Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[915] as has been seen, my terms of acceptance and capitulation would have been very different from his. And although subsequent events have shown me that the States have got together again never to be disunited, yet I think we should have much sooner come together and without the harshness of feeling which has existed so long between the North and the South, and without the horrible butcheries of the negroes that have taken place. For the two races of the South have not got together, and I feel that there is great danger they will not do so save by another conflict of arms.

After the capture of Jefferson Davis en route across the Mississippi to carry on the war, he was held in close confinement for almost two years in Fortress Monroe and a part of the time in irons. Although an “outlaw,” I have always regretted this, for the chains were not necessary for his safe keeping, and I have a horror of punishing men before they are convicted either by imprisonment or by the enormous bail imposed by some foolish judges of the lower order, not as a means of restraining the prisoner, but by way of expressing their horror of the crime with which he is charged. I do not know how far I should have been stirred in the direction of putting Davis in chains had I stood beside the death-bed of Mr. Lincoln as did Stanton, who fully believed for months that Davis incited the crime, which beyond all controversy now was not the fact.

While President Johnson held to the opinions originally expressed that traitors must take back seats and be punished, and while he had Davis in custody and the general impression of the people of the North was that Davis was implicated immediately or remotely in the fact of Lincoln's death, the President was much embarrassed as to what he should do with Davis and in what manner he should be tried. His acts of treason had all been committed in the Southern States and by the Constitution he must be tried, if tried by a civil court, by a jury of the vicinage of those acts. There certainly could not be a jury got in those States fairly impanelled, some of whom would not have been of his political faith, and interference with the selection of the jury by the prosecutor or otherwise was of all things the most to be condemned.

Mr. Johnson, on the recommendation of Senator Wade, who at the first of his administration was his warmest supporter, but when Johnson changed became one of his bitterest foes, sent for me as a