The University of Michigan Library provides access to these materials for educational and research purposes, with permission from their copyright holder. If you decide to use any of these materials, you are responsible for making your own legal assessment and securing any necessary permission.
Please find some way to relieve me from the embarrassment of this case. Let me have a return of the papers, with your answer by 9 o'clock,A.M. to-morrow, at which time I am engaged to see the gentlemen who now present the case. Yours truly
A. LINCOLN.
[1] Stan. V. Henkels Catalog 1342, January 4, 1924, No. 33. Under date of August 29, 1864, Welles' Diary records:
``The President sent me a bundle of papers, embracing a petition drawn up with great ability and skill, signed by most of the Massachusetts delegation in Congress and a large number of the prominent merchants in Boston, asking special favors in behalf of Smith Brothers, who are under arrest for fraudulent deliveries under contract, requesting that the trial may be held in Boston and that it may be . . . transferred to the civil tribunals. . . . The whole scheme had been well studied and laboriously got up, and a special delegation have come on to press the subject upon the President.
``He urged me to relieve him from the annoying and tremendous pressure that had been brought to bear upon him in this case. . . . I went briefly over the main points; told him the whole subject ought to be referred to and left with the navy Department in this stage of the proceedings, that I desired to relieve himself of all care and trouble by throwing the whole responsibility and odium, if there was odium, on the Navy Department, that we could not pursue a different course in this case from the others. . . . He then asked why not let the trial take place in Boston and thus concede something. I told him this might be done, but it seemed to me inexpedient; but he was so solicitous---political and party considerations had been artfully introduced, against which little could be urged, when Solicitor [William] Whiting and others averred that three Congressional districts would be sacrificed if I persisted---that the point was waived and the President greatly relieved. The President evinced shrewdness in influencing, or directing me, but was sadly imposed upon by the cunning Bostonians. . . .''
See Lincoln to Welles, January 26, 1865, and the order annulling sentence in the case of Benjamin G. and Franklin W. Smith, March 18, 1865, infra.