The Victim: A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis Part 102

Charles O'Connor, the greatest lawyer in America, indignant at the outrage, had offered his services to the prisoner. Socola hastened to a conference with O'Connor and placed himself at his command.

The lawyer sent him to Washington to find out the master mind at the bottom of these remarkable proceedings.

"Johnson the President," he warned, "is only a tool in the hands of a _stronger_ man. Find that man. Stanton, the Secretary of War, is vindictive enough, but he lacks the cunning. Stevens, the leader of the House, is the real ruler of the Nation at this moment. Yet I have the most positive information that Stevens sneers at the attempt to accuse Davis of the a.s.sa.s.sination of Lincoln. Stevens hated Lincoln only a degree less than he hates Davis. He is blunt, outspoken, brutal in his views. There can be no question of the honesty of his position. Sumner, the leader of the Senate, is incapable of such low intrigue. Find the man and report to me."

Socola found him within six hours after his arrival in Washington. He was morally sure of him from the moment he left O'Connor's office.

Immediately on his arrival at the Capital he sought an interview with Joseph Holt, now the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army.

He was therefore in charge of the prosecution of the cases of Clay and Davis.

For five minutes he watched the crooked poisonous mouth of the ex-Secretary of War and knew the truth. This vindictive venomous old man, ambitious, avaricious, implacable in his hatreds, had organized a Board of a.s.sa.s.sination, which he called "The Bureau of Military Justice." This remarkable Bureau had already murdered Mrs. Surratt on perjured testimony.

Socola had given his ex-Chief no intimation of his personal feelings and no hint of his a.s.sociation with O'Connor.

"I've a little favor to ask of you, young man," Holt said suavely.

Socola bowed.

"At your service, Chief--"

"I need a man of intelligence and skill to convey a proposition to Wirz, the keeper of Andersonville prison. He has been sentenced to death by the Bureau of Military Justice. I'm going to offer him his life on one condition--"

"And that is?"

"If he will confess under oath that Davis ordered the starving and torturing of prisoners at Andersonville I'll commute his sentence--"

"I see--"

"I'll give you an order to interview Wirz. He has never seen you. Report to me his answer."

When Socola explained to Wirz in sympathetic tones the offer of the Government to spare his life for the implication of Davis in direct orders from Richmond commanding cruelties at Andersonville, the condemned man lifted his wounded body and stared at his visitor.

His answer closed the interview.

"Tell the scoundrel who sent you that I am a soldier. I was a soldier in Germany before I cast my fortunes with the South. I bear in my body the wounds of honorable warfare. If I hadn't time to learn the meaning of honor from my friends in the South, my mother taught me in the old world. You ask me to save my life from these a.s.sa.s.sins by swearing away the life of another. Tell my executioner that I never saw the President of the Confederacy. I never received an order of any kind from him. I did the best I could for the men in my charge at Andersonville and tried honestly to improve their conditions. I am not a perjurer, even to save my own life. A soldier's business is to die. I am ready."

Socola extended his hand through the bars and grasped the prisoner's.

The deeper he dived into the seething ma.s.s of corruption and blind pa.s.sion which had engulfed Washington the more desperate he saw the situation of Davis at Fortress Monroe. After two weeks of careful work he hurried to New York and reported the situation to O'Connor.

"The master mind," he began slowly, "I found at once. His name is Holt--"

"The Judge Advocate General?"

"Yes."

"That accounts for my inability to obtain a copy of the charges against Davis. Holt drew those charges. They are in his hands and he has determined to press his prisoner to trial before his Board of a.s.sa.s.sins without allowing me to know the substance of his accusations. It's infamous."

"There are complications which may increase our dangers or suddenly lift them--"

"Complications--what do you mean?"

"The President, who has been intensely hostile to Davis, realizes that his own term of office and possibly his life are now at stake. He has broken with the Radicals who control Congress, old Thaddeus Stevens's at their head. Stevens lives in Washington in brazen defiance of conventionalities with a negro woman whom he separated from her husband thirty odd years ago. Under the influence of this negress he has introduced a bill into the House of Representatives to confiscate the remaining property of the white people of the South and give it to the negroes--dividing the land into plots of forty acres each. He proposes also to disfranchise the whites of the Southern States, enfranchise the negroes, destroy the State lines and erect on their ruins territories ruled by negroes whom his faction can control.

"Johnson the President, a Southern born white man, has already informed the Radicals that he will fight this programme to the last ditch.

Stevens' answer was characteristic of the imperious old leader. 'Let him dare! I'll impeach Andrew Johnson, remove him from office and hang him from the balcony of the White House.'

"The President realizes that the Bureau of Military Justice which he allowed Holt to create may be used as the engine of his own destruction.

They have already taken the first steps to impeach him--"

"Then he'll never dare allow another case to be tried before that Bureau--" O'Connor interrupted.

"It remains to be seen. He is afraid of both Stanton and Holt. The Bureau of Military Justice is their hobby."

O'Connor sprang to his feet.

"We must smash it by an appeal to the people. Their sense of justice is yet the salt that will save the Nation. The key to the situation is in the character of the remarkable witnesses whom Holt has produced before this tribunal of a.s.sa.s.sination. In my judgment they are a gang of hired perjurers. Their leader is a fellow named Conover. There are five men a.s.sociated with him. They used these witnesses against Mrs. Surratt.

They used them against Wirz. They are preparing to use them against Davis. It is inconceivable that these plugs from the gutters of New York could have really stumbled on the facts to which they have sworn. Find who these men are. Get their records to the last hour of the day you track them--and report to me."

Socola organized a force of detectives and set them to work. The task was a difficult one. He found that Conover and his pals were protected by the unlimited power of the National Government.

CHAPTER XLVI

THE TORTURE

While the prisoner fought to save his reason in the dungeon at Fortress Monroe, his wife was denied the right to lift her hand in his defense.

No communication was allowed between them except through his jailer.

On arrival in Savannah Mrs. Davis and her children were compelled to walk through the blazing heat the long distance from the wharf uptown, the whole party trudging immigrant fashion through the streets. Her sister carried the baby. Mrs. Davis and the two little boys and Maggie followed with parcels, and Robert, her faithful black man, brought up the rear with the baggage.

The people of Savannah, on learning of their arrival, treated their prisoners with the utmost kindness. Every home in the city was thrown open to them. Her children had been robbed of all their clothing except what they wore. The neighbors hurried in with clothes.

The newspaper of Savannah of the new regime, _The Republican_, published and republished with gleeful comments the most sensational accounts of the brutal scene of the shackling of Davis. Maggie composed a prayer and taught her little brothers to repeat it in concert for their grace at the table morning, noon and night:

"Dear Lord, give our father something he can eat, and keep him strong, and bring him back to us with eyes that can see and in his good senses, to his little children, for Jesus' sake."

Nearly every day the child who composed the prayer was so moved by its recital she would run from the table and dry her tears in the next room before she could eat.

Hourly scenes of violence increased between the whites and the inflamed blacks. A negro sentinel leveled his gun at little Jeff and threatened to shoot him for calling him "Uncle." With prayers and tears the mother sent her children away to the home of a friend in Montreal.

A year pa.s.sed before President Johnson in answer to the wife's desperate pleading permitted her to visit her husband in prison. She arrived from Montreal on the cold raw morning of May 10, 1866, at four o'clock before day. There was no hotel at the fort at that time and the mother was compelled to sit in the desolate little waiting room with her baby without a fire until ten o'clock.

General Miles called. His references to her husband were made in a manner which brutally expressed his hatred and contempt. She had been informed that his health was in so dangerous a condition that physicians had despaired of his life.

Miles hastened to say: