mr. holt reports upon the case of c. c. clay, jr.
armed with general grant’s letter, my hopes at once rose high. it seemed to my eager and innocent mind that an ally so really great could not fail to convince the president and his cabinet of the wisdom of granting my plea in whole or in part. i began to feel that the culmination of my husband’s troubles was now approaching. i hastened to send the letter to mr. johnson. it read as follows:
“washington, d. c., nov. 26, 1865.
“his excellency a. johnson,
“president of the united states.
“sir: as it has been my habit heretofore to intercede for the release of all prisoners who i thought could safely be left at large, either on parole or by amnesty, i now respectfully recommend the release of mr. c. c. clay.
“the manner of mr. clay’s surrender, i think, is a full guarantee that if released on parole, to appear when called for, either for trial or otherwise, that he will be forthcoming.
“argument, i know, is not necessary in this or like cases, so i will simply say that i respectfully recommend that c. c. clay, now a state prisoner, be released on parole, not to leave the limits of his state without your permission, and to surrender himself to the civil authorities for trial whenever called on to do so.
“i do not know that i would make a special point of fixing the limits to a state only, but at any future time the limits could be extended to the whole united states, as well as if those limits were given at once.
“i have the honour to be,
“very respectfully, your obedient servant,
(signed.) “u. s. grant, lieutenant-general.”[56]
318in my note accompanying the general’s recommendation, i begged to repeat my request that i be allowed to visit mr. clay at fortress monroe, and that i be furnished with copies of the charges against him, in order that i might consult with him as to the proper means to disprove them, in the event of his being brought to trial. after a two days’ silence on the part of the executive, i wrote a note of inquiry to mr. johnson. the reply that reached me was not calculated to stimulate my erstwhile hopefulness.
“i cannot give you any reply to your note of this inst.,” wrote colonel robert johnson, on the 30th of november, “except that the president has the letter of general grant. no action has yet been had. i will bring the matter before the president during the day, and will advise you.”
and now, indeed, i began to be aware how all-powerful was the hidden force that opposed the taking of any action on my husband’s case. again and again thereafter i called upon president johnson, pleading at first for his intervention on my behalf; but, upon the third visit, when he again suggested that i “see mr. stanton,” i could refrain no longer from an outburst of completest indignation. i was accompanied on this and on almost all my innumerable later visits to the white house by mrs. bouligny, who witnessed, i fear, many an astonishing passage at arms between president johnson and me. on the occasion just touched upon, aroused by mr. johnson’s attempt to evade the granting of my request, i answered him promptly:
“i will not go to mr. stanton, mr. president! you issued the proclamation charging my husband with crime! you are the man to whom i look for redress!”
“i was obliged to issue it,” mr. johnson replied, “to satisfy public clamour. your husband’s being in canada while surratt and his associates were there made it 319necessary to name him and his companions with the others!”
“and do you believe, for one moment, that my husband would conspire against the life of president lincoln?” i burst out indignantly. “do you, who nursed the breast of a southern mother, think mr. clay could be guilty of that crime?”
mr. johnson disclaimed such a belief at once.
“then, on what grounds do you detain one whom you believe an innocent man, and a self-surrendered prisoner?” i asked.
but here the president, as he did in many instances throughout those long and, to me, most active days in the capital, resorted to his almost invariable habit of evading direct issues; yet it was not long ere i was given reason to feel that he, personally, sincerely wished to serve me, though often appearing to be but an instrument in the hands of more forceful men, whom he lacked the courage to oppose, and who were directly responsible for my husband’s detention. before the end of december the president gave me a valuable and secret proof that his sympathies were with rather than against mr. clay.
until the sixth of december, nearly seven months after my husband’s surrender, no formal charges had been filed against him with a view to placing him on trial, or on which to base his continued imprisonment. during that time, the visits of counsel being denied him, there was not in the capital one who was vitally concerned in his or mr. davis’s case, though certain unique aspects of the cases of the two distinguished prisoners of the government had invited a more or less continuous professional interest in them.
at the time of my reappearance in washington, though the city was filled with distinguished pardon-seekers, and with southerners who had been summoned on various 320grounds, to explain their connection with the late confederate states’ government, interest in the prisoners at fortress monroe became quickened. the legislature of the state of alabama drew up and forwarded a memorial to the president, asking for mr. clay’s release. prominent lawyers besides those whose letters i have quoted wrote volunteering their aid, senator garland, mr. carlisle, and frederick a. aiken, counsel for mrs. surratt, among them. through mr. aiken, already familiar with the means employed by the military commission to convict their prisoners, i gained such information as was then available as to the probable charges which would be made against mr. clay.
“i send you the argument of assistant judge advocate general bingham, in the surratt trial,” he wrote on november 25th.... “this argument has been distributed broadcast over the country, and the opinion of the republican party educated to think it true! it seems to me,” he added, “that a concisely written argument in favour of mr. clay, on the evidence as it stands, would be useful with the president.”
in the midst of this awakening of our friends on mr. clay’s behalf, the government’s heretofore (from me) concealed prosecutor, mr. holt, presented to the war department his long-delayed and elaborately detailed “report on the case of c. c. clay, jr.” on the face of it, his action at this time appeared very much like an effort to checkmate any influence my presence might awaken on the prisoner’s behalf. upon learning of this movement i at once applied to the war department for an opportunity to examine the report. it was not accorded me. after some days, learning of mr. stanton’s absence from the city, and acting on the suggestion of mr. johnson, on the 20th of december i addressed mr. holt by letter for the third and last time. i asked for a copy of the charges against my husband, and also for the return 321of my private correspondence, which had been taken from me, in part, at macon, and part from my home in huntsville. days passed without the least acknowledgment from the judge advocate.
it was at this juncture that mr. johnson’s friendliness was exhibited toward me; for, happening to call upon him while the document was in his hands, i told him of my ill success and growing despair at the obstacles that were presented to the granting of my every request at the war department.[57] i begged him to interpose and assist me to an interview with mr. clay, but, above all, at this important moment, to aid me in getting a copy of the charges now formulated against him. thereupon, exacting from me a promise of complete secrecy, the president delivered his official copy of the “report” into my hands, that i might peruse it and make such excerpts as would aid me. i did more than this, however; for, hastening back with it to the home of mrs. a. s. parker, which had been generously thrown open to me, i spent the night in copying the document in full.
the list of accusations against my husband was long. it represented “testimony” which the bureau of military justice had spent six months, and, as later transpired, many thousands of dollars, in collecting, and was a digest of the matter sworn to in the judge advocate’s presence. 322as i read and copied on during that night, the reason for mr. holt’s persistent disregard of my letters became obvious. no official, no man who, for months, against the protests of some of the most substantial citizens, the most brilliant lawyers of the country, had been so determinedly engaged in secret effort to prove a former friend and congressional associate to be deserving of the gallows, could be expected to do anything but to avoid a meeting with the wife of his victim. in december, 1860, when mr. clay’s position as a secessionist was known to be unequivocal, mr. holt, whose personal convictions were then somewhat less clearly declared, had written, on the occasion of my husband’s illness, “it is my earnest prayer that a life adorned by so many graces may be long spared to our country, whose councils so need its genius and patriotism!” in december, 1865, basing his charges against his former friend—a former united states senator, whose integrity had never suffered question; a man religious to the point of austerity; a scholar, of delicate health and sensibilities, and peculiarly fastidious in the selection of those whom he admitted to intimacy—, mr. holt, i repeat, basing his accusations against such a one-time friend upon the purchased testimony of social and moral outcasts, designated mr. clay in terms which could only be regarded as the outspurting of venomous malice, or of a mind rendered incapable of either logic or truth by reason of an excessive fanaticism.
under this man’s careful marshalling, the classes of “crimes which clay is perceived to have inspired and directed” were frightful and numerous. the “most pointed proof of clay’s cognisance and approval of” [alleged] “deeds of infamy and treason” lay in the deposition of g. j. hyams (so reads the report), “testimony which illustrates the treacherous and clandestine character of the machinations in which clay was engaged,” 323to the complete satisfaction of mr. holt.[58] one of the most curious pieces of evidence of the judge advocate’s really malignant design in that virulent “report” lies in his wilful perversion of a statement which mr. clay had made by letter to the secretary of war. my husband had written that, at the time of seeing mr. johnson’s proclamation for his arrest (during the second week in may), he had been nearly six months absent from canada, a fact so well known that had mr. clay ever been brought to trial a hundred witnesses could have testified to its accuracy. mr. holt, to whom the secretary of war, while denying the access of counsel to his prisoner, had confided mr. clay’s letter, now altered the text as follows:
“in connection with the testimony in this case, as thus presented, may be noticed the assertions of clay in his recent letters to the secretary of war, that at the date of the assassination, he, clay, had been absent from canada nearly six months.”
the substitution of the word “assassination” for “proclamation” made a difference of one month, or nearly so, in the calculations by which mr. holt was attempting to incriminate and to preclude a sympathy for his defenseless victim, my husband. after thus subtly manipulating mr. clay’s statement in such way as to give it the appearance of a falsehood, mr. holt next proceeded to stamp it as such, and decreed that this “remain as the judgment of the department upon the communications of this false and insolent traitor!”
“it is to be added,” this remarkable report continues, “upon the single point of the duration of his stay in canada, that it is declared by two unimpeached witnesses[59] 324that he was seen by them in canada in february last.” it may be said that this bureau has now “no doubt that it will be enabled, by means of additional witnesses, to fix the term of clay’s stay in canada even more precisely than it has already been made to appear.”[60]
having now carried, through many pages, his charges of numerous and basest crimes against mr. clay, mr. holt sums up his report thus:
“it may, therefore, be safely assumed that the charge against clement c. clay, of having incited the assassination of the president, is relieved of all improbability by his previous history and criminal surroundings!”
it must not be supposed that my woman’s mind at once recognised the real atrocity of these charges in that first reading, or identified the palpable inaccuracies in them; nor that fortifying deductions immediately made themselves plain to me. as was said of another holt document, sent later to the house by the judge advocate general himself, every sentence of the report before me was “redolent with the logic of prosecution, revealing something of the personal motive. there was certainly nothing in it of the amicus curiae spirit, nothing of the searcher after truth; nothing but the avidity of the military prosecutor for blood.”
at that time, denied access to my husband, his papers and journal scattered, my own retained by the war department, i possessed nothing with which to combat judge holt’s accusations, save an instinctive conviction 325that when once the charges were made known to mr. clay, he would be able to refute them.
that this elaborately detailed, this secretly and laboriously gathered category of crime was destined months hence to be turned to the open contempt and shame of the judge who drew it up, i had no consoling prescience, and not even the most astute of my counsellors foresaw. three months after mr. clay’s conditional release, in april, 1866, however, representative rogers, in his report to the judiciary committee appointed by the house, revealed to the body there assembled the “utterly un-american proceedings of the military bureau” and the strange conduct of its head.
after a detailed report on the testimony which, having been given to the bureau of military justice, the witnesses now acknowledged before the house committee to have been false, mr. rogers continued:
“who originated this plot i cannot ascertain. i am deeply impressed that there is guilt somewhere, and i earnestly urge upon the house an investigation of the origin of the plot, concocted to alarm the nation, to murder and dishonour innocent men, and to place the executive in the undignified position of making, under proclamation, charges which cannot ... stand a preliminary examination before a justice of the peace.... but that no time was left me to pursue to the head the villainies i detected in the hand, i might have been able plainly to tell congress and the country that if, in this plot, we had a titus oates in conover,[61] so also we had a shaftesbury somewhere.”
many newspapers, the new york herald and washington intelligencer in the lead, also began to reiterate the demand for a public inquiry into the strange workings of 326the bureau of military justice. rumours ran over the country that “persons in high places who deemed it for their best interest to show complicity on the part of davis and others in the assassination of lincoln, by false testimony or otherwise, will find themselves held up to public gaze in a manner they little dream of.”[62]
two months later mr. holt issued a pamphlet which, under the heading, “vindication of judge holt from the foul slanderers of traitors, confessed perjurers and suborners acting in the interest of jefferson davis,” was scattered broadcast over the country. it is improbable that any parallel to this snarl of defiance was ever sent out by a weak but, by no means, an apologetic offender in high office. the pamphlet covers eight full pages of admissions as to the deceptions which he claimed had been practised upon him, but contains no line of regret for the tyranny he had exercised, and which had condemned distinguished and innocent men to lie for months in damp dungeons, prey to a thousand physical ills and mental torments. mr. holt’s vindication began as follows: “to all loyal men! in the name of simple justice ... your attention is respectfully invited to the subjoined article[63] from the washington chronicle,[64] of yesterday, 327as representing a perfectly true vindication of myself from the atrocious calumny with which traitors and suborners are now so basely pursuing me. joseph holt.”
“it is clear,” says this “vindicatory” excerpt, “that a conspiracy has been formed to defame the judge advocate general and the bureau of military justice.... at the bottom of this conspiracy, or actively engaged in executing its purposes, is sanford conover, who, after having been fully proved guilty of subornation or perjury,[65] has unquestionably sold himself to the friends of davis[66] and is seeking with them to destroy the reputation of a public officer[67] whose confidence he gained, as we shall hereafter see, by the same solemn protestations, and which confidence he subsequently most treacherously abused.... a more cold-blooded plot for the assassination of character [sic] has never been concocted in any age or country!”
it will be seen, mr. holt now overlooked the months in which he, supported in his secret work by the secretary of war, and with almost unlimited powers vested in him, had been engaged in plotting with the same tools, though warned of their evil careers, against the lives of gentlemen of irreproachable character and antecedents; against my husband, who had with confidence in its integrity placed himself in the hands of the government in the expectation of a fair and impartial trial.
mr. holt’s “vindication” continues: “conover, though now wholly degraded, was then, so far as was known to the government, without a stain upon his character.” 328(the thoughtful reader must naturally turn to the accusations of the reverend stuart robinson, made publicly to the government representative, hon. h. h. emmons, and, by the press, scattered through the country fifteen months previous to this declaration in mr. holt’s “vindication.”) “hence, when he wrote me,” continues the aggrieved judge advocate general, “alleging the existence of testimony implicating davis and others, and his ability to find the witnesses, and proffering his services to do so, i did not hesitate to accept his statements and proposals as made in good faith and entitled to credit and to consideration.”
in the “report” on the case of mr. clay, dated december 6, 1865, which, by the courtesy of the president, i was enabled to see, mr. holt’s willing adoption of the fabrications of his unscrupulous “witnesses” was apparent in every phrase. in fact, its spirit of malice terrified me. i kept faith with mr. johnson and told no one of the knowledge i now possessed; but i communicated some of the main points of the “report” to judge black and other advisers, and, resolving that i would never cease until i attained my point, i redoubled my pleadings with the president for the permission to visit my husband, which request i now knew it would be useless to make at the war department. when i returned the “report” to the president, i was keyed to a high pitch of alarm by the spirit shown by the advocate general, and my requests now took another form.
“it is said, mr. johnson, that you have refused to allow the military court, composed of messrs. holt, speed and stanton, to try mr. davis and mr. clay.” the president bowed affirmatively.
“then i pray you to give me your solemn oath in the presence of the living god, that you will never, while in this presidential chair, yield those two innocent men into the hands of that blood-seeking military commission!”
329i was greatly agitated, and weeping. mr. johnson, however, was calm and seemingly deeply in earnest as he answered me,
“i promise you, mrs. clay; trust me!”
“i will; i do!” i cried, “but i would like you to emphasise this sacred oath, remembering the precious lives that hang upon it.”
upon this mr. johnson raised his hand and repeated his promise, adding again, “trust me!”
after this interview i felt a sense of security which gave me comparative repose of mind, but, nevertheless, i called almost daily, to fortify mr. johnson against the continued machinations of those officials whose influence was so inimical to my husband and mr. davis. i now began to perceive that judge black, senator garland and others had said truly when they remarked to me that mr. johnson might be moved, if at all, by his heart rather than by his head. he had already given me a strong proof of this; soon he gave me others.
the christmas season was approaching, and while all about me were arranging their little gaieties and surprises, the realisation of mr. clay’s isolation and discomforts and peril became more and more poignant. to add to the sadness of our situation, letters from huntsville containing pathetic allusions to the failing health of my husband’s mother now began to follow each other rapidly. i was urged to act quickly if she and her son were to meet on earth again. in my letters to mr. clay i dared not tell him of this approaching disaster, for between himself and his mother an unusually tender relationship existed. i dreaded the alarm such news might give him, alone and ill in his dismal prison, exhausted as he was with waiting for direct communication with me. i had already been a month in washington without having effected a meeting with him. under the circumstances, the headway gained seemed inappreciable. with 330a copy of holt’s “report” in my possession, i resolved to go on to new york for consultation with mr. o’conor, mr. shea, and mr. greeley, so soon as i should receive some definite concession from the president.
i now told mr. johnson of mrs. clay’s condition, and begged him to release my husband, if only to permit him one interview with his probably dying mother, to return again to custody if the president so wished; or, failing the granting of this, to allow me to visit him in prison. at last, after much reiteration on my part, mr. johnson yielded; he promised that he would issue the permit for my visit to fort monroe on his own responsibility in a few days; that i might rely upon receiving it upon my return from the metropolis.
hastening to new york, i was soon made aware by messrs. o’conor, shea and greeley, who called upon me severally, that my one course now was to persist in my effort to precipitate a trial for my husband, or to procure his release on parole, in which these gentlemen stood ready to supplement me, and, upon the announcement of a trial, to defend mr. clay.
my interview with mr. greeley took place in one of the public corridors of the new york hotel, now thronging with southern guests, and, as i sat beside him on a settle, in earnest conversation with the fatherly old man, his bald “temple of thought” gleaming under the gaslights, which threw their fullest brilliancy upon us, i remember seeing several prominent southern generals then registered at the hotel glance repeatedly at us, and always with a look of surprise that said very plainly, “well! if there isn’t mrs. clem. clay hobnobbing with that old abolitionist!”
