“It may, therefore, be safely assumed that the charge against Clement C. Clay, of having incited the assassination of the President, is relieved of all improbability by his previous history and criminal surroundings!”
It must not be supposed that my woman’s mind at once recognised the real atrocity of these charges in that first reading, or identified the palpable inaccuracies in them; nor that fortifying deductions immediately made themselves plain to me. As was said of another Holt document, sent later to the House by the Judge Advocate General himself, every sentence of the Report before me was “redolent with the logic of prosecution, revealing something of the personal motive. There was certainly nothing in it of the amicus curiae spirit, nothing of the searcher after truth; nothing but the avidity of the military prosecutor for blood.”
At that time, denied access to my husband, his papers and journal scattered, my own retained by the War Department, I possessed nothing with which to combat Judge Holt’s accusations, save an instinctive conviction that when once the charges were made known to Mr. Clay, he would be able to refute them.
That this elaborately detailed, this secretly and laboriously gathered category of crime was destined months hence to be turned to the open contempt and shame of the Judge who drew it up, I had no consoling prescience, and not even the most astute of my counsellors foresaw. Three months after Mr. Clay’s conditional release, in April, 1866, however, Representative Rogers, in his report to the Judiciary Committee appointed by the House, revealed to the body there assembled the “utterly un-American proceedings of the Military Bureau” and the strange conduct of its head.
After a detailed report on the testimony which, having been given to the Bureau of Military Justice, the witnesses now acknowledged before the House Committee to have been false, Mr. Rogers continued:
“Who originated this plot I cannot ascertain. I am deeply impressed that there is guilt somewhere, and I earnestly urge upon the House an investigation of the origin of the plot, concocted to alarm the nation, to murder and dishonour innocent men, and to place the Executive in the undignified position of making, under proclamation, charges which cannot ... stand a preliminary examination before a justice of the peace.... But that no time was left me to pursue to the head the villainies I detected in the hand, I might have been able plainly to tell Congress and the country that if, in this plot, we had a Titus Oates in Conover,[[61]] so also we had a Shaftesbury somewhere.”
Many newspapers, the New York Herald and Washington Intelligencer in the lead, also began to reiterate the demand for a public inquiry into the strange workings of the Bureau of Military Justice. Rumours ran over the country that “persons in high places who deemed it for their best interest to show complicity on the part of Davis and others in the assassination of Lincoln, by false testimony or otherwise, will find themselves held up to public gaze in a manner they little dream of.”[[62]]
Two months later Mr. Holt issued a pamphlet which, under the heading, “Vindication of Judge Holt from the Foul Slanderers of Traitors, Confessed Perjurers and Suborners acting in the interest of Jefferson Davis,” was scattered broadcast over the country. It is improbable that any parallel to this snarl of defiance was ever sent out by a weak but, by no means, an apologetic offender in high office. The pamphlet covers eight full pages of admissions as to the deceptions which he claimed had been practised upon him, but contains no line of regret for the tyranny he had exercised, and which had condemned distinguished and innocent men to lie for months in damp dungeons, prey to a thousand physical ills and mental torments. Mr. Holt’s vindication began as follows: “To all loyal men! In the name of simple justice ... your attention is respectfully invited to the subjoined article[[63]] from the Washington Chronicle,[[64]] of yesterday, as representing a perfectly true vindication of myself from the atrocious calumny with which traitors and suborners are now so basely pursuing me. Joseph Holt.”
“It is clear,” says this “vindicatory” excerpt, “that a conspiracy has been formed to defame the Judge Advocate General and the Bureau of Military Justice.... At the bottom of this conspiracy, or actively engaged in executing its purposes, is Sanford Conover, who, after having been fully proved guilty of subornation or perjury,[[65]] has unquestionably sold himself to the friends of Davis[[66]] and is seeking with them to destroy the reputation of a public officer[[67]] whose confidence he gained, as we shall hereafter see, by the same solemn protestations, and which confidence he subsequently most treacherously abused.... A more cold-blooded plot for the assassination of character [sic] has never been concocted in any age or country!”
It will be seen, Mr. Holt now overlooked the months in which he, supported in his secret work by the Secretary of War, and with almost unlimited powers vested in him, had been engaged in plotting with the same tools, though warned of their evil careers, against the lives of gentlemen of irreproachable character and antecedents; against my husband, who had with confidence in its integrity placed himself in the hands of the Government in the expectation of a fair and impartial trial.