Lincoln Letters

May 10th [1865] Andrew Johnson has issued a proclamation offering a $100,000 reward for the arrest of Jeff Davis and others whom he pretends to implicate in the murder of Lincoln and Seward. Poor Davis, where is he? We heard a few days since that he was in Ga. With 4,000 Cavalry, but I cannot believe that he would so triffle with his life, and would sooner suspect him of making his way under an old slouched hat, incog, along the hedges and by ways leading out of the country, as forlorn in appearance and fortunes as any other of Lee’s (les) Miserables. I understand the commandant of the Stockade at Andersonville, where we kept our northern prisoners, has been arrested and first condemned to be starved for thirty days, but subsequently it was determined to give him up to the soldiers of the Federal army to be dealt with as they please, and it is said, they hang by his thumbs every day and subject him to other tortures, which I suppose would ___ death welcome. He is said even by our authorities to have been personally cruel. [5]

Footnotes

[5] See Johnson’s Proclamation of May 8, 1865, in the Call papers. Northern newspapers circulated stories that Davis had been captured wearing women’s clothing. The battered but still unbroken soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia called themselves “Lee’s Miserables,” after the title of the popular Victor Hugo novel, Les Misérables. Captain Henry Wirz, a native of Switzerland, was the commandant of the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia. Some 13,000 Union prisoners died at Andersonville of exposure, malnutrition, disease, and lack of medical care. Wirz was tried for war crimes and hanged, the only Confederate executed after the war.