An incident occurred at this point in the history of the procedure, which should be related, although it interrupts somewhat the thread of the narrative. It was the disappearance of Mr. Black from among the counsel for the President, and the appearance of Mr. Groesbeck in his place. It was the gossip among the enemies of the President, and this gossip was sedulously spread abroad throughout the whole country by them, that Black on examining the case had become convinced of the President's guilt and had retired from the case for this reason, and for the further reason that he had become disgusted with the President's conduct. It did not become known until later that during this time Judge Black was counsel for a firm composed of one Patterson and one Marguiendo, which firm claimed a guano island in the West Indies, called Alta Vela, and that one of Judge Black's colleagues in the prosecution of the Patterson-Marguiendo claim, one J. W. Shaffer, procured a letter of the date of the 9th of March, 1868, that is one week after the House of Representatives had resolved to impeach the President, signed by General Benjamin F. Butler and approved by John A. Logan, J. A. Garfield, W. H. Koontz, J. K. Moorhead, Thaddeus Stevens, J. G. Blaine and John A. Bingham, some of them the most bitter among the President's enemies, which contained the statement that these gentlemen were clearly of the opinion that the citizens of the United States had the exclusive right to the guano beds of Alta Vela island, and an expression of their {178} surprise that the President had not upheld this right by force against the claims of the Dominican Government to the island, and caused this letter to be placed in the hands of the President on the 16th day of March, and that on the 17th or 18th of March Judge Black had an interview with the President and urged him to send an armed vessel of the United States to Alta Vela to take possession of the island, and that the President, viewing this approach to him at this time as an attempt to take advantage of his situation, refused, and that on the next day, the 19th of March, Judge Black declined to appear further as the President's counsel in the impeachment trial. It must have taken a good deal of self-control on the part of the President, in possession of all these facts, to keep them quietly to himself for more than a month from the time of Judge Black's retirement from his case, while his enemies were pointing the finger of a supposed triumphant scorn at him as being unworthy to have so honest a man as Judge Black among his counsel, and then to allow them to be given out only under provocation from the managers of the impeachment, taunting him with his treatment of Judge Black, and with Judge Black's withdrawal from his case. [Sidenote: The contents of the President's answer.]