From the 17 June 1865 issue of The New York Times.
Robert E. Lee's Application for Pardon
EXCELLENT EXAMPLES. Our dispatches from Washington state that among the thousands of late rebels who are sensible enough to give up their wicked folly and apply for pardon, are ROBERT E. LEE and ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS, one the General-in-Chief of the rebellion, the other the Vice-President of the abortive nation. Perhaps no two men of note in all the South would be received with anything like the consideration that these repentant sinners can command. In spite of his manifest treason, Gen. LEE has retained a strong hold upon Northern regard; he has held, notwithstanding his complicity in the treatment of Union prisoners, a sort of deified position, and has been tacitly expected from the herd of common traitors. That he should have the good sense to acknowledge his sins and ask forgiveness, is a hopeful sign. What the result may be is another matter, and one entirely within the province of President JOHNSON to determine.
The next, and a far more important individual, politically considered, is Mr. STEPHENS. We all know how vigorously he, at first, opposed the Southern appeal to arms, and with what vivid truth he prophesied the disastrous results to the South which have already come to pass. Very singularly, Mr. STEPHENS pleads in mitigation of his manifold rebellious sins that he was a reader and believer in the New-York Tribune, and from that sheet, in 1861, he imbibed the doctrine that the South had a perfect right to establish an independent government, if she chose to feel idssatisfied with the one then existing. Time has, on his part, rectified this hallucination, and Mr. STEPHENS now acknowledges how sadly he was misled by the journal in question, and comes respectfully to the confessional to ask forgiveness. We cannot doubt that, if such be the case, these great leaders of the exploded Confederacy will be met in a spirit generous toward the men who ask and honorable to the man who is to decide.