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The immediate results of the campaign were not sufficiently important to lift Congress and the country for more than a brief period out of the dejection into which they had fallen. Sumner, although he realized the peril, had not lost heart. “These are dark hours,” he wrote to Lieber. “There are senators full of despair,—not I.… But I fear that our army is everywhere in a bad way.” Greeley in his journal advocated the mediation of a European power between the North and the South, and to further this end he held private interviews and opened a correspondence with Mercier, the French Minister, intimating that the people would welcome any foreign mediation which should look to a termination of the war. I mean to carry out this policy, he said to Raymond, and bring the war to a close. “You’ll see that I’ll drive Lincoln into it.” An offer of mediation between the two sections from Napoleon, the Emperor of the French, was communicated on February 3, 1863 to the Secretary of State. It was declined at once by the President, the offer and response being published at the same time. Despite the rumors which had somehow prepared the public mind for this step, the actual fact that a powerful nation impelled by motives of material interest was eager to interfere in the struggle startled the people and deepened the gloom. 37 “The President tells me,” wrote Sumner to Lieber, “that he now fears ‘the fire in the rear,’—meaning the Democracy especially at the Northwest—more than our military chances.” Governor Morton of Indiana telegraphed to the Secretary of War, “I am advised that it is contemplated when the Legislature meets in this State to pass a joint resolution acknowledging the Southern Confederacy, and urging the States of the Northwest to dissolve all constitutional relations with the New England States. The same

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