Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 05.pdf/102



Vol. V.

The publication, in the Philadelphia Weekly Times of July 7th, 1877, of an article by Major-General James H. Wilson, professing to give an account of the capture of the Confederate President in 1865, has not only revived a fictitious story circulated soon after that event occurred—perhaps still current among the vulgar, though long since refuted—but has surrounded it with a cluster of new embellishments, which bad heretofore been either "unwritten history" or unimagined fiction. To which of these classes they belong, the reader may be better able to determine after an examination of the evidence which it is one of the objects of this paper to lay before him.

The key-note to the temper, as well as the truthfulness of Gen. Wilson's narrative, may be found in its first paragraph, which I quote entire: