Five days after he had been imprisoned, to wit, September 8, Terry
wrote a letter to his friend Zachariah Montgomery at Washington,
then Assistant Attorney-General for the Interior Department under the
Cleveland Administration, in which he asked his aid to obtain a pardon
from the President. Knowing that it would be useless to ask this upon
the record of his conduct as shown by the order for his commitment,
he resorted to the desperate expedient of endeavoring to overcome
that record by putting his own oath to a false statement of the
facts, against the statement of the three judges, made on their own
knowledge, as eye-witnesses, and supported by the affidavits of court
officers, lawyers, and spectators.
To Montgomery he wrote:
"I have made a plain statement of the facts which occurred in
the court, and upon that propose to ask the intervention of
the President, and I request you to see the President; tell
him all you know of me, and what degree of credit should be
given to a statement by me upon my own knowledge of the facts.
When you read the statement I have made you will be satisfied
that the statement in the order of the court is false."
He then proceeded to tell his story as he told it in his petition to
the Circuit Court. His false representations as to the assault he made
upon the marshal, and as to his alleged provocation therefor, were
puerile in the extreme.
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