From Great Grandfather’s memories: [A]t the request of Governor Morton in September 1864, I was ordered to Indiana to act as Judge Advocate of the court detailed to try the members of the “Knights of the Golden Circle” or “Sons of Liberty.” These trials were finished sometime in December of that year, and I entered almost immediately upon the trial of the Chicago conspirators — St. Leger, Grenfel, and others, who had come over from Canada to engage in the enterprise of releasing the rebel prisoners then in Camp Douglas near Chicago. I started for Washington the same evening, reached there on the morning of the 19th, and was “specially assigned by the Secretary of War for duty on the investigation of the murder of President Lincoln and the attempted assassination of Mr. Seward”, and a room was assigned to me in the War Department. In the faces of those in authority — Cabinet ministers, officers of the army, — there was an anxious expression of the eye as though a dagger’s gleam in a strange hand was to be expected; and a pale determined expression, a set of the jaw that said: “The truth about this conspiracy shall be made clear and the assassins found and punished: we will stand guard and the Government shall not die.” For no ruler who ever lived, I venture to say, not excepting Washington himself, was the love of the people so strong, so peculiarly personal and tender, as for Abraham Lincoln.
Author: NEH - National Endowment for the Humanities
Published at: 2025-09-14 20:11:21
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