After three or four of our number had been tried, one of our lawyers read to us the plea, which he said he had read after the trial of each man, and would continue to read. It appeared to me to be a paper of great ability, and I cannot conceive how it could be successfully answered. Judge-Advocate-General Holt officially speaks of it as "This just and unanswerable presentation of the case." It was contended that our being dressed in citizen's clothes instead of Federal uniforms, which was the only unmilitary incident in the whole history, ought not to weigh against us, because this was nothing more than the Confederate government had expressly authorized in the case of their own soldiers, and that making war without uniform was practised by all the guerrillas in the Confederate service,--by some from necessity, and by others because they were thus able better to escape detection, and inflict more damage upon the enemy. A special instance was cited in which General Morgan had dressed a detachment of his partisans in Federal uniform, and passed them off as belonging to the Eighth Pennsylvania Cavalry, by which means he had succeeded in reaching and damaging a railroad within the Federal lines. Some of these very men were captured by the Federal government, and were, up to the present, held as prisoners of war. To decide that we were spies because we were captured without our uniform would not only provoke retaliation, but establish a principle far more dangerous to the Confederate than to the Federal forces. It was urged that we had stated the object of our expedition, which was a purely military one, and as such entirely within the laws of war. No evidence had been adduced to show that we were other than what we claimed. The plea closed by asking what good purpose could be served by sacrificing ignominiously the lives of so many brave men on a charge which had been conclusively disproved by the evidence, and which every member of the court knew to be really untrue. We were not spies in fact, and to call us such against their own convictions, and on merely technical and constructive grounds, would be as unwise as it was cruel. The plea did _not_ embrace one argument which added very much to our hopefulness, and which our lawyers considered likely to have a great weight with the court, though they dared not formally state it. McClellan had not yet been repulsed before Richmond, and the collapse of the Rebellion seemed imminent. The same rigid construction which was necessary to make us spies would assuredly render them all liable to the punishment of treason, and they were not in a position to make it prudent to invoke the utmost severities and extreme penalties of the laws of war. As I glance back over the lapse of twenty years it still seems to me strange that the decision of the court-martial in our favor could have been for a moment doubtful. But, alas! reason and sound judgment do not always rule in human affairs.