up in true royal dignity and exclaimed: 'I suppose that you consider it bravery to charge a train of defenseless women and children, but it is theft, it is vandalism!'" Postmaster-General Reagan, who was of the party captured, relates the incident as follows: "Colonel Pritchard did not come up for some time after Mr. Davis was made prisoner. When he rode up there was a crowd, chiefly of Federal soldiers, around Mr. Davis. He was standing, and dressed in the suit he habitually wore. He turned toward Colonel Pritchard and asked: 'Who commands these troops?' Colonel Pritchard replied, without hesitation, that he did. Mr. Davis said to him: 'You command a set of thieves and robbers. They rob women and children.' Colonel Pritchard then said: 'Mr. Davis, you should remember that you are a prisoner.' And Mr. Davis replied: 'I am fully conscious of that. It would be bad enough to be the prisoner of soldiers and gentlemen. I am still lawful game, and would rather be dead than be your prisoner.' Davis was taken to Fortress Monroe and there confined under charge of being accessory to the death of President Lincoln: a charge not sustained by the evidence. Among the Confederate archives, write Nicolay and Hay, "a letter was found from one Lieutenant Alston, who wrote to Jefferson Davis immediately after Lincoln's re-election, offering to 'rid his country of some of her deadliest enemies by striking at the very heart's blood of those who seek to enchain her in slavery.' This shameless proposal was referred, by Mr. Davis's direction, to the Secretary of War; and by Judge Campbell, Assistant Secretary of War, was sent to the Confederate Adjutant-General indorsed 'for attention.' We can readily imagine what reception an officer would have met with who should have laid before Mr. Lincoln a scheme to assassinate Jefferson Davis. It was the uprightness and the kindliness of his own heart that made him slow to believe that any such ignoble fury could find a place in the hearts of men in their right minds." After nearly two years' imprisonment Davis was indicted and arraigned at Richmond before the United States Circuit Court for the District of Virginia on the charge of treason, but was liberated on bail, his bond having been signed, with others, voluntarily by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Gerrit Smith and Horace Greeley. The District Court, on December 3, 1868, disagreed on a motion to quash the indictment on the ground that "the penalties and disabilities pronounced against and inflicted on him for his alleged offense, by the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, were a bar to any proceedings upon such indictment," and certified the case to the United States Supreme Court. On Christmas-day following, President Johnson issued a sweeping proclamation of pardon and amnesty to all who had participated in the rebellion, restoring them to all rights, privileges and immunities under the Constitution and laws of the United States. The government took no further action in regard to Davis and later, on motion of counsel, the indictment against him was dismissed. This left him under the single disability of capacity to hold office either State or Federal, and this disability Congress refused to remove. The most acrimonious Southern critic of Jefferson Davis, Pollard, his biographer and author of The Secret History of the Confederacy, expresses the opinion that "The imprisonment of Mr. Davis was the best thing that could have happened to his fame." It helped to make him a martyr in the eyes of the South. After his release, continues Pollard, "he proceeded to England, in pursuance of an offer of a commission house in Liverpool to take him in as a partner, and thus afford him a handsome pecuniary profit or bonus. The terms of this singular proposition, as reported in the newspapers, were that Mr. Davis was to become a member of the house referred to without the contribution of any capital, and that he should continue to reside in America, if he preferred to do so, representing the interests of the firm at New Orleans. On arriving in England, Mr. Davis did not find the house of that character as to induce the advertisement of his name in connection with it; and, partly through the persuasions of friends who recognized the offer attempted to be imposed upon his credulity or his avarice, as a disreputable advertising 'dodge'— a scheme of trading through the name of the ex-president of the Southern Confederacy-the matter was dropped, but not until it had obtained for Mr. Davis considerable scandal. Since then he has been residing, alternately, in England and in France, living quietly but comfortably; his descent into obscurity being rather faster than most of revolutionary refugees, who have generally continued to be objects of curiosity after having ceased to excite any other interest. But although Mr. Davis declined the peculiar adventure in commercial life just referred to, it is greatly to be regretted that he ever entertained it; that he ever came near to a descent so unexampled from that historical heroism and dignity which he was expected to support in the sight of Europe and the world. His commercial errand to England was, indeed, a mortifying episode; and for some time it was feared by his countrymen that the unfortunate ex-president of the South, at the end of his public career, might fall to exhibiting the dregs of his character, in a way to shame them as well as to disgrace himself. The people of the South have always prided themselves upon their nice and delicate observances of honor, and, in this respect, Mr. Davis had been their master of ceremonies, their pattern of deportment, the very prince of punctilios. It would have been excessively awkward if he had turned out to be an excellent accountant of pelf, doing precisely at Liverpool what the South had so often reviled as 'a Yankee trick' of utilizing public and social advantages, turning such to the mean account of dollars and cents. The world would have accused him of selling out his historical fame, and turning the Southern Confederacy into a tradesman's advertisement. There is something inexpressibly low and offensive in the idea. History demands, even in the extremity of misfortune, |