Raymond urged Lincoln to send a delegation to meet with CSA President Jefferson Davis to offer peace terms “on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution”—leaving the issue of slavery to be resolved at a later date. Raymond’s prediction: Davis would turn it down and insist on Confederate independence, and the country and the world would see that Davis, not Lincoln, was the true implacable obstructionist. For a brief moment, Lincoln went along with Raymond’s idea,
