dience of the Rebel leader; and as such a disclosure may relieve me, in the minds of candid men, from some of the aspersions cast upon my motives by Rebel sympathizers, I willingly make it. In making it, however, I wish to be understood as speaking only for myself. My companion, Colonel Jaquess, while he fully shared in my motives, and rightly estimated the objects I sought to accomplish, had other, and, it may be, higher aims. And I wish also to say, that to him attaches whatever credit is due to any one for the conception and execution of this "mission." While I love my country as well as any man, and in this enterprise cheerfully perilled my life to serve it, I was only his co-worker: I should not have undertaken it alone.
No reader of this magazine is so young as not to remember, that, between the first of June and the first of August last, a Peace simoom swept over the country, throwing dust into the people's eyes, and threatening to bury the nation in disunion. All at once the North grew tired of the war. It began to count the money and the blood it had cost, and to overlook the great principles for which it was waged. Men of all shades of political opinion—radical Republicans, as well as honest Democrats—cried out for concession, compromise, armistice,—for anything to end the war,—anything but disunion. To that the North would not consent, and peace I knew could not be had without it, I knew that, because on the sixteenth of June, Jeff. Davis had said to a prominent Southerner that he would negotiate only on the basis of Southern Independence, and that declaration had come to me only five days after it was made.
The people, therefore, were under a delusion. They were crying out for peace when there was no peace,—when there could be no peace consistent with the interest and security of the country. The result of this delusion, were it not dispelled, would be that the Chicago Convention, or some other convention, would nominate a man pledged to peace, but willing to concede Southern independence, and on that tide of popular frenzy he would sail into the Presidency. Then the deluded people would learn, too late, that peace meant only disunion. They would learn it too late, because power would then be in the hands of a Peace Congress and a Peace President, and it required no spirit of prophecy to predict what such an Administration would do. It would make peace on the best terms it could get; and the best terms it could get were Disunion and Southern Independence.
The Peace epidemic could be stayed, and the consequent danger to the country averted, it seemed to me, only by securing in a tangible form, and before a trustworthy witness, the ultimatum of the Rebel President. That ultimatum, spread far and wide, would convince every honest Northern man that war was the only road to lasting peace.
To get that ultimatum, and to give it to the four winds of heaven, were my real objects in going to Richmond.
I did not shut my eyes to the possibility of our paving the way for negotiations that might end in peace, nor my ears to the blessings a grateful nation would shower on us, if our visit had such a result; but I did not expect these things. I expected to be smeared from head to foot with Copperhead slime, to be called a knight-errant, a seeker after notoriety, an abortive negotiator, and a meddlesome volunteer diplomatist; but I expected also, if a good Providence spared our lives, and my pen did not forget the English language, to be able to tell the North the truth; and I knew that the Truth would stay the Peace epidemic, and kill the Peace party. And by the blessing of God, and the help of the Devil, it did do that. The Devil helped, for he inspired Mr. Benjamin's circular, and that forced home the bolt we had driven, and shivered the Peace party into a million of fragments, every fragment now a good War man until the old flag shall float again all over the country.
