The necessity to make some reply to this pressing question seems to have driven both General Holt himself and his defenders into the maintenance of the most absurd, antagonistic and untenable positions.
Holt's theory on this subject in his "Refutation" is even ingenious in its absurdity. He would have us believe that when Johnson originally fabricated the calumny, "he had not yet broken with the Republican party, and was, doubtless, in his heart at least, a candidate for reëlection," of course by that party. If this is true, then the "fabrication" was made before the fall of 1865, for by that time the President was in full swing of opposition to the men who had elected him Vice-President. During this brief transitory period, according to Holt, Johnson discovered that the hostility of the Catholics (especially, as may be inferred, those of the Republican party), on account of his signature to the death-warrant of Mrs. Surratt, would blast this otherwise felicitous prospect. Accordingly, to abate this uncomfortable hostility, this Republican candidate concocted the vile slander and set it secretly and anonymously circulating among his friends and followers;--even his greed for reëlection being not strong enough to give full effect to his cowardly policy by openly clearing his own skirts. Could the fatuity of folly farther go? The dream of Andrew Johnson as a Republican candidate for President had ceased to be possible even before the execution of Mrs. Surratt. The Catholics who could be conciliated by any such story might be numbered on Johnson's fingers. And the undisguised signature to the death-warrant could be obliterated by no plea of abatement which the petitioner dared not avow.
On the other hand, the other suggestion put forward, if not by Holt himself; by several of his defenders, viz.: that the President propagated the lie "to curry favor with the South in the hope to be elected to the Presidency," has the one merit of being in direct antagonism to the foregoing theory, but nevertheless is yet more flimsy and preposterous. At the time he invented the story, if invention it was, (as Holt appears to have perceived), the road to the Presidency was to curry favor with the North and not with the down-trodden South. And after Johnson had escaped conviction and removal by but one vote, and had retired from office execrated by the North and distrusted even yet by the South, the chance of the Presidency for such a character as he was popularly considered then--especially by truckling to the discredited South--could only look fair in the imagination of a lunatic.