During the eight years which had elapsed since their crowning achievement of hanging a woman for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, these two men had lived, for a considerable portion of the time, in the same city. They were together in the contest over reconstruction and impeachment, standing in the front rank of the enemies of Johnson. They were both at the Capital during the trial of John H. Surratt, when the ghastly reminiscences of the trial of the mother along with seven chained men must have drawn the two military prosecutors into a most sympathetic union.
And yet when, in February, 1873, Joseph Holt sits down in Washington to write his letter of inquiry to John A. Bingham, then in the same city, he would have us believe that he had never before poured into the bosom of his old colleague his own sufferings over the frightful calumny so long poisoning the very air he breathed, never before told him his embarrassment over the difficulty to elicit evidence from Cabinet officials, never before besought his friend for his own powerful testimony on the side of his persecuted fellow-official.
He writes to his former assistant, as though the information were now communicated for the first time, that the President and he were alone when the record was presented and the death-warrant signed; that he had always been satisfied the petition was considered in a Cabinet meeting, but has hitherto been unable to obtain any evidence upon that point; and then, in an artless, ingenuous manner, as if putting the question for the first time, asks his correspondent whether or not he had had a conversation with William H. Seward, Secretary of State under President Johnson, in reference to the petition, and "if so, state as nearly as you may be able to do all he said on the subject;" with a like request as to Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War.
With a diviner's skill he selects the two members of the Cabinet who are then dead; and, not to disappoint him, Bingham, in a letter from Washington six days later, informs him that he has struck the two-fold mark. With the same apparent artlessness which characterizes the letter of inquiry, this useful advocate now, as if for the first time, discloses to his long-tried colleague, that he did indeed have a conversation with each of the eminent men he had hit upon, who are now, alas! dead.