Washington, D.C., April 12, 1893.
My dear good friend:
I regret much to be obliged to communicate with you by the hand of another, but my poor life seems to be fixed by fate on the down grade, and at present there is no encouragement to believe that the future has anything better in store for me.
I send you a number of the North American Review containing the correspondence to which you refer between General Speed and myself. In it there is also a detached printed letter of Colonel Brown which is important. And I must ask that both this letter and the number of the Review be carefully preserved and after their perusal by your friend be returned to me, as I have no other copies and wish to preserve these. I am sorry that the sad circumstances of my condition prevent me from thanking you in person for your continued interest in my reputation which has been so basely assailed, but I trust as triumphantly vindicated.
I thank you sincerely for what you have said of Mrs. Kearny. It would be a great gratification to me to have an interview with her on the long, long ago, but this is a pleasure which I now have no encouragement to promise myself.
Believe me most grateful for the repeated calls and inquiries as to my health which you have been so good as to make. Such calls are precious fountains of consolation that will not go dry.
Very sincerely your friend,
J. Holt.
It has been asserted upon high authority that after the conviction and sentence of Mrs. Surratt her daughter Anna, as well as Catholic priests and prominent men in Washington, attempted to see the President in order to intercede for executive clemency in her behalf, but were denied admission by Preston King, Collector of the Port of New York and then a guest at the White House, and by U.S. Senator James Lane of Kansas. It has also been said that Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas succeeded in reaching the President by pushing herself past the guards, but her attempts in behalf of the condemned woman were fruitless.
I knew Preston King very well and his political career interested me deeply. He was from St. Lawrence County, New York, and in my girlhood I often heard it asserted that the mantle of Silas Wright had fallen upon him. I saw much of him in 1849 when I was visiting the Scotts in Washington, and was particularly impressed by his exceptionally sensitive nature. General Scott once told me that at one period of his military career he was ordered to quell a disturbance between Canadians and Americans near Ogdensburg, the home of Mr. King, and that the latter was so seriously affected by the scenes he witnessed at that time that it was long before he recovered his normal condition of mind. During President Johnson's administration Mr. King, while Collector of the Port of New York, boarded a Jersey City ferry boat one morning, attached weights to his person and jumped into the river. When the news of his death reached me I was not surprised as I had seen evidences of his nervous temperament which might well result in acts indicative of an unbalanced mind. He was a man of big heart and exceptional ability, and in his death the State of New York lost one of her most gifted and distinguished sons.