The prominent authoress, Mrs. Elizabeth F. Ellet, was repeatedly our guest while we were living in Frederick. A volume of her poems had appeared as early as 1835, and she subsequently published quite a number of books which were highly regarded. When she first came to visit us, her "Women of the American Revolution" had just appeared and her journey to Maryland was for the purpose of collecting data for a new work which later was published under the title of "The Court Circles of the Republic." Besides being a gifted writer, Mrs. Ellet had considerable histrionic ability, and I have now before me an old newspaper clipping containing an account of an entertainment given by me in her honor when she recited from "Pickwick Papers", "Widow Bedott" and "The Lost Heir." Another party at which music and recitations were a prominent feature was given to Mrs. Ellet in Frederick by Mrs. Charles E. Trail, a gifted woman who thoroughly appreciated intellectual accomplishments wherever found.
My first acquaintance with the Hon. Joseph Holt, who at the time was Judge Advocate General of the Army, began in Frederick in 1869. He was a Kentuckian by birth and, after serving for a time as Postmaster General under President Buchanan, succeeded, in 1860, John B. Floyd of Virginia as Secretary of War. He made frequent visits to Frederick where he was always the guest of the Rev. Dr. and Mrs. George Diehl. He was a typical Kentuckian, over six feet tall, and in my opinion no one could have known him well without being impressed by his intellectual ability. After we returned to Washington to live, in 1873, Judge Holt was a constant visitor at our home and I frequently attended handsome entertainments given in his residence on Capitol Hill. Although I have been in society more or less all of my life, I can say without hesitancy that he more perfectly understood and practiced the art of entertaining—it certainly is an art, and possessed by but few—than any other person I have ever known. His second wife, who was Miss Margaret Anderson Wickliffe of Kentucky, had died in 1860 and, as he had no children, he was living entirely alone.
From my earliest acquaintance with Judge Holt I was deeply impressed by the cloud of sadness that seemed to envelop him, and I never learned until I had known him many years and really called him my friend that he was laboring under a deep sense of wrong and injustice. Without entering into exhaustive details, the main facts are substantially these: In 1865 Mr. Holt was Judge Advocate General of the Army and as such was the prosecuting officer before the Military Commission convened by order of President Johnson for the trial of Mrs. Mary E. Surratt and others for complicity in the assassination of Lincoln. The findings and sentence of the Commission were accompanied by a recommendation signed by a majority of its members in which they "respectfully pray the President, in consideration of the sex and age of the said Mary E. Surratt, if he can, upon all the facts in the case, find it consistent with his sense of duty to the country, to commute the sentence of death, which the Court have been constrained to pronounce, to imprisonment in the penitentiary for life." This recommendation for executive clemency remained unknown to the public until it was incidentally referred to by the Hon. Edwards Pierrepont, counsel for the government in the trial of Mrs. Surratt's son in 1867. This was followed in subsequent years, and after Andrew Johnson had ceased to be President, by a controversy in which reflections were made upon the personal and official integrity of Judge Holt by the charge that he had never presented the recommendation for clemency to the President. The matter finally sifted itself down to a question of personal veracity between the ex-President and Judge Holt, in which the latter affirmed that "he drew the President's attention specially to the recommendation in favor of Mrs. Surratt, which he read and freely commented on"; and was contradicted by the ex-President in the assertion that "in acting upon her case no recommendation for a commutation of her punishment was mentioned or submitted to me."
The enemies of Holt accordingly held him indirectly responsible for Mrs. Surratt's execution, and against such a charge he naturally rebelled until the day of his death. The most cruel feature of the whole affair, however, and the one which probably did more than anything else to sadden and becloud the remaining days of Judge Holt's life, was the personal disloyalty of an eminent citizen of his own State, who had been his intimate friend from youth. I refer to James Speed, Andrew Johnson's Attorney General. In 1883, after most of the prominent actors in the scene were dead and the animosities caused by the controversy were largely allayed—at a time, too, when Holt realized that he was growing old and recognized more keenly than ever the importance of leaving behind a final refutation of the calumnies that had been heaped upon him—he appealed to Speed, who, he believed he had reason to assume was in possession of the exact facts of the case; but all that could be wrung from him were evasive words to the effect that he saw the petition for clemency in the President's office, without intimating whether it was before or after Mrs. Surratt's execution, and that he did not "feel at liberty to speak of what was said at cabinet meetings." An exchange of letters followed between the two in which Speed excused himself for six months on the pleas of bereavement and press of business, and that he had lost his glasses, when he finally replied:—"After very mature and deliberate consideration, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot say more than I have said." It is no wonder, then, that Holt, driven to desperation by such treatment, wrote to Speed:—"Your forbearance towards Andrew Johnson, of whose dishonorable conduct you have been so well advised, is a great mystery to me. With the stench of his baseness in your nostrils you have been all tenderness for him, while for me ... you have been as implacable as fate."
While spending the summer of 1888 in Princeton, Massachusetts, I read in the North American Review for July of the same year the correspondence relating to the Surratt question between Holt and Speed in 1883. Knowing Judge Holt as I did, having firm faith in his version of the controversy, believing him to be a victim of gross injustice and realizing withal how keenly through all these years he had felt the sting of misrepresentation, I wrote him a lengthy letter. It was not long before I received his reply, and I copy it here, as I believe it casts an additional sidelight upon a subject which caused this brilliant and high-minded gentleman bitter suffering from which he never wholly recovered. I add several more letters written to me by him which are beautiful in expression but pathetic in character.
Washington, August 26th, 1888.
Mrs. M. Gouverneur,
My dear Madam:
Your kind letter of the 14th instant was quite a surprise, but a very agreeable one I assure you. My reply has been thus long delayed from an impression that it would probably more certainly reach your hands if addressed to you at Frederick.
I have read and re-read your letter with increasing gratification and thankfulness. Truly am I grateful for the friendly spirit that prompted you to make so thorough an examination of the Speed correspondence as your résumé of it discloses. That résumé is in every way admirable. It has the clearness and logical force of a first-class lawyer's brief. Indeed, I was on the point of asserting that you have a good lawyer's head on your shoulders, but prefer saying that you have a head which obeying the inspirations of your heart enables you to discern and appreciate the truth and extricate it, as well, from the entanglements of chicanery and fraud. Be assured, my dear Madam, that I shall treasure up your letter fondly, at once as a consolation and as a powerful support of the endeavors which I have been making for years to rescue my name from the obloquy of an accusation, than which nothing falser or fouler ever fell from the lips of men or devils.