Background
Joseph Holt was born on January 6, 1807 in Breckinridge County, Kentucky, United States. He was the oldest of six children of John Holt, a lawyer, and of Eleanor (Stephens) Holt.
Joseph Holt was born on January 6, 1807 in Breckinridge County, Kentucky, United States. He was the oldest of six children of John Holt, a lawyer, and of Eleanor (Stephens) Holt.
Holt was educated at St. Joseph's and Centre colleges and at the age of twenty-one opened a law office in Elizabethtown, where for a year he acted as a local partner of the celebrated Ben Hardin.
Holt early gained recognition as an eloquent speaker, appearing frequently on Democratic platforms to expound the political issues of the day. In 1832 he moved to Louisville, where he was assistant editor of the Louisville Advertiser for a year and commonwealth's attorney for two. Soon afterward, he moved to Mississippi, where he practised with notable success. For a number of years, Holt took little part in political life except for an occasional campaign speech. For his share in winning the Democratic victory of 1856, he was appointed commissioner of patents in 1857 by President Buchanan.
In 1859 he was made postmaster-general, from which office he sanctioned a local ruling barring abolitionist doctrines from the mails within the borders of Virginia. At this time he was opposed to "coercion" of a state by the federal government; he contributed a letter, dated November 30, 1860, to the Pittsburgh Chronicle, denouncing the personal liberty bills passed by Northern states but proclaiming his loyalty to the Union on the basis of "a faint, hesitating hope that the North will do justice to the South and save the Republic before the wreck is complete. " When the ordinance of secession had passed and South Carolina's commissioners appeared in Washington, however, Holt joined Jeremiah Black and Edwin M. Stanton in urging upon Buchanan a policy of firmness.
On January 1, 1861, he succeeded John B. Floyd in the office of secretary of war, being commissioned January 18. In the light of his new responsibilities what he had heretofore termed "coercion" began to appear as "self-defense, " and his latent but tenacious Unionism developed into an inflexible belief in the righteousness of the Federal cause. After the inauguration of Lincoln, Holt addressed himself to the task of winning his native Kentucky from its equivocal policy of neutrality. He kept in close communication with Union leaders there, writing letters for publication and making speeches in the border states, and his efforts were rewarded by Kentucky's voting in September to support the Federal armies. He also toured Massachusetts and appealed to an audience in New York City to give a sturdy support to the war and to the administration. In view of his services, President Lincoln determined to appoint him to office as soon as a suitable vacancy occurred, while Holt in the interim accepted minor commissions to investigate war contracts. Meanwhile Lincoln was becoming involved in a struggle with Congressional leaders in his own party over the possession of the war powers. Among other matters, his treatment of political prisoners was challenged by legislation skilfully steered through Congress by Senator Lyman Trumbull. The President wished to arrest citizens suspected of disloyal activities and hold them in prison for indefinite terms by means of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, but successive acts of Congress made specific provision that the civil courts should punish such activities. The President, believing that these courts could not be trusted, turned to Holt, a War Democrat, to forward his policy of executive (or military) control of political prisoners, and appointed him judge-advocate general of the army on September 3, 1862. Holt was thus the first incumbent of an office recently created by Congress, the duties of which consisted in receiving, revising, and causing to be recorded the proceedings of all courts martial, courts of inquiry, and military commissions.
In the phase of his work that touched the military commission the President saw the opportunity to extend his control of political prisoners. Holt therefore set to work to develop the jurisdiction of the military commission so that persons and offenses not subject to the jurisdiction of courts martial could be tried by a military body. The military authorities were thus enabled to arrest and keep in prison many persons who would otherwise have been released to the civil courts. The most conspicuous of the cases tried by military commission during Lincoln's lifetime were those of Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio and Lambdin P. Milligan and his associates in Indiana. The assassination of Lincoln aroused in the War Department an added zest for military trial of civilians. The individuals accused of having conspired with John Wilkes Booth against the lives of Lincoln and high officials of state were prosecuted by Judge-Advocate General Holt, assisted by John A. Bingham and Henry L. Burnett, before a military commission convened in Washington in the midst of much excitement and general public approval. Holt's credit with the Radical group soared in proportion to the certainty of his obtaining a conviction, and when he returned from his conference with President Johnson bearing the death sentence of Mrs. Surratt, his popularity stretched its bounds. The trial of Henry Wirz, ill-starred keeper of the Confederate prison, followed hard in the wake of the government's triumph in the case of the "assassins, " and Holt's plans for a further use of this convenient tribunal to convict Jefferson Davis and his cabinet of treason were checked only by a series of unexpected developments which undermined the confidence of many erstwhile supporters of the tribunal.
In December 1866 the United States Supreme Court pronounced against the jurisdiction of the military commission in the Milligan case. In 1864, "taking its opinion bodily from the argument of Judge-Advocate General Holt, " the Court had refused to review the proceedings of the military commission in the Vallandigham case, but the decision in the case of Ex parte Milligan was reached when the war was at an end and the necessity for the policy of military trial of civilians had terminated. Resentment toward the policy which had been steadily growing in Conservative circles as recent passions declined was unexpectedly fanned by the disclosure of gross perjury on the part of the government's witnesses in the trial of the Lincoln conspirators and of a regrettable credulousness on the part of the prosecution, which was the inevitable result of the method of trial.
Holt was accused of suppressing important evidence, notably Booth's diary, and of withholding from President Johnson the military commission's recommendation of clemency toward Mrs. Surratt. Confronted by these charges, which failed to discriminate between the intent and the error of judgment, he rose to the defense of his personal integrity. He published in the columns of the Washington Daily Morning Chronicle (September 3, 1866) a justification, later issued as a pamphlet: Vindication of Judge Advocate General Holt from the Foul Slanders of Traitors, Confessed Perjurers and Suborners, Acting in the Interest of Jefferson Davis (1866). This method of meeting opposition threw him more irrevocably into the Radical camp. When President Johnson joined the Conservative party, Holt's personal quarrel with him over the responsibility for the execution of Mrs. Surratt became a part of a larger political antagonism. Holt maintained thereafter his attempts to disprove a charge which had ceased to carry public significance with the change of political issues; thirteen years after his resignation (in 1875) as judge-advocate general, he published an article in the North American Review (July 1888), in a vain effort to revive interest in a subject still of vital moment to himself. His health became feebler and he lost his eyesight. Shortly after the advent of this last affliction he died in his solitary home at New Jersey Avenue and C Street, South East, Washington.
Holt was a member of the Democratic Party.
In his thirty-fifth year, with a considerable fortune, Holt retired from active practice and returned to Louisville to recuperate from tuberculosis, from which his wife, Mary Harrison, had died. He was married again, to Margaret, the daughter of Charles A. Wickliffe.
