All persons who have been or are absentees from the United States for the purpose of aiding the rebellion.
All military and naval officers in the rebel service, who were educated by the Government in the Military Academy at West Point or the United States Naval Academy.
All persons who held the pretended offices of governors of States in insurrection against the United States.
All persons who left their homes within the jurisdiction and protection of the United States, and passed beyond the Federal military lines into the pretended confederate States for the purpose of aiding the rebellion.
All persons who have been engaged in the destruction of the commerce of the United States upon the high seas, and all persons who have made raids into the United States from Canada, or been engaged in destroying the commerce of the United States upon the lakes and rivers that separate the British Provinces from the United States.
All persons who, at the time when they seek to obtain the benefits hereof by taking the oath herein prescribed, are in military, naval, or civil confinement, or custody, or under bonds of the civil, military, or naval authorities, or agents of the United States, as prisoners of war, or persons detained for offences of any kind, either before or after conviction.
All persons who have voluntarily participated in said rebellion, and the estimated value of whose taxable property is over twenty thousand dollars.
All persons who have taken the oath of amnesty as prescribed in the President’s proclamation of December 8, A. D. 1863, or an oath of allegiance to the Government of the United States since the date of said proclamation, and who have not thenceforward kept and maintained the same inviolate.[[467]]
The proclamation provided, however, that persons belonging to the excluded classes could make special application for pardon, when such liberal clemency would be exercised by the President as was deemed consistent with the facts in each case, and with the peace and dignity of the United States.
Secretary Seward, who attested the proclamation, approved its general tenor as well as its details. At first he appears to have opposed the “Twenty-thousand-dollar exclusion,” but finally yielded to the arguments of the President, who by this description had hoped to include a numerous class that did not come under any of those specified. In this respect it possessed the comprehensive as well as the convenient character of a general warrant. All attempts to fix responsibility for secession have proved futile, and it is difficult to explain the President’s attitude toward Southern men of property unless, indeed, he meant to humiliate a class that he personally disliked, or, perhaps, he intended to act upon the principle that to be mild it is necessary first to appear cruel. Precisely why the other classes were excepted from the offer of indemnity the reader of Rebellion literature need not be informed. The amnesty proclamation applied to all the insurgent States.