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 fa............