magruder as a messenger to Mr. Janney, president of the Virginia Convention, urging that one of the Union members come to Washington to confer with Lincoln. Baldwin was called out of the convention by Summers on the 3d of April to see Magruder, and the latter said that Seward had authorized him to say that Fort Sumter would be evacuated on Friday of the ensuing week. The gentlemen consulted urged Baldwin to go to Washington, and he consented and did go promptly. Seward accompanied him to the White House and Lincoln took him upstairs into his bedroom and locked the door. Lincoln "took a seat on the edge of the bed, spitting from time to time on the carpet." The two entered into a long dispute about the right of secession. Baldwin insisted that coercion would lead to war, in which case Virginia would join in behalf of the seceded states.
Lincoln's native good sense [the narrative proceeds], with Baldwin's evident sincerity, seemed now to open his eyes to the truth. He slid off the edge of the bed and began to stalk in his awkward manner across the chamber in great excitement and perplexity. He clutched his shaggy hair as though he would jerk out handfuls by the roots. He frowned and contorted his features, exclaiming, "I ought to have known this sooner; you are too late, sir, too late. Why did you not come here four days ago and tell me all this?" Colonel Baldwin replied: "Why, Mr. President, you did not ask our advice."
The foregoing narrative involves the supposition that Lincoln, in the midst of preparations for sending a fleet to Fort Sumter, dispatched a messenger to Richmond to bring a man to Washington to discuss with him the abstract question of the right of a state to secede, and that, having procured the presence of such a person, he took him into a bedroom, locked the door, and had the debate with him, taking care that nobody else should hear a syllable of it. Not a word about Fort Sumter, although Magruder, the messenger, had said that it would be evacuated on the following Friday! Yet the Rev. Mr. Dabney did not see the incongruity of the situation.
Nicolay and Hay say that Lincoln did not make any offer to Baldwin to evacuate Sumter, but did tell him what he had intended to say to Summers, if the latter had come to Washington at the right time.[53]
Douglas in combating the Rebels, in contrast to the futile diplomacy of Seward:
A marvelous incident is related in Welles's Diary immediately after his narrative of the Harvey affair. It describes the activity and earnestness of Stephen A.