In a private letter written by Governor Johnson some months ago in reference to this matter he says:
_Dear Sir_:—Your letter of inquiry as to Mr. John Quinn is received. Permit me to say in response, that if ever there was a case of judicial wrong and oppression, he has the misfortune of affording the illustration. At the solicitation of his friends I became his attorney after conviction and sentence, and visited him in prison, at Jeffersonville, Indiana, where I heard the statement of the facts in his case. I immediately went to work to find out the truth of the recital. I examined into the matter exhaustively and became convinced of his innocence of the perpetration of the crime charged against him. I collected all the facts and circumstances going to show that my opinion was correct and worthy of consideration, and in laying them before Gov. Gray, of Indiana, he righted a great wrong and pardoned him. He is not the first man in my experience who has suffered so great a misfortune. I am very truly yours,
Of my prison life I care to say but little here. Not that my memory of it has grown indistinct, or that I might not say something that would awaken interest. To dwell upon it in detail in this place would swell to too great dimensions a sketch which has already outgrown my original intention. It is enough to say that I was what is known as a “good” convict, respectful in my demeanor to the officials and yielding unhesitating obedience to every command. I think that I do not exaggerate when when I say that I won and retained the confidence of the officers, from whom I received every kindness compatible with the necessarily inexorable discipline of a penal institution. I shall always recall with gratitude the generous words of encouragement repeatedly spoken to me by the warden and his deputy and by many of the guards, and notably from Messrs. Miller and Wilkinson. In the solitude of my workbench and cell I had ample leisure to reflect upon the follies of my youth, and the graver offences of my maturer years. My wasted life, with its miserable vacillation of purpose, passed before me in all its shameful reality of color. While cleaning out the rubbish from under my bench one day, I picked up a battered Testament, upon the fly leaf of which were written the words, “From your broken-hearted wife.” The entire sacred volume contains no more touching epitome of a blighted existence than was laid before me in this inscription, with its pregnant suggestion of early love, girlish confidence, marriage, womanly love, home, perhaps paternity, crime, misery, punishment, and, at the end, the despair of a broken heart. But I do not intend to moralize. It is enough to say that within those four stone walls in which I passed so many sleepless nights, and behind that grated door which so effectually barred all communication with the outer world, I felt the first emotions of what I still believe to have been true penitence. To prove it such shall be the aim of my future life. Acting under these newly found impulses, I became the teacher of a Sunday school class, and was one of the ten convicts who founded, under the supervision of Chaplain Bornhill, a Young Men’s Christian Association within the prison walls. I was made assistant librarian—under Mr. Martin, a lifetime prisoner—and entrusted with the writing of a considerable proportion of prisoner’s letters to their friends.