I regard it as extremely fortunate for the peace of the whole country that this point, upon which the Republicans have been so long and so persistently misrepresented, is now brought to a practical test and placed beyond the possibility of a doubt. Disunionists _per se_ are now in hot haste to get out of the Union, because they perceive they cannot much longer maintain an apprehension among the Southern people that their homes and firesides and their lives are to be endangered by the action of the Federal Government. With such "Now or never" is the maxim. I am rather glad of the military preparations in the South. It will enable the people the more easily to suppress any uprisings there, which those misrepresentations of purpose may have encouraged. These words were incorporated in Mr. Trumbull's speech and were printed in the newspapers, and the manuscript in Lincoln's handwriting is still preserved.[39] But Mr. Lincoln's record neither hastened nor retarded the secession of the Southern States. The words he had previously spoken or written were as completely disregarded by the promoters of disunion as were those uttered now by Trumbull. Jefferson Davis was not one of the hot-heads of secession. His speech in the Senate on January 10, 1861, reads like that of a man who sincerely regretted the step that South Carolina had taken, and deprecated that which Mississippi was about to take, although he justified it afterward, but he believed that the coercion of South Carolina would be the death-knell of the Union. His remedy for the existing menace was not to reinforce the garrison at Fort Sumter, but to withdraw it altogether, as a preliminary step to negotiations with the seceding state. Yet he did not say what terms South Carolina would agree to, or that she would agree to any. That Lincoln was in no mood to offer terms to South Carolina or to any seceding states which did not say what would satisfy them, was made emphatic in a letter from Dr. William Jayne to Trumbull, dated Springfield, January 28, saying that Governor Yates had received telegraph dispatches from the governors of Ohio and Indiana, asking whether Illinois would appoint peace commissioners in response to a call sent out by the governor of Virginia to meet at Washington on the 4th of February. "Lincoln," he continued, "advised Yates not to take any action at present. He said he would rather be hanged by the neck till he was dead on the steps of the Capitol than buy or beg a peaceful inauguration." The following letters from Lincoln throw light on his attitude toward a compromise at a somewhat earlier stage: _Private and Confidential_ SPRINGFIELD, ILL., December 10, 1860. HON. L. TRUMBULL,