Secretary Seward, with the President's sanction, declined official intercourse with Messrs. Forsyth and Crawford, in a "Memorandum" (March 15th) reciting their request, etc., in which, after referring to President Lincoln's Inaugural Address—forwarded to them with the "Memorandum" he says: "A simple reference will be sufficient to satisfy those gentlemen that the Secretary of State, guided by the principles therein announced, is prevented altogether from admitting or assuming that the States referred to by them have, in law or in fact, withdrawn from the Federal Union, or that they could do so in the manner described by Messrs. Forsyth and Crawford, or in any other manner than with the consent and concert of the People of the United States, to be given through a National Convention, to be assembled in conformity with the provisions of the Constitution of the United States. Of course, the Secretary of State cannot act upon the assumption, or in any way admit, that the so-called Confederate States constitute a Foreign Power, with whom diplomatic relations ought to be established."
On the 9th of April, Messrs. Forsyth, Crawford and Roman—as "Commissioners of the Southern Confederacy"—addressed to Secretary Seward a reply to the "Memorandum" aforesaid, in which the following passage occurs:
"The undersigned, like the Secretary of State, have no purpose to 'invite or engage in discussion' of the subject on which their two Governments are so irreconcilably at variance. It is this variance that has broken up the old Union, the disintegration of which has only begun.
"It is proper, however, to advise you that it were well to dismiss the hopes you seem to entertain that, by any of the modes indicated, the people of the Confederate States will ever be brought to submit to the authority of the Government of the United States. You are dealing with delusions, too, when you seek to separate our people from our Government, and to characterize the deliberate, Sovereign act of that people as a 'perversion of a temporary and partisan excitement.' If you cherish these dreams, you will be awakened from them, and find them as unreal and unsubstantial as others in which you have recently indulged.
"The undersigned would omit the performance of an obvious duty were they to fail to make known to the Government of the United States that the people of the Confederate States have declared their independence with a full knowledge of all the responsibilities of that act, and with as firm a determination to maintain it by all the means with which nature has endowed them as that which sustained their fathers when they threw off the authority of the British Crown.
"The undersigned clearly understand that you have declined to appoint a day to enable them to lay the objects of the mission with which they are charged, before the President of the United States, because so to do would be to recognize the independence and separate nationality of the Confederate States. This is the vein of thought that pervades the memorandum before us.
"The truth of history requires that it should distinctly appear upon the record, that the undersigned did not ask the Government of the United States to recognize the independence of the Confederate States. They only asked audience to adjust, in a spirit of amity and peace, the new relations springing from a manifest and accomplished revolution in the Government of the late Federal Union.
"Your refusal to entertain these overtures for a peaceful solution, the active naval and military preparation of this Government, and a formal notice to the Commanding General of the Confederate forces in the harbor of Charleston that the President intends to provision Fort Sumter by forcible means, if necessary, are viewed by the undersigned, and can only be received by the World, as a Declaration of War against the Confederate States; for the President of the United States knows that Fort Sumter cannot be provisioned without the effusion of blood.
"The undersigned, in behalf of their Government and people, accept the gage of battle thus thrown down to them, and, appealing to God and the judgment of mankind for the righteousness of their Cause, the people of the Confederate States will defend their liberties to the last, against this flagrant and open attempt at their subjugation to Sectional power."
Let us now, for a moment, glance at the condition of Fort Sumter, and of the Government with regard to it: