The General gives us no explanation of this “inexplicable conduct.”
Surely, the undaunted Bingham—who, as manager on the impeachment trial, so clawed the character of the arraigned President, could have had no “fear of the resentment of Andrew Johnson.” And, unless the masterful Stanton held some secret back to feather his “advice,” or lend weight to his injunction of silence, we see no reason why the fear of Stanton should have closed the lips of the voluble Special Judge-Advocate. He surely could not have joined in the fine irony of the Secretary, that it would be better for their mutual friend, although “under fire,” “to rely on the judgment of the people.”
But another, and a final, explanation is necessary. The Great War Minister died in December, 1869. Holt more than hints that “Providence” shortened his life so that he should no longer “perpetrate so pitiless an outrage” as keeping Bingham’s mouth shut.
Why, then, do we hear nothing from Judge Bingham for three years more? In the words of Holt, “after the Secretary had, amid the world’s funeral pomp, gone down into his sepulchre, the truth came up out of the grave to which he had consigned it,” and was “resurrected and openly announced by Judge Bingham.” But why was the resurrection delayed until February, 1873? He does not tell us. Why should “the buzz of this slanderous rumor” (to use Holt’s own words), “sadly recall to him that, though holding that proof, he was not yet privileged to divulge it?” There is no answer to this; none. The “scrupulosity” of Bingham did not end with the providential taking off of Stanton, but prolonged its reverential obedience to the advice of the dead, until his great colleague also was summoned from the scene.
Such resurrected truth, like the suggested letter of Speed to be used only after poor Holt’s death, seems doubly obnoxious to the latter’s own common sense remark: “thus strangely withheld from the public, it would not, when it appeared, be credited.”
On the whole, it is exceedingly doubtful whether Judge Bingham’s testimony does not do more harm than good to General Holt’s case. It is the testimony of an accomplice, if the charge it is meant to refute is true. Its subject-matter is hearsay, withheld, so long as the direct evidence was attainable, for no good reason, or for a reason assigned which will not stand a moment’s examination.
This interchange of letters between two associates in infamy, if infamy there were, the one applying for, and the other disclosing ostensibly for the first time, at so late a day, decisive information, which, in the ordinary course of things, the one must have asked for or the other revealed, and both talked over from the beginning, wears upon the face all the features of a collusive correspondence.
No one acquainted with the facts can be induced to credit what both these men state upon the threshold of their correspondence, and upon the truth of which their credibility is staked for all time, that, if two such conversations with Judge Bingham actually took place, this co-victim of a common charge would ever have withheld all knowledge of such important testimony from his brother in affliction for eight years, and until the lips of his two eminent interlocutors, whose confirmation would have at once and for ever crushed the calumny, were closed in death.
And, with this incontrovertible assertion, we dismiss John A. Bingham to keep company with Richard Montgomery and Sanford Conover, two witnesses who were once the subjects of his own fervid eulogy.