and that the authority of the Confederacy was gone.  They beset Jefferson Davis with demands that he should start negotiations.  But none of them had determined what price they would pay for peace; and there was not among them any will that could really withstand their President.  In one point indeed Jefferson Davis did wisely yield.  On February 9, 1865, he consented to make Lee General-in-Chief of all the Southern armies.  This belated delegation of larger authority to Lee had certain military results, but no political result whatever.  Lee could have been the dictator of the Confederacy if he had chosen, and no one then or since would have blamed him; but it was not in his mind to do anything but his duty as a soldier.  The best beloved and most memorable by far of all the men who served that lost cause, he had done nothing to bring about secession at the beginning, nor now did he do anything but conform to the wishes of his political chief.  As for that chief, Lincoln had interpreted Davis’ simple position quite rightly.  Having once embraced the cause of Southern independence and taken the oath as chief magistrate of an independent Confederacy, he would not yield up that cause while there was a man to obey his orders.  Whether this attitude should be set down, as it usually has been set down, to a diseased pride or to a very real heroism on his part, he never faced the truth that the situation was desperate and the spirit of his people daunted at last.  But it is probable that just like Lincoln he was ready that those who were in haste to make peace should see what peace involved; and it is probable too that, in his terrible position, he deluded himself with some vague and vain hopes as to the attitude of the North.  Lincoln on the other hand would not enter into any proceedings in which the secession of the South was treated otherwise than as a rebellion which must cease; but this did not absolutely compel him to refuse every sort of informal communication with influential men in the South, which might help them to see where they stood and from which he too might learn something.

Old Mr. Francis Blair, the father of Lincoln’s late Postmaster-General, was the last of the honest peace-makers whom Lincoln had allowed to see things for themselves by meeting Jefferson Davis.  His visit took place in January, 1865, and from his determination to be a go-between and the curious and difficult position in which Lincoln and Davis both stood in this respect an odd result arose.  The Confederate Vice-President Stephens, who had preached peace in the autumn without a quarrel with Davis, and two other Southern leaders presented themselves at Grant’s headquarters with the pathetic misrepresentation that they were sent by Davis on a mission which Lincoln had undertaken to receive.  What they could show was authority from Davis to negotiate with Lincoln on the footing of the independence of the Confederacy, and a politely turned intimation from Lincoln that he would at any