On the other hand, if Pitman knew of the paper, he certainly would not have voluntarily left it out of his book for the reason, he himself felt constrained afterwards to assign, that "it formed no part of the proceedings, was not mentioned in open session;" since he had given room to so much matter, not of record, solely for the purpose of adding interest and completeness to his work, and this critical document could add so much to the one and its absence detract so much from the other. Moreover, in December, the report of the Judge-Advocate-General to the Secretary of War appeared, in which the trial was reviewed, and to which the report to the President, dated July 5th, 1865, was appended. But in both the existence of the petition was ignored. Whatever may have been the true inwardness of these significant omissions, their inevitable effect was to convince the mass of the people of the non-existence of a recommendation to mercy; and the petition of the five officers might have reposed in silence in the secret archives of the War Department, had it not been for the alienation of the President from the party which had elected him, his gradual gravitation towards his own section, and finally his revolt from the sway of Stanton. During this period, the rumors that the Court had recommended Mrs. Surratt to the clemency of the Executive and that the paper had never reached the Executive, coupled with stories that from the close of the trial to the hour of the execution the President had been kept under confinement and in a state of semi-stupefaction by a band of reckless partisans who were bound there should be no clemency, grew louder and louder. But they were never traceable to any reliable source. In fact, the coolness which had been for a long time growing between Andrew Johnson and Edwin M. Stanton did not break out into an open rupture until as late as the month of March, 1867. The other members of the Cabinet, which Johnson had inherited from Lincoln, who disagreed with Johnson on the question of Reconstruction, Harlan, Dennison and Speed, resigned, on account of that disagreement, in the summer of 1866; but Stanton stayed on. When the Tenure of Office bill was passed by the Congress in February, 1867, the Secretary of War was still so much in accord with the President as to unite with the other members of the reconstructed Cabinet in an emphatic condemnation of the bill as unconstitutional, and to be asked by the President to draft his veto message.