In 1866, the Reconstruction Committee of Congress got an inkling of this interview between Lincoln and Baldwin, called Baldwin as a witness, and questioned him about it. He testified that he had an interview with the President at the date mentioned, but denied that Lincoln had offered to evacuate Fort Sumter if the Virginia Convention would adjourn _sine die_. Thereupon Botts collected and published a mass of collateral evidence to show that Baldwin had testified falsely. Botts says in his book that he had confirmatory letters from Governor Peirpoint, General Millson, of Virginia, Dr. Stone, of Washington, Hon. Garrett Davis (Senator from Kentucky), Robert A. Gray, of Rockingham (brother-in-law to Baldwin), Campbell Tarr, of Wheeling, and three others, to whom Lincoln made the statement regarding his interview with Baldwin, in almost the same language in which he made it to Botts himself. Botts quotes from two letters written to him by John F. Lewis in 1866, in which the latter says that Baldwin acknowledged to him (Lewis) that Lincoln did offer to evacuate Fort Sumter on the condition named. There are persons now living to whom Lewis made the same statement, verbally. There is another piece of evidence, supplied by Rev. R. L. Dabney in the Southern Historical Society Papers, in a communication entitled "Colonel Baldwin's Interview with Mr. Lincoln." This purports to give the writer's recollections of an interview with Baldwin in March, 1865, at Petersburg, while the siege of that place was going on. Baldwin said that Secretary Seward sent Allan B. Magruder as a messenger to Mr. Janney, president of the Virginia Convention, urging that one of the Union members come to Washington to confer with Lincoln. Baldwin was called out of the convention by Summers on the 3d of April to see Magruder, and the latter said that Seward had authorized him to say that Fort Sumter would be evacuated on Friday of the ensuing week. The gentlemen consulted urged Baldwin to go to Washington, and he consented and did go promptly. Seward accompanied him to the White House and Lincoln took him upstairs into his bedroom and locked the door. Lincoln "took a seat on the edge of the bed, spitting from time to time on the carpet." The two entered into a long dispute about the right of secession. Baldwin insisted that coercion would lead to war, in which case Virginia would join in behalf of the seceded states.