And if he had been guilty of so foolhardy a course of action, now was the time for the Judge-Advocate to fortify the declaration which he had inspired Mr. Pierrepont to make, by appealing to these members of the Cabinet to confront their shameless chief with their united testimony, and forever silence the "atrocious accusation."
From his course of proceeding at a later day, it is not probable that he made any such attempt. At all events, he got no help from Seward, from McCulloch or from Welles. Nay, he got no help to sustain his history of the record, even from Stanton. If help came from that quarter at all, it was to shield him from the awakened wrath of the hood-winked Executive, by drawing the fire upon the head of his department.
But what the Judge-Advocate-General did do, in view of the crisis, is sufficiently apparent. He took immediate measures to retract all that portion of Mr. Pierrepont's declaration of Saturday, which expressed or implied any knowledge on the part of the Cabinet of the disputed paper.
The counsel for the United States had continued his speech to the jury all day Monday, apparently unconscious of the tempestuous effect of his statement of Saturday, and of the predicament in which it had involved his informant. In the evening, he must have had a "confidential interview" with Judge Holt. For, on rising to resume his speech on Tuesday morning, the 6th of August, from no apparent logical cause arising from the course of his argument, he saw fit to recur to the now absent record, and to interpolate the following perfectly insulated and seemingly superfluous piece of information:
"You will recollect, gentlemen, when a call was made several days ago by Mr. Merrick * * asking that we should produce the record of the Conspiracy Trial, that I brought the original record here and handed it to counsel. I then stated that as a part of that record was a suggestion made by a part of the Court that tried the conspirators, that, if the President thought it consistent with his public duty, they would suggest, in consideration of the sex and age of one of those condemned, that a change might be made in her sentence to imprisonment for life. I stated that I had been informed that when that record was before the President, and when he signed the warrant of execution, that recommendation was then before him. I want no misunderstanding about that, and I do not intend there shall be any. That is a part of the original record which I here produced in Court. It is in the hand-writing of one of the members of that Court, to wit, General Ekin. The original of that is now in his possession and in the hand-writing of Hon. John A. Bingham. When the counsel called for that record, I sent the afternoon of that day to the Judge-Advocate-General, in whose possession these records are. He brought it to me with his own hand, and told me with his own voice, in the presence of three other gentlemen, that that identical paper, then a part of the record, was before the President when he signed the warrant of execution, and that he had a conversation with the President at that time on the subject. That is my authority. Subsequently to this, having presented it here, the Judge-Advocate-General called to receive it back, and reiterated in the presence of other gentlemen the same thing. That is my knowledge and that is my authority."