Springfield Weekly Republican

Jeff Davis Arraigning the Administration For Bad Faith.

Jeff Davis is evidently very uneasy in his mind. He still wants to argue the case. He is very anxious to make out a case of bad faith against the administration in the matter of Fort Sumter. He sent a supplementary message to his congress, the other day, elaborating this point, and bringing the evidence of ex-Judge Campbell, who was employed as a sort of confidential messenger between the southern commissioners and the administration, while the former were at Washington.

The charge is that the administration promised to evacuate Fort Sumter and did not. It might be a sufficient answer to this that the fort would have been evacuated in forty-eight hours if Jeff Davis had not ordered an assault upon it, because he needed actual war in order to save his conspiracy from perishing still-born.

But there is not a particle of evidence in the letters of Judge Campbell to Secretary Seward, published by Davis, that anybody ever promised the evacuation of Fort Sumter. All that Judge Campbell actually says is that after certain conversations with Mr. Seward, he (Campbell) assured the rebel commissioners that Sumter would be evacuated, and that no attempt would be made to reinforce it.

It is quite possible that Mr. Seward gave it as his private opinion that the fort would be evacuated. At that time everybody believed it would be. But the presumption of any pledge of that kind given to the rebels is preposterous, and Judge Campbell and Jeff Davis do not assert it.

But they charge duplicity in Mr. Seward and the administration because their expectation of the evacuation of Fort Sumter was not realized previous to the time when Davis determined to commence the assault on the fort. Davis needs a moral basis to stand on badly enough, but he does not find it here, and the fact that such an attempt is made should be a caution to Mr. Seward not to be too polite to traitors hereafter.