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]
In 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 necessary 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 grounds, 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 of 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. As
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,” to
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] that 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 that 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 the 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, as 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.” (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!”
I 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 a 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!”