In my note accompanying the General’s recommendation, I begged to repeat my request that I be allowed to visit Mr. Clay at Fortress Monroe, and that I be furnished with copies of the charges against him, in order that I might consult with him as to the proper means to disprove them, in the event of his being brought to trial. After a two days’ silence on the part of the Executive, I wrote a note of inquiry to Mr. Johnson. The reply that reached me was not calculated to stimulate my erstwhile hopefulness.
“I cannot give you any reply to your note of this inst.,” wrote Colonel Robert Johnson, on the 30th of November, “except that the President has the letter of General Grant. No action has yet been had. I will bring the matter before the President during the day, and will advise you.”
And now, indeed, I began to be aware how all-powerful was the hidden force that opposed the taking of any action on my husband’s case. Again and again thereafter I called upon President Johnson, pleading at first for his intervention on my behalf; but, upon the third visit, when he again suggested that I “see Mr. Stanton,” I could refrain no longer from an outburst of completest indignation. I was accompanied on this and on almost all my innumerable later visits to the White House by Mrs. Bouligny, who witnessed, I fear, many an astonishing passage at arms between President Johnson and me. On the occasion just touched upon, aroused by Mr. Johnson’s attempt to evade the granting of my request, I answered him promptly:
“I will not go to Mr. Stanton, Mr. President! You issued the proclamation charging my husband with crime! You are the man to whom I look for redress!”
“I was obliged to issue it,” Mr. Johnson replied, “to satisfy public clamour. Your husband’s being in Canada while Surratt and his associates were there made it necessary to name him and his companions with the others!”
“And do you believe, for one moment, that my husband would conspire against the life of President Lincoln?” I burst out indignantly. “Do you, who nursed the breast of a Southern mother, think Mr. Clay could be guilty of that crime?”
Mr. Johnson disclaimed such a belief at once.
“Then, on what grounds do you detain one whom you believe an innocent man, and a self-surrendered prisoner?” I asked.
But here the President, as he did in many instances throughout those long and, to me, most active days in the capital, resorted to his almost invariable habit of evading direct issues; yet it was not long ere I was given reason to feel that he, personally, sincerely wished to serve me, though often appearing to be but an instrument in the hands of more forceful men, whom he lacked the courage to oppose, and who were directly responsible for my husband’s detention. Before the end of December the President gave me a valuable and secret proof that his sympathies were with rather than against Mr. Clay.
Until the sixth of December, nearly seven months after my husband’s surrender, no formal charges had been filed against him with a view to placing him on trial, or on which to base his continued imprisonment. During that time, the visits of counsel being denied him, there was not in the capital one who was vitally concerned in his or Mr. Davis’s case, though certain unique aspects of the cases of the two distinguished prisoners of the Government had invited a more or less continuous professional interest in them.