Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume Two).djvu/78

Rh charge that Mr. Seward gave a promise that Sumter would be abandoned, may or it may not have been true, but there can be no ground for doubting the statement made by Mr. Botts in regard to the terms tendered by Mr. Lincoln, and which were rejected by Mr. Baldwin.

Mr. Baldwin admitted the interview with Mr. Lincoln, and the nature of it as herein given, to Mr. John F. Lewis, who was a Union man and a member of the convention that adopted the Ordinance of Secession by a vote of eighty- eight to fifty-five.

Of the three witnesses, Baldwin, Botts and Lewis, Mr. Baldwin was the first witness who was examined by the Committee on Reconstruction. At that time the committee had no knowledge of the conversation between Mr. Baldwin and President Lincoln. Speaking, apparently, under the influence of the criticisms of Botts and Lewis of his rejection of Mr. Lincoln’s propositions, Baldwin introduced the subject with the remark: “I had a good deal of interesting conversation with him (that is with Mr. Lincoln) that evening. I was about to state that I have reason to believe that Mr. Lincoln himself had given an account of this conversation which has been understood—but I am sure misunderstood—by the persons with whom he talked, as giving the representation of it, that he had offered to me, that if the Virginia Convention would adjourn sine die he would withdraw the troops from Sumter and Pickens.” As there was no occasion in the conversation between Lincoln and Baldwin for a reference to Fort Pickens, and as the President did not mention Fort Pickens in the account of the conversation that he gave to Mr. Botts, the denial of Mr. Baldwin may fall under one of the forms of falsehood mentioned by Shakespeare.

The evidence is conclusive to this point: That at an interview at the Executive Mansion, April 5, 1861, between