hat 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 18