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There is more information in the footnote of pages 197-202 in Botts’ book relative to Lincoln’s offer to evacuate Sumter. These pages list additional people to whom Lincoln made the same proposition. Botts claimed to have letters from them confirming this.

Botts is a somewhat questionable source. He was a minor league politician with thoughts of grandeur. But apparently on this matter he had some corroborating letters and testimony.

What I want to know is on what date this offer by Lincoln was tendered and who actually relayed it the Virginia secession convention. Clearly Baldwin didn't. And the Botts and Baldwin accounts give a lot more detail about the actual nature of the offer, the sine die adjournment, etc. Botts also goes on to say, "Gray is the only member of the Convention that I have met with who acknowledged that he knew anything about the matter."

Finally, Botts concludes, presciently,

"...if any Copperhead in the North or Traitor in the South shall hereafter charge that Abraham Lincoln made unnecessary war upon the South, or that he came into office under a pledge to war upon Southern institutions, his friends may exultingly point to this record for a refutation of the slander, and to show what great personal sacrifices that generous-hearted man was prepared to make to avert the heavy calamities of a civil war, and to throw the responsibility where it properly belongs.

Botts is a somewhat questionable source. He was a minor league politician with thoughts of grandeur. But apparently on this matter he had some corroborating letters and testimony.

I've seen posters attack Baldwin's testimony, but it's always interesting to see who supports his position (and when). Fearful of reprisal (prison or worse):

Colonel Baldwin's Interview with Mr. Lincoln-Letter from Colonel J. H. Keatley, of Iowa.
We publish the following letter as confirming the accuracy of Dr. Dabney's interesting report of Colonel John B. Baldwin's account of his interview with Mr. Lincoln.
COUNCIL BLUFFS, IOWA, December 18, 1880.
Rev. J. William Jones, D. D., Secretary Southern Historical Society, Richmond, Va.:
Dear Sir,--I have just read, in the first volume of the Transactions of your society, Dr. Dabney's paper concerning an interview between Mr. Lincoln and Colonel John Baldwin, of Virginia, in April, 1861. In May, 1865, I was on duty, as a Federal military officer, in Norfolk, and while the United States District Court for the eastern district of Virginia was in session there. I was introduced to Colonel Baldwin at that time, in the clerk's office, by Honorable L. H. Chandler, United States District Attorney, Colonel Baldwin being then in attendance on some business connected with that court, and having also for the first time, after the war, visited Norfolk. I met him again, during the afternoon, at the Atlantic hotel, and he was kind enough to refer to some of the incidents of the contest, and to the causes which occasioned it. In that interview he made substantially the same statement that Dr. Dabney has given in his valuable and interesting paper, but, for reasons that will occur to almost any one, I did not repeat what he said, and did not feel at liberty then to make any publication of his statement, and would not do so now had not others already done so.
Yours respectfully,
JNO. H. KEATLEY.

According to Botts, it was Lincoln himself (p. 195) that gave him [Botts] the information.