“You are correct in saying, in your answer as garnishee, that I have been an active and decided friend of Peace.  In the early stages of the troubles, when the Southern Commissioners were in Washington, I devoted my time and influence and property, subscribing and paying in the outset five hundred dollars, to set on foot measures for preserving peace honorable to all parties.  The attack on Fort Sumter struck down all these efforts (so far as my associates were concerned), but I was not personally discouraged, and I again addressed myself to the work of the Peacemaker, determining to visit personally both sections of the country, the Government at Washington, and the Government of the Confederates at Richmond, to ascertain if there were, by possibility, any means of averting war.  And when, from physical inability and age, I was unable to undertake the duty personally, I defrayed from my own pocket the expenses of a friend in his performance of the same duties for me, who actually visited both Washington and Richmond and conferred with the Presidents and chiefs of each section on the subject.  True his efforts were unsuccessful, and so nothing remained for me but to retire to the quiet of my own study and watch the vicissitudes of the awful storm which I was powerless to avert, and descry the first signs of any clearing up, ready to take advantage of the earliest glimmerings of light through the clouds.”

He had no doubts as to the ultimate issue of the conflict, for, in a letter to his wife’s sister, Mrs. Goodrich, of May 2, 1862, he reduces it to mathematics:—­

“Sober men could calculate, and did calculate, the military issue, for it was a problem of mathematics and not at all of individual or comparative courage.  A force of equal quality is to be divided and the two parts to be set in opposition to each other.  If equally divided, they will be at rest; if one part equals 3 and the other 9, it does not require much knowledge of mathematics to decide which part will overcome the force of the other.

“Now this is the case here just now.  Two thirds of the physical and material force of the country are at the North, and on this account military success, other things being equal, must be on the side of the North.  Courage, justness of the cause, right, have nothing to do with it.  War in our days is a game of chess.  Two players being equal, if one begins the game with dispensing with a third of his best pieces, the other wins as a matter of course.”

He was firmly of the opinion that England and other European nations had fomented, if they had not originated, the bad feeling between the North and the South, and at times he gave way to the most gloomy forebodings, as in a letter of July 23, 1862, to Mr. Kendall, who shared his views on the main questions at issue:—­