[cowboyway]

You're dodging the point (as usual). The point is that the federal government didn't want a trial. And why not? Because it would have exposed disHonest Abe as the war criminal that he was and would have upheld the right of secession.

President Johnson, Lincoln's successor, thought the easiest way out would be to pardon Davis, as he had pardoned many other Confederates. But Davis refused, saying, "To ask for a pardon would be a confession of guilt." He wanted a trial to have the issue of secession decided by a court of law - where it should have been decided to begin with - instead of on battlefields. Most Southerners wanted the same.

Also read: The Trial of Jefferson Davis, An Interesting Constitutional Question

[BroJoeK]

cowboyway: "You're dodging the point (as usual).
The point is that the federal government didn't want a trial."

No, I dodged nothing, and pointed clearly to the facts.
The chief judge of the district court where the case was brought, Justice Salmon Chase, wanted the case dismissed on technicalities, another judge wanted Davis convicted, so the case would end up in the Supreme Court, where Chase was the newly appointed Chief Justice.

But had the case been brought in a different court, say, for example, in Boston, there can be no doubt Davis would have been convicted.

President Johnson's pardon of Davis closed the case, and is, imho, what Lincoln would have done.

cowboyway: "Because it would have exposed disHonest Abe as the war criminal that he was and would have upheld the right of secession."

Total complete Lost Causer wet-dream rubbish.
That's because the same Justice Salmon Chase, who wished to dismiss treason charges against Jefferson Davis also lead the majority opinion in Texas v White just four months later (April 1869).

In Texas v White, Chase ruled, in effect, that unilateral, unapproved declarations of secession were not constitutional or legal, and therefore were acts of constitutionally proscribed rebellion, insurrection and "domestic violence".