President Lincoln vignettes in F.B. Carpenter's "Six Months at the White House"

[David Lockmiller]

A "Reality Check" for Seward, according to Burton Hendrick, in Lincoln's War Cabinet, page 361:

Two days after Lincoln had submitted his original paper, Seward wrote John Lothrop Motley, minister to Austria, inquiring: "Are you sure that today, under the seductions and pressures that could be applied to some European powers, they would not rise up and resist an attempt to bestow freedom upon the laborers whose capacity to supply cotton and open a market for European fabrics depends, or is thought to depend, upon their continuance in bondage?" Motley's almost thunderous negation, "A thousand time No!" was evidently not exactly the response which Seward had hoped to elicit.