Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/191

 assassination remains the order of the day with the rebels.” In a proclamation issued by President Johnson, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the intended assassination of Secretary Seward and others, were declared to have been “incited and encouraged” by Jefferson Davis, and his agents in Canada, Jacob Thompson, late Secretary of the Interior under Buchanan, and Clement C. Clay, late United States Senator from Alabama, and rewards were offered, $100,000 for the capture of Jefferson Davis, and of $25,000 each for those of Thompson and Clay, directly charging them with complicity in the murder of Lincoln. Jefferson Davis was captured on the 10th of May, 1865, near Irwinville, Ga., by a detachment of a Michigan cavalry regiment. It was reported that trying to escape he had put on some of his wife's clothes, but that his cavalry boots had betrayed his identity. The story, although somewhat stripped of its comical aspects by subsequent accounts, was widely believed and much relished at the North where many people had during the war been accustomed to see in Jefferson Davis the personification of all that was offensive in the rebellion, and to hold him mainly responsible for all the ills it had inflicted upon the country, and were now rather pleased to see him exposed not only to detestation but also to ridicule. But the capture of Jefferson Davis was a very serious thing, and it was regarded by not a few cool-headed and long-sighted men as a very unfortunate one. It has become well known that President Lincoln wished that the downfall of the Confederacy should not deliver the Chief of the Confederacy into his hands. There was a Lincoln anecdote current at the time which seemed to have good authority behind it. It was this: After Lee's surrender a friend asked Mr. Lincoln whether, all things considered, he did not think it would be best to let Jefferson Davis