wonted patience. But toward the close of June, Alexander H. Stephens,
Vice-President of the Confederacy, was seized with the notion that, if
he should go to Washington on a personal mission to Mr. Lincoln,
purporting to be about prisoners of war, he might then "indirectly ...
turn attention to a general adjustment." Accordingly he set forth on his
way to Fortress Monroe; but very inopportunely for his purposes it fell
out that the days of his journey were the very days in which General
Lee was getting so roughly worsted at Gettysburg. So it happened that it
was precisely on the day of the Southern retreat, July 4, that he
notified the admiral in Hampton Roads that he was the "bearer of a
communication in writing from Jefferson Davis, commander-in-chief of the
land and naval forces of the Confederate States, to Abraham Lincoln,
commander-in-chief of the land and naval forces of the United States;"
and he asked for leave to proceed to Washington. But his ingenious
phraseology was of no avail. Mr. Lincoln said: "The request of A.H.
Stephens is inadmissible. The customary agents and channels are adequate
for all needful communication and conference between the United States
forces and the insurgents." Thus the shrewd instinct of the Northerner
brought to naught a scheme conceived in the spirit of the old-time
Southern politics, a scheme which was certainly clever, but which,
without undue severity, may also be called a little artful and
insidious; for Mr. Stephens himself afterward confessed that it had, for
its ulterior purpose, "not so much to act upon Mr. Lincoln and the then
ruling authorities at Washington as through them, when the
correspondence should be published, upon the great mass of the people in
the Northern States." The notion, disseminated among the people, that
Mr. Lincoln would not listen to proposals for peace, would greatly help
malcontents of the Fernando Wood school.

It is necessary now to turn from the Eastern field of operations to the