June 13, 1865---The Trial of Robert E. Lee

JUNE 13, 1865:          

Civil government is re-established by Executive Order in Mississippi and in Georgia.

President Johnson's Executive desk

Robert E. Lee receives word that he, along with Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders is going to be indicted for treason. He writes to General Grant:

 . . . Upon reading the President's proclamation of the 29^th ult., I came to Richmond to ascertain what was proper or required of me to do, when I learned that, with others, I was to be indicted for treason by the grand jury at Norfolk. I had supposed that the officers and men of the Army of Northern Virginia were, by the terms of their surrender, protected by the United States Government from molestation so long as they conformed to its conditions. I am ready to meet any charges that may be preferred against me, and do not wish to avoid trial; but, if I am correct as to the protection granted by my parole, and am not to be prosecuted, I desire to comply with the provisions of the President's proclamation, and, therefore, inclose the required application, which I request, in that event, may be acted on. I am, with great respect . . . 

Attached is the following petition to President Johnson:

. . . Being excluded from the provisions of the amnesty and pardon contained in the proclamation of the 29th ult., I hereby apply for the benefits and full restoration of all rights and privileges extended to those included in its terms. I graduated at the Military Academy at West Point in June, 1829; resigned from the United States Army, April, 1861; was a general in the Confederate Army, and included in the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, April 9, 1865. I have the honor to be, very respectfully . . .

 

In Dublin, Ireland, William Butler Yeats is born. 

June 12, 1865---The revival of the Copperhead press

JUNE 12, 1865:          

In San Francisco, the first edition of the Daily Examiner appeared. During the war, it had been the Democratic Press which was forced to close because of its support of the South. Despite the new name and ownership, William A. Moss, a hardcore Copperhead, nevertheless remained editor.

John C. Breckinridge arrives by ship in Havana, Cuba. He arrives in England in late August, ending his long voyage into exile.

June 11, 1865---The Great Treasury Raid

JUNE 11, 1865:                    

The Great Treasury Raid:

Amelia Barr, a 35-year-old woman living in Austin, Texas decries the chaos that has engulfed her State, telling her diary, 

“Confederate soldiers, without officers or orders, are coming in every hour, and there is nothing but plunder and sack going on—and the citizens are as bad as the soldiers.”

Still unsure whether they will be pardoned or hanged as traitors, most Confederate officials in Texas, down to the local town Sheriffs, have decamped for parts unknown, leaving Texas in chaos. And since few of Kirby Smith’s men actually surrendered after his surrender, big Texas is full of armed men in gray who, unchallenged, are committing crimes ranging from pickpocketing to rape and murder.

Since all the State officials in the Capitol Building have fled, the building is standing open and empty, its contents ripe for the picking. Land deeds are stolen and new signatures forged. Banknotes are pocketed. Criminal records are expunged by being thrown in heaps into the streets. Jailed men are freed by the looters, and they join in the looting. And the State’s great Treasury Vault is broken open this day.

Although the robbers try very hard to be secretive, their efforts to break the Vault attract the attentions of George R. Freeman and Nathan Shelley, two paroled Confederates who have recently formed a Night Watchman group in Austin. They quickly sound the alarm, ringing the bell at the First Baptist Church. This alerts the other Night Watchmen, who gather, and in a posse move on the Treasury Vault. They manage to kill one lookout, but the shooting alerts the thieves in the Vault, who flee into the night with $250,000.00 (2015 value)  in gold coins. The robbers are never caught and the money is never recovered.   

June 10, 1865---"A very ill-disguised sympathy with the insurrection."

JUNE 10, 1865:         

Harper’s Weekly editorializes about President Johnson’s plans for Reconstruction. The Editors are clearly unhappy with the carte blanche being extended to former Confederates, particularly at the expense of the Freedmen: 

President Johnson has issued his proclamation defining the terms upon which the Government of the State of North Carolina is to be reorganized. He has appointed M. W. W. Holden Provisional Governor, and he has prescribed the qualifications of electors to the reorganizing convention. Those qualifications are loyalty and complexion. The voters under the old State Constitution who take the oath provided are, politically speaking, to be considered the people of the State.   

                   

This act of the National Government very properly and completely recognizes the fact that there is at present no political authority in the State of North Carolina but that which the Government by prescribing qualifications chooses to acknowledge. The loyal white citizens of the State are admitted to vote not because the State authorizes them, but because the United States permits them. The United States intervenes and requires a condition unknown to the State. And the same power had the same right to require any other condition. The question was how far the Government should intervene, what conditions it should demand.        

The President evidently wishes to act in the spirit of our system, which has allowed States to settle the questions of suffrage. It is perfectly true that the Constitution of the United States suffers the people of the various States to determine who shall be voters? But it seems to us that the President hardly remembers that he is now deciding the vital point, namely, who are to be considered the people of the State? He expressly excepts some who are so considered by the late State Constitution. He has the same right to include others. And he would certainly not have violated the spirit of the National or the late State Constitution, if he had remembered that the whole number of freemen was the true basis of representation, and had therefore ordered an enrollment of all the adult male population as the constitutional "people" of the State.          

        

The precedent of the proclamation will doubtless be followed in Georgia and other States. The question will then reappear in Congress when the representatives and senators elected by a State so reorganized shall claim their seats. Whether Congress will recognize as republican in the sense of the Constitution a government founded upon a small minority of the adult male population, we may be permitted to doubt. We confess that we should be better pleased with the plan by which North Carolina is to be reorganized, if it did not receive such unqualified commendation from those who have most savagely denounced President Johnson, and who have had a very ill-disguised sympathy with the insurrection of State Sovereignty against the Union.

June 9, 1865---"I'd live in Hell and rent out Texas."

JUNE 9, 1865:           

General Philip Sheridan takes command of the United States Military Department of The Southwest (approximately the geographic equivalent of the Confederate Military Department of The Trans-Mississippi. As it turns out Sheridan hates Texas, later admitting, “If I had a choice between Hell and Texas, I’d live in Hell and rent out Texas.” Texans likewise hate Sheridan. Sheridan immediately requisitions 1,800 men, stating, "There is not a very wholesome state of affairs in Texas. The governor, soldiers, and people are disposed to be ugly," very much a holdover from both Kirby Smithdom and the general state of chaos in the region. 

  

Hearing that Indians are being forcibly enslaved in west Texas and in New Mexico, President Johnson issues an Executive Order forbidding all enslavement in the United States.