Peace, on the basis of a restored Union, is a consummation so devoutly to
be wished that the people will watch with intense interest the faintest
indications of its return. Now that the
Government, by authorizing Mr. Greeley’s mission, has turned the public mind in
that direction, the country will hardly let the occasion pass without a free
expression of opinion on the possibility, method, conditions, and probable
consequences of the peace which all but army contractors and abolitionists so
ardently desire. The President having
sanctioned the Niagara negotiations, the subject is fairly before the public
for such discussion as may seem appropriate.
We are bound to say that we expect no results from the breaking of the
diplomatic ice across the Niagara river.
It is, probably, on one side and on the other, a mere politician’s
trick. But it wears the external form of
duly authorized preliminaries to a more formal negotiation On the same side, the presence of the
private secretary of the President of the United States is as valid an
authentication of Mr. Greeley’s mission as would be a written letter of credentials;
and it is to be presumed that the President would not have given the affair
this degree of countenance had he not been satisfied that the alleged
commissioners on the other side were duly authorized. The selection of Mr. Greeley as an
intermediary was on many accounts politic, and especially as protecting Mr.
Lincoln from the kind of imputations put upon Secretary Seward for his informal
intercourse with rebel commissioners in the first days of the Administration,
previous to the attempt to provision Fort Sumter.
P. S. Since writing the above we have received the papers that passed in
this odd negotiation; and, if the subject were not to serious for laughter, we
should go into convulsions. That dancing wind-bag of popinjay
conceit, William Cornell Jewett, has achieved the immortality he covets; he has
reversed the adage about the mountain in labor bringing forth a ridiculous
mouse—the mouse has brought forth this ridiculous mountain of
diplomacy. This is Jewett’s doings, and it is marvelous in our eyes! He
got Greeley and the President’s private secretary to the Falls on a fool’s
errand, and made even the President an actor in this comedy; he has bade each
of them play the part so well suited to himself, of
———“A tool
That knaves do work
with, called a fool.”
Sublime impudence of George Sanders! Enchanting simplicity of
Colorado Jewett! “But—ah!—him”—how, oh benevolent Horace, shall we
struggle with the emotions (of the ridiculous) that choke the utterance of THY
name? Greeley and Jewett—Jewett and Greeley; which is Don Quixote
and which is Sancho Panza?
SOURCE: The Daily True Delta,
New Orleans, Louisiana, Tuesday, August 2, 1864, p. 1
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