Holt’s theory on this subject in his “Refutation” is even ingenious in its absurdity. He would have us believe that when Johnson originally fabricated the calumny, “he had not yet broken with the Republican party, and was, doubtless, in his heart at least, a candidate for reëlection,” of course by that party. If this is true, then the “fabrication” was made before the fall of 1865, for by that time the President was in full swing of opposition to the men who had elected him Vice-President. During this brief transitory period, according to Holt, Johnson discovered that the hostility of the Catholics (especially, as may be inferred, those of the Republican party), on account of his signature to the death-warrant of Mrs. Surratt, would blast this otherwise felicitous prospect. Accordingly, to abate this uncomfortable hostility, this Republican candidate concocted the vile slander and set it secretly and anonymously circulating among his friends and followers;—even his greed for reëlection being not strong enough to give full effect to his cowardly policy by openly clearing his own skirts. Could the fatuity of folly farther go? The dream of Andrew Johnson as a Republican candidate for President had ceased to be possible even before the execution of Mrs. Surratt. The Catholics who could be conciliated by any such story might be numbered on Johnson’s fingers. And the undisguised signature to the death-warrant could be obliterated by no plea of abatement which the petitioner dared not avow.
On the other hand, the other suggestion put forward, if not by Holt himself; by several of his defenders, viz.: that the President propagated the lie “to curry favor with the South in the hope to be elected to the Presidency,” has the one merit of being in direct antagonism to the foregoing theory, but nevertheless is yet more flimsy and preposterous. At the time he invented the story, if invention it was, (as Holt appears to have perceived), the road to the Presidency was to curry favor with the North and not with the down-trodden South. And after Johnson had escaped conviction and removal by but one vote, and had retired from office execrated by the North and distrusted even yet by the South, the chance of the Presidency for such a character as he was popularly considered then—especially by truckling to the discredited South—could only look fair in the imagination of a lunatic.
No Southern man has seriously thought of being, or has been seriously thought of as, a candidate for President of either political party since the termination of the war, let alone the one Southerner reputed to have been false alternately to both parties and both sections.
Besides, Andrew Johnson never apologized for his appointment of the Military Commission, for his approval of its judgment, or for his signature to the death-warrant. He pardoned Dr. Mudd on the very eve of the Impeachment Trial. And he pardoned the two remaining prisoners just before he went out of office. And he may, therefore, be held to have thus signified his reawakened reverence for constitutional rights as expounded in the Milligan decision.
But in no other way did he ever acknowledge that in taking the life of Mary E. Surratt he had done wrong. On the contrary, he defended his action in his answer of 1873, and he justified his denial of the habeas corpus, which the ex-Judge-Advocate had the exquisite affrontery to cast up against him. That a President in his situation could cherish aspirations—or hope—of reëlection, based on such a phantom foundation as the whining plea that he would have commuted the unlawful sentence of a woman, hung by his command, to imprisonment for life, had he been permitted to see the petition of five of her judges;—such an imputation can only be made by men mad enough to believe him to have been the accomplice of Booth and Atzerodt.
Finally, let us sternly put the question:—What right has Holt to ask us, on the word of himself and his associates, to reject the testimony of Andrew Johnson, who at the best was their accomplice or their tool? He, and his associates, demanded the life of Atzerodt for barely imagining the death of so precious a Vice-President. He, and his associates, hounded the woman to the scaffold, welcoming with delight the stories of spies, informers, personal enemies, false friends, against her, and meeting with contumely and violence the least scrap of testimony in her favor. He suppressed the “Diary.” Why may he not have been bad enough to suppress the recommendation? Two of the same band of woman-stranglers kept back from the President the petition for mercy, which wailed out from the lips of the stricken daughter. Why should he not have kept back the timorous suggestion of five officers, who were so soft-hearted as to “discriminate” as to sex? His fate will be—and therein equal and exact justice will be done him—to go down through the ages, stealing away, in the dusk of the evening, from the private entrance of the White House, bearing the fatal missive—the last feeble hope of the trembling widow crushed in his furtive hand.
CHAPTER VI.
Conclusion.