Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 01.djvu/461

Rh a few weeks after the end of the war, in a curious interview with a personal friend and apologist of Seward. The first volume of my life of Jackson had been published in London, in which I characterized the shameless lie told by Seward to the commissioners from Montgomery, through Judge Campbell, touching the evacuation of Sumter. This friend and apologist of Seward said that I was unjust to him, because when he promised the evacuation, he designed and thought himself able to fulfilfulfill [sic] it; but between the making and breaking of the pledge, a total change of policy had been forced upon the administration, against Mr. Seward's advice, "by Thad. Stevens and the radical governors." Seward, abolitionist, and knave as he was, still retained enough of the statesman-like traditions of the better days of the republic, to know that coercion was unlawful, and that a war between the States was, of course, the annihilation of the Union. It suited his partisan and selfish designs to talk of an "irrepressible conflict," and to pretend contempt for "effeminate slavocrats;" but he had sense enough to know that the South would make a desperate defence of her rights, and would be a most formidable adversary, if pushed to the wall. Hence, Mr. Seward, with General Scott, had advised a temporizing policy towards the Montgomery government, without violence, and Mr. Lincoln had acceded to their policy. Hence, the promises to Judge Campbell. Meantime, the radical governors came down, "having great wrath," to terrorize the administration. They spoke in this strain: "Seward cries perpetually that we must not do this, and that, for fear war should result. Seward is shortsighted. War is precisely the thing we should desire. Our party interests have everything to lose by a peaceable settlement of this trouble, and everything to gain by collision. For a generation we have been 'the outs;' now at last we are 'the ins.' While in opposition, it was very well to prate of Constitution, and of rights; but now we are the government, and mean to continue so; and our interest is to have a strong and centralized government. It is high time now that the government were revolutionized and consolidated, and these irksome 'States' rights' wiped out. We need a strong government to dispense much wealth and power, to its adherents; we want permanently high tariffs, to make the South tributary to the North; and now these Southern fellows are giving us precisely the opportunity we want to do all this, and shall Seward sing his silly song of the necessity of avoiding war? War is the very thing we should hail! The Southern men are rash, and now profoundly