Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/606

568 passion on account of the enormous crime of Booth, must be admitted. Some cool men were for the hour set aflame. Some fair men were borne out on the wave of public resentment to speak and act unjustly. But it cannot be conceived that many men of reason and reflection joined and remained in the view that such men as Jefferson Davis and Clement C. Clay were in any respect accessory to the assassination of Mr. Lincoln. In fact, such men very soon recovered themselves and protected the national honor against the projectors of the shame of an effort to connect President Davis and other Confederate leaders with the assassin and his guilt. Soon after his arrest Mr. Davis was shown the proclamation of Andrew Johnson, accusing him of being accessory to the murder of President Lincoln, and he at once said to the United States officer who had him in charge, * There is one man who knows that this proclamation is false, and he is the man who signed it, for he knows that I preferred President Lincoln to himself. President Davis again said in referring to one very important bearing of the assassination, that &quot; but for the untimely death of Mr. Lincoln the agreement between Generals Sherman and Johnston would have been ratified and the wounds inflicted on civil liberty by the reconstruction measures might not have left their shameful scars on the United States. &quot; In small atonement for this gross blunder the accusation was soon abandoned.