Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/201

 Virginia, and released on bail, Horace Greeley, the old anti-slavery apostle, Gerrit Smith, and Cornelius Vanderbilt being his principal bondsmen. The case, however, as might have been foreseen, was never tried, and in December, 1868, he with all his followers in the rebellion received “a full pardon and amnesty for the offense of treason,” suffering no other punishment than the disability to hold office imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

It cannot, therefore, be said that he and the other Southern leaders, after all that had happened, were harshly treated. On the contrary, the leniency with which the victorious Government, which had them in its power, dealt by them, is without parallel in history. What there had been of popular clamor for the “condign punishment of the traitors” soon died away, and Jefferson Davis was permitted to live a quarter of a century longer in untroubled security on his plantation in Mississippi, where he continued to nurse his grudges against an “unjust fate,” but where he was also consoled by unmeasured reverence for his mythical heroship and martyrdom, by a large part of the Southern people whom he had done so much to lead to disaster and misery.