Lincoln's Forgotten Ally by Elizabeth D. Leonard

Author:Elizabeth D. Leonard [Leonard, Elizabeth D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), Biography & Autobiography, Historical
ISBN: 9780807869383
Google: OyAUCAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011-10-10T15:57:42+00:00

7 FIGHTING THE TIDE, APRIL 1866-DECEMBER 1868

It is a political mystery if not iniquity, that a triumphant government should exalt its enemies ... above its friends.... This is a strange conclusion to a triumphant war!

—Jesse Kincheloe to Joseph Holt, September 1866

On April 9, 1866, the first anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox and just days after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ex parte Milligan, the heavily Republican Thirty-ninth Congress voted to override Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill. In doing so, the legislators signaled their growing determination to resist Johnson’s efforts to forge a rapid reunion with the former Confederacy in which the rights of the freedpeople would remain unprotected. Joseph Holt was pleased.

Also on April 9, in light of Johnson’s April 2 declaration that the war was over, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives took up the question of whether any of the individuals named in the president’s May 2, 1865, proclamation linking Jefferson Davis and various members of his Canadian Cabinet to the Lincoln assassination conspiracy should, or even could, still be brought to trial. In conjunction with its examination of this question, the committee, chaired by Republican James F. Wilson of Iowa, requested that Holt appear before them, bringing with him copies of all the relevant papers and documents held by the Bureau of Military Justice. When Holt met with the committee on April 13 and 14—now a full year since Lincoln’s murder and the attack on Secretary Seward—he discussed the evidence he had collected so far, including depositions from several of the potential witnesses Charles Dunham, as “Conover,” had identified. As before, Holt displayed his firm confidence in the strength of the case against Davis and his subordinates. In addition, he expressed his faith in the Conover witnesses’ veracity, boldly offering to arrange for the most important of them, including Conover himself, to meet with the committee directly. Clearly, any doubts Holt may have experienced about Charles Dunham’s behavior at the trial of the assassins had given way before his determination to prosecute Davis.1

Meanwhile, however, Andrew Johnson was continuing to move in a very different direction indeed with regard to those he had implicated in the May 2 proclamation. In keeping with the logical progression of his Reconstruction policies, Johnson’s interest in prosecuting Davis or any other leading Confederates was waning: just days after the Judiciary Committee interviewed Holt, Johnson ordered Clement Clay’s release from Fortress Monroe, where Clay had been in prison for almost a year. As he later did for David Yulee, back in November General Grant had written to the president on Clay’s behalf, in this case noting that the accused man’s willingness to turn himself in constituted an implied guarantee that he would not flee should Johnson parole him. Johnson considered Grant’s recommendation for four solid months. Clay, after all, was second only to Davis among the federal government’s remaining high-profile captives, and paroling him could have serious political implications.

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