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

[931] who was not in, though it could not be ascertained by the committee where he was. The card was put in the proper box for the delivery of all such matters in Mr. Johnson's room, and he never saw it. This fact was substantially all the evidence which would tend to implicate him.

After the capture of Atzerott and other fellow-conspirators with Booth, it was confessed by some of them that Atzerott was to have attacked Johnson. But as he did not, that should end the belief that there had been previously a conspiracy to abduct Lincoln, and that this scheme to kill him and Seward was substituted for it almost within the day when it was to be carried out. It seems to me that the call of Booth and his leaving a card might have been only for the purpose of finding out whether Johnson was at home. We felt it a duty to the country that nothing should be said or done to give a foundation for any such suspicion against its President — certainly not without the most overwhelming proofs.

In 1867 there was pending before Congress a proposition so to change the law as to pay the issue of five-twenty bonds of the United States to the amount of fifteen thousand millions made by the terms of the act authorizing them payable in twenty years at six per cent. interest, both principal and interest payable in lawful money, and they were sold at a little more than the ten-forty bonds, that is, bonds payable in forty years in gold or silver, principal and interest at five per cent. By this change of law the five-twenty bonds, although sold to the bankers at a discount of sixty and seventy per cent., more or less, were to be paid in gold and silver, which made the interest, in fact, nearly treble. I looked upon the proposition to be an enormous robbery of the people for the benefit of the bankers, without justice or reason. I made an impromptu argument in my first term in Congress upon that question and the currency in reply to Mr. Blaine of Maine. There were a majority of bondholders in both houses of Congress. I take leave to append extracts of the principal portions of that speech.

Mr. Chairman: Having been so pointedly and directly called upon by the gentleman from Maine [Mr. Blaine] to reply in some small degree as I may to his criticisms upon what he has been pleased to term my financial scheme, I may have to ask the House,--as I have neither a speech written nor printed, and speak, therefore, with great slowness, because