In the popular mind they were held amenable to the charge of piracy.
-- Twelfth, "All persons who, at the time when they seek to obtain amnesty and pardon, are in military, naval, or civil confinement, as prisoners of war, or persons detained for offenses of any kind either before or after conviction." Many prisoners in the custody of the Government were charged with acts of peculiar cruelty or perfidy, especially with the committal of personal outrages which did not, in any degree, affect the fortunes of the war, and were not therefore entitled to the excuse of having been the necessities of a bad cause.
-- Thirteenth, "All participants in the Rebellion, the estimated value of whose taxable property is over twenty thousand dollars." The intention of this exception was to draw the line between the men who could exert influence in their respective communities, and those who were necessarily led by others.

Fixing this partition between voluntary and involuntary guilt on the property line was a favorite measure with President Johnson.

It met with much opposition from the loyal as well as the disloyal.
A fourteenth class was excepted, not from the benefits of the proclamation of amnesty, but from the necessity of taking the oath demanded from the other classes.

Full pardon was granted, without further act on their part, to all who had taken the oath prescribed in President Lincoln's proclamation of December 8, 1863, and who had thenceforward kept and maintained the same inviolate.

The status of every man in the Confederate States was thus determined and proclaimed, -- a procedure which was intended to be the corner-stone of the work of reconstruction.
Standing naked and unqualified these thirteen exceptions might seem to imply a harshness of treatment inconsistent with the spirit of forgiveness and generosity upon which Mr.Seward had been insisting, and to which the President had apparently assented.