Horace Greeley, Who Would Sign the Bail Bond for Jefferson Davis, Writes Mrs. Davis and the Union General Overseeing the Davis Family, Insisting That Davis Was Not Guilty of Lincoln’s Assassination and that He Be Given a Prompt and Fair Trial

The letter had to pass through US government screeners: “If it be your duty to read the letter, I certainly have no objection.”

A search of public sale records going back over 40 years fails to turn up any other letter of Greeley on the Davis matter, nor have we seen one.

At the end of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis was arrested and imprisoned at Fortress Monroe, on the coast of Virginia. He was placed in irons for three days. Davis was indicted for treason a year later. While in prison, Davis arranged to sell his Mississippi estate to one of his former slaves. After two years of imprisonment, he was released on bail of $100,000 which was posted by prominent citizens of both Northern and Southern states, including Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Gerrit Smith.

During and after the Civil War, Greeley’s political course was highly controversial. His reluctance to support Lincoln’s renomination in 1864 lost him some popular support, as did his premature efforts to bring about an armistice and peace negotiations. After the war, he joined the Congressional Radicals in supporting equality for the freedmen. The Tribune also advocated the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. At the same time, Greeley favored measures to restore relations with the South. In 1867, he recommended Jefferson Davis’s release from prison, and he signed Davis’s bail bond.

Varina Davis, wife of the Confederate president, saw in Greeley a friend once the war had ended. Greeley received a letter from her dated June 22, 1865, written at Savannah, Ga., where she and her family were detained under a sort of military restraint. The conspicuous charge against Mr. Davis was made by the Bureau of Military Justice, of being accessory to the assassination of President Lincoln. The letter implored Greeley to insist upon a speedy trial of her husband upon that charge, and upon all other supposed cruelties that were alleged he had inflicted. A public trial was prayed, that the accusations might be publicly met, and her husband vindicated. To this letter Greeley answered Mrs. Davis, and directed it to the care of General Birge at Savannah. The morning of the next day Greeley went to an attorney, saying that he could not believe the charge against Davis true. Greeley asked Shea to become professionally interested in behalf of Davis.

This is the very letter Greeley wrote Mrs. Davis and directed to Birge. Autograph letter signed, on his The Tribune letterhead, New York, June 27, 1865, to General. “I enclose a letter to Mrs. Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, in reply to one just received from her. I do not [foresee] that you will wish to read it, but not knowing what will be your orders, I deem it proper to do so, and to say that if it be your duty to read the letter, I certainly have no objection. Mrs. D. seems to be laboring [under] distressing apprehension which it is the object of my letter to remove.”

A search of public sale records going back over 40 years fails to turn up any other letter of Greeley on the Davis matter, nor have we seen one.

When pressed to explain why he was helping Davis, Greeley said he was being denied a timely trial, and besides, the nation needed to heal from its wounds. Greeley was, predictably, the most irascible, telling the infuriated New York Union League Club: “Gentlemen,…I arraign you as narrow-minded blockheads, who would like to be useful to a great and good cause, but don’t know how. Your attempt to base a great, enduring party on the hate and wrath necessarily engendered by a bloody civil war, is as though you should plant a colony on an iceberg which had somehow drifted into a tropical ocean.”