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.  He stood alone in his declaration that the marshal first assaulted him, while the three judges and a dozen witnesses declared the very opposite.  His denial that he had assaulted the marshal with a deadly weapon was contradicted by the judges and others, who said that they saw him attempt to draw a knife in the court-room, which attempt, followed up as it was continually until successful, constituted an assault with that weapon.  To call his bowie-knife “a small sheath-knife,” and the outrageous conduct of his wife “acts of indiscretion;” to pretend that he lost his temper because he was assaulted “while making an honest effort to peaceably and quietly enforce the order of the court,” and finally to pretend that his wife had been “unnecessarily assaulted” in his presence, was all not only false, but simply absurd and ridiculous.

He said:  “I don’t want to stay in prison six months for an offense of which I am not guilty.  There is no way left except to appeal to the President.  The record of a court imports absolute verity, so I am not allowed to show that the record of the Circuit Court is absolutely false.  If you can help me in this matter you will confer on me the greatest possible favor.”

He told Montgomery that it had been suggested to him that one reason for Field’s conduct was his refusal to support the latter’s aspirations for the Presidency.  In this connection he made the following statement: