On this day in 1865 President Andrew Johnson issued Presidential Proclamation 131, providing for a bounty for the capture of several former Confederate officials suspected of being involved in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. The most prominent of those officials was Jefferson Davis, then making his way south from Richmond just ahead of the Union army.
The others were George N. Sanders, former American consul to London who had gone to Canada when the Civil War started and who was thought to have collaborated with Confederate officials in Montreal to plan the assassination; Alabama Senator Clement C. Clay, who served in the American Senate just before the war and then in the Confederate Senate. Clay had been sent to Canada by Davis to create a network of secret agents in the Great Lakes region; journalist Nathaniel Beverley Tucker of Winchester, Virginia, who was also a former American consul to London who became a Confederate agent in Britain and Canada where he attempted to set up the trade of cotton for food and who was also suspected of being in a conspiracy to kill Lincoln; and Jacob Thompson, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior. He resigned that position to become the Inspector General of the Confederate Army. In 1864 President Davis sent him to Canada to become the head of the Confederate Secret Service operations in that country. He, too, was suspected of being involved in Lincoln’s assassination.
The amounts offered included $100,000 for the capture of Jefferson Davis, $25,000 each for Clay, Thompson, Sanders and Tucker, and $10,000 for the capture of Tucker’s clerk, a man named William C. Cleary.
