You say in your letter: “I shall write my reply next week, I should have done it sooner, but it seemed best to wait till it should be reasonably certain that I am not to be compelled to decline. I now see my way clear.”
When I wrote to you on former occasions, I did not believe that you would consider the contingency of being compelled to decline at all. Had I thought so, I should have said something on that subject. I do not know under what circumstances you would have felt yourself compelled to decline, but in the same spirit of frankness which dictated my former letters, I would now observe that I do not see your way clearer to-day than it was ten days ago. I speak from the point of observation which I occupy.
You are evidently strong in the South. That was to be expected. But the South is not the battlefield of this campaign. You would probably on a fair vote carry all the Southern States but two, South Carolina and Mississippi. But if the election should depend upon the Southern vote, it would not be difficult for the managers of the other side to create disturbance in the South here and there, and to have the vote of a couple of Southern States thrown out on some pretext. What then would follow, nobody can tell. The result of the election must, therefore, not depend on the South.
In the North the campaign has been comparatively dead. There have been but few ratification meetings and the speeches delivered on such occasions have furnished little, if anything, to make an impression upon the popular mind. The progress which seems to have been made is only apparent. Some men and some papers, which immediately after the Cincinnati Convention spoke of nothing but disappointment, have since given in their adhesion, but we see there only some of the ground which was lost, regained, but no positive gain made, nor by any
