At the time of my reappearance in Washington, though the city was filled with distinguished pardon-seekers, and with Southerners who had been summoned on various grounds, to explain their connection with the late Confederate States’ Government, interest in the prisoners at Fortress Monroe became quickened. The Legislature of the State of Alabama drew up and forwarded a memorial to the President, asking for Mr. Clay’s release. Prominent lawyers besides those whose letters I have quoted wrote volunteering their aid, Senator Garland, Mr. Carlisle, and Frederick A. Aiken, counsel for Mrs. Surratt, among them. Through Mr. Aiken, already familiar with the means employed by the Military Commission to convict their prisoners, I gained such information as was then available as to the probable charges which would be made against Mr. Clay.
“I send you the argument of Assistant Judge Advocate General Bingham, in the Surratt trial,” he wrote on November 25th.... “This argument has been distributed broadcast over the country, and the opinion of the Republican party educated to think it true! It seems to me,” he added, “that a concisely written argument in favour of Mr. Clay, on the evidence as it stands, would be useful with the President.”
In the midst of this awakening of our friends on Mr. Clay’s behalf, the Government’s heretofore (from me) concealed prosecutor, Mr. Holt, presented to the War Department his long-delayed and elaborately detailed “Report on the case of C. C. Clay, Jr.” On the face of it, his action at this time appeared very much like an effort to checkmate any influence my presence might awaken on the prisoner’s behalf. Upon learning of this movement I at once applied to the War Department for an opportunity to examine the Report. It was not accorded me. After some days, learning of Mr. Stanton’s absence from the city, and acting on the suggestion of Mr. Johnson, on the 20th of December I addressed Mr. Holt by letter for the third and last time. I asked for a copy of the charges against my husband, and also for the return of my private correspondence, which had been taken from me, in part, at Macon, and part from my home in Huntsville. Days passed without the least acknowledgment from the Judge Advocate.
It was at this juncture that Mr. Johnson’s friendliness was exhibited toward me; for, happening to call upon him while the document was in his hands, I told him of my ill success and growing despair at the obstacles that were presented to the granting of my every request at the War Department.[[57]] I begged him to interpose and assist me to an interview with Mr. Clay, but, above all, at this important moment, to aid me in getting a copy of the charges now formulated against him. Thereupon, exacting from me a promise of complete secrecy, the President delivered his official copy of the “Report” into my hands, that I might peruse it and make such excerpts as would aid me. I did more than this, however; for, hastening back with it to the home of Mrs. A. S. Parker, which had been generously thrown open to me, I spent the night in copying the document in full.
The list of accusations against my husband was long. It represented “testimony” which the Bureau of Military Justice had spent six months, and, as later transpired, many thousands of dollars, in collecting, and was a digest of the matter sworn to in the Judge Advocate’s presence. As I read and copied on during that night, the reason for Mr. Holt’s persistent disregard of my letters became obvious. No official, no man who, for months, against the protests of some of the most substantial citizens, the most brilliant lawyers of the country, had been so determinedly engaged in secret effort to prove a former friend and Congressional associate to be deserving of the gallows, could be expected to do anything but to avoid a meeting with the wife of his victim. In December, 1860, when Mr. Clay’s position as a Secessionist was known to be unequivocal, Mr. Holt, whose personal convictions were then somewhat less clearly declared, had written, on the occasion of my husband’s illness, “It is my earnest prayer that a life adorned by so many graces may be long spared to our country, whose councils so need its genius and patriotism!” In December, 1865, basing his charges against his former friend—a former United States Senator, whose integrity had never suffered question; a man religious to the point of austerity; a scholar, of delicate health and sensibilities, and peculiarly fastidious in the selection of those whom he admitted to intimacy—, Mr. Holt, I repeat, basing his accusations against such a one-time friend upon the purchased testimony of social and moral outcasts, designated Mr. Clay in terms which could only be regarded as the outspurting of venomous malice, or of a mind rendered incapable of either logic or truth by reason of an excessive fanaticism.
Under this man’s careful marshalling, the classes of “crimes which Clay is perceived to have inspired and directed” were frightful and numerous. The “most pointed proof of Clay’s cognisance and approval of” [alleged] “deeds of infamy and treason” lay in the deposition of G. J. Hyams (so reads the Report), “testimony which illustrates the treacherous and clandestine character of the machinations in which Clay was engaged,” to the complete satisfaction of Mr. Holt.[[58]] One of the most curious pieces of evidence of the Judge Advocate’s really malignant design in that virulent “Report” lies in his wilful perversion of a statement which Mr. Clay had made by letter to the Secretary of War. My husband had written that, at the time of seeing Mr. Johnson’s Proclamation for his arrest (during the second week in May), he had been nearly six months absent from Canada, a fact so well known that had Mr. Clay ever been brought to trial a hundred witnesses could have testified to its accuracy. Mr. Holt, to whom the Secretary of War, while denying the access of counsel to his prisoner, had confided Mr. Clay’s letter, now altered the text as follows:
“In connection with the testimony in this case, as thus presented, may be noticed the assertions of Clay in his recent letters to the Secretary of War, that at the date of the assassination, he, Clay, had been absent from Canada nearly six months.”
The substitution of the word “assassination” for “proclamation” made a difference of one month, or nearly so, in the calculations by which Mr. Holt was attempting to incriminate and to preclude a sympathy for his defenseless victim, my husband. After thus subtly manipulating Mr. Clay’s statement in such way as to give it the appearance of a falsehood, Mr. Holt next proceeded to stamp it as such, and decreed that this “remain as the judgment of the Department upon the communications of this false and insolent traitor!”
“It is to be added,” this remarkable Report continues, “upon the single point of the duration of his stay in Canada, that it is declared by two unimpeached witnesses[[59]] that he was seen by them in Canada in February last.” It may be said that this Bureau has now “no doubt that it will be enabled, by means of additional witnesses, to fix the term of Clay’s stay in Canada even more precisely than it has already been made to appear.”[[60]]
Having now carried, through many pages, his charges of numerous and basest crimes against Mr. Clay, Mr. Holt sums up his Report thus: