Seward also gave trouble which he ought not to have given. On December 8 Lincoln wrote to him that he would nominate him as secretary of state. Mr. Seward assented and the matter remained thus comfortably settled until so late as March 2, 1861, when Seward wrote a brief note asking "leave to withdraw his consent." Apparently the Democratic complexion of the cabinet, and the suggestions of suspicious friends, made him fear that his influence in the ministry would be inferior to that of Chase. Coming at this eleventh hour, which already had its weighty burden of many anxieties, this brief destructive note was both embarrassing and exasperating. It meant the entire reconstruction of the cabinet. Never did Lincoln's tranquil indifference to personal provocation stand him in better stead than in this crisis,—for a crisis it was when Seward, in discontent and distrust, desired to draw aloof from the administration. He held the note of the recalcitrant politician for two days unanswered, then he wrote a few lines: "Your note," he said, "is the subject of the most painful solicitude with
me; and I feel constrained to beg that you will countermand the withdrawal. The public interest, I think, demands that you should; and my personal feelings are deeply enlisted in the same direction." These words set Mr. Seward right again; on March 5 he withdrew his letter of March 2, and in a few hours was appointed.
Immediately after the installation of the new government three commissioners from the Confederacy came to Washington, and requested an official audience. They said that seven States of the American Union had withdrawn therefrom, had reassumed sovereign power, and were now an independent nation in fact and in right; that, in order to adjust upon terms of amity and good-will all questions growing out of this political separation, they were instructed to make overtures for opening negotiations, with the assurance that the Confederate government earnestly desired a peaceful solution and would make no demand not founded in strictest justice, neither do any act to injure their late confederates. From the Confederate point of view these approaches were dignified and conciliatory; from the Northern point of view they were treasonable and insolent. Probably the best fruit which Mr. Davis hoped from them was that Mr. Seward, who was well known to be desirous of finding some peace-assuring middle course, might be led into a discussion of the situation, inevitably provoking divisions in the cabinet, in
the Republican party, and in the country. But though Seward's frame of mind about this time was such as to put him in great jeopardy of committing hurtful blunders, he was fortunate enough to escape quite doing so. To the agent of the commissioners he replied that he must "consult the President," and the next day he wrote, in terms of personal civility, that he could not receive them. Nevertheless they remained in Washington a few weeks longer, gathering and forwarding to the Confederate government such information as they could. In this they were aided by Judge Campbell of Alabama, a Secessionist, who still retained his seat upon the bench of the Supreme Court. This gentleman now became a messenger between the commissioners and Mr. Seward, with the purpose of eliciting news and even pledges from the latter for the use of the former. His errands especially related to Fort Sumter, and he gradually drew from Mr. Seward strong expressions of opinion that Sumter would in time be evacuated, even declarations substantially to the effect that this was the arranged policy of the government. Words which fell in so agreeably with the wishes of the judge and the commissioners were received with that warm welcome which often outruns correct construction, and later were construed by them as actual assurances, at least in substance, whereby they conceived themselves to have been "abused and overreached," and they charged the government with "equivocating conduct." In the second
week in April, contemporaneously with the Sumter crisis, they addressed to Mr. Seward a high-flown missive of reproach, in which they ostentatiously washed the hands of the South, as it were, and shook from their own departing feet the dust of the obdurate North, where they had not been met "in the conciliatory and peaceful spirit" in which they had come. They invoked "impartial history" to place the responsibility of blood and mourning upon those who had denied the great fundamental doctrine of American liberty; and they declared it "clear that Mr. Lincoln had determined to appeal to the sword to reduce the people of the Confederate States to the will of the section or party whose President he is." In this dust-cloud of glowing rhetoric vanished the last deceit of peaceful settlement.
About the same time, April 13, sundry commissioners from the Virginia convention waited upon Lincoln with the request that he would communicate the policy which he intended to pursue towards the Confederate States. Lincoln replied with a patient civility that cloaked satire: "Having at the beginning of my official term expressed my intended policy as plainly as I was able, it is with deep regret and some mortification I now learn that there is great and injurious uncertainty in the public mind as to what that policy is, and what course I intend to pursue." To this ratification of the plain position taken in his inaugural, he added that he might see fit to repossess himself
of the public property, and that possibly he might withdraw the mail service from the seceding States.
The inauguration of Mr. Lincoln was followed by a lull which endured for several weeks. A like repose reigned contemporaneously in the Confederate States. For a while the people in both sections received with content this reaction of quiescence. But as the same laws of human nature were operative equally at the North and at the South, it soon came about that both at the North and at the South there broke forth almost simultaneously strong manifestations of impatience. The genuine President at Washington and the sham President at Montgomery were assailed by the like pressing demand: Why did they not do something to settle this matter? Southern irascibility found the situation exceedingly trying. The imposing and dramatic attitude of the Confederate States had not achieved an appropriate result. They had organized a government and posed as an independent nation, but no power in the civilized world had yet recognized them in this character; on the contrary, Abraham Lincoln, living hard by in the White House, was explicitly denying it, contumaciously alleging himself to be their lawful ruler, and waiting with an exasperating patience to see what they were really going to do in the business which they had undertaken. They must make some move or they would become ridiculous, and their revolution would die and their confederacy
would dissolve from sheer inanition. The newspapers told their leaders this plainly; and a prominent gentleman of Alabama said to Mr. Davis: "Sir, unless you sprinkle blood in the face of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the Union in ten days." On the other hand, the people of the North were as energetic as the sons of the South were excitable, and with equal urgency they also demanded a conclusion. If the Union was to be enforced, why did not Mr. Lincoln enforce it? How long did he mean placidly to suffer treason and a rival government to rest undisturbed within the country?
With this state of feeling growing rapidly more intense in both sections, action was inevitable. Yet neither leader wished to act first, even for the important purpose of gratifying the popular will. As where two men are resolved to fight, yet have an uneasy vision of a judge and jury in waiting for them, each seeks to make the other the assailant and himself to be upon his defense, so these two rulers took prudent thought of the tribunal of public sentiment not in America alone but in Europe also, with perhaps a slight forward glance towards posterity. If Mr. Lincoln did not like to "invade" the Southern territory, Mr. Davis was equally reluctant to make the Southern "withdrawal" actively belligerent through operations of military offense. Both men were capable of statesmanlike waiting to score a point that was worth waiting for; Davis had been for years biding the