Lawyer Accepts Pardon But Nothing Else

On March 22, 1877, Guy M. Bryan wrote the new President of the United States, who happened to be an old college classmate, to recommend a relative for the Supreme Court.

William Pitt Ballinger had no idea why the caretaker governor summoned him in the middle of May 1865. He was relieved to learn that Pendleton Murrah and Gen. John Bankhead Magruder had accepted the fall of the Confederacy as an irreversible fact.

The war was over, and they needed someone to negotiate a separate peace for Texas. For once Ballinger