Lincoln's native good sense [the narrative proceeds], with Baldwin's evident sincerity, seemed now to open his eyes to the truth. He slid off the edge of the bed and began to stalk in his awkward manner across the chamber in great excitement and perplexity. He clutched his shaggy hair as though he would jerk out handfuls by the roots. He frowned and contorted his features, exclaiming, "I ought to have known this sooner; you are too late, sir, _too late_. Why did you not come here four days ago and tell me all this?" Colonel Baldwin replied: "Why, Mr. President, you did not ask our advice." The foregoing narrative involves the supposition that Lincoln, in the midst of preparations for sending a fleet to Fort Sumter, dispatched a messenger to Richmond to bring a man to Washington to discuss with him the abstract question of the right of a state to secede, and that, having procured the presence of such a person, he took him into a bedroom, locked the door, and had the debate with him, taking care that nobody else should hear a syllable of it. Not a word about Fort Sumter, although Magruder, the messenger, had said that it would be evacuated on the following Friday! Yet the Rev. Mr. Dabney did not see the incongruity of the situation. Nicolay and Hay say that Lincoln did not make any offer to Baldwin to evacuate Sumter, but did tell him what he had intended to say to Summers, if the latter had come to Washington at the right time.[53] Douglas in combating the Rebels, in contrast to the futile diplomacy of Seward: A marvelous incident is related in Welles's Diary immediately after his narrative of the Harvey affair. It describes the activity and earnestness of Stephen A.