Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/270

 264 Southern Historical Society Papers.

speech at the opening of the new headquarters of the Frank Blair Post?" "Well, sir," said General Sherman, very slowly, " I won't say that he wasn't."

My alleged Raleigh letter has never been found. Sherman says it was sent to Nashville, Savannah, Washington and St. Louis, and may have been finally burned in Chicago in the great fire in 1871. But in all its travels no other person but Sherman saw it; not a single ofificer at any headquarters has been produced who read it, and it passes belief that in the excitement of the closing days of the war, and during my imprisonment, when every letter of mine was carefully examined to find evidence upon which to convict and destroy me, that not an officer at all those headquarters should have read that letter. Every fair-minded man must therefore con- clude that General Sherman stated at the Grand Army Post a willful and deliberate falsehood, and that his motive had its inspiration in that mean malice which has characterized his acts and writings in other respects towards the Southern people.

A man so lost to every sense of truth deserved to receive the contempt of every one who values veracity, but Senator Hawley, in offering the resolution above quoted, said: "Personally, how- ever, he did not hesitate to say that in a controversy between Jeffer- son Davis and General Sherman he (Mr. Hawley) was on General Sherman's side all the time." High qualification that for an United States Senator, who may sit a judge in the Court of Impeachment, the highest tribunal of the land.

I leave Mr. Hawley by General Sherman's side, with no desire whatever to have either one or the other on my side. Senator Con- ger denied my equal citizenship with Sherman until "something" is done by me; if that "something" to be done is to take such part as that filled by Sherman and his indorsers on this occasion, the described inequality must ever remain. Another Senator (Ingalls) evinced very great indignation because " the Democratic party had in debate in the Senate taken sides with Jefferson Davis." and that " they had always indorsed him, always approved his course, and had declared that there was nothing wrong in his record that would convince posterity that he was not a man of honor and a patriot," and that " the Senator from Alabama (Mr. Morgan) and the Sena- tor from Missouri (Mr. Vest) had taken occasion to inform the Senate that there were millions of people in the United States to day who loved Jefferson Davis, and to whom Jefferson Davis was endeared by the memory of common hardships, common privations and com-