The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt Part 10

But murder, also, in the President of the United States, who appointed the court, approved its findings, and commanded the execution of its sentence.

He stands before the law in the same position as though, sweeping aside all empty forms, he had seized a sword and with his own hand cut off the head of the woman, without the mockery of a trial. In our frame of government, there is surely no room for such a twi-formed barbarian-despot, as a President having the power to pick out from the army, of which he is the commander-in-chief, the members of a court to try and punish with death, at his option, any one of the citizens, for an abortive attempt on his own life.

And it was murder, not only in the case of the President; he, too, but with scarcely audible voice, might plead the coercion of his situation--sitting as he did in the seat of the murdered Lincoln.

But it was murder, also, in the Secretary of War, who initiated the iniquitous process, pushed on the relentless prosecution, shut his own ears and the ears of the President to all pleas for mercy, presided like a Moloch over the scaffold, and kept the key of the charnel-house, where, beside the unpitied carca.s.ses of the reputed ruffians forced upon her in her ordeal of torture and in the hour of death, the slaughtered lady lay mouldering in her shroud. Here, at least, the plea of mitigation exhales in a cry like that of Payne, "I was mad!"

Weigh the extenuating circ.u.mstances in whatever scale you may; extend as much mercy as possible to those who showed no mercy in their day of power--still, the offense of every one and all, who had hand, part or lot in this work of death, contains every element which, under the most rigorous definition of the law, makes up the Crime of Murder. The killing was there. The unlawful killing was there. The premeditated design to effect death was there. The belief of the perpetrators, that they had a right to kill, or that they were commanded to kill by an overruling power, before a court of law avails not a whit. Ignorance of the const.i.tution as well as the law excuses no man, be he civilian or soldier, President or a.s.sa.s.sin, War-Minister or Payne.

Murder it essentially was, and as such it should be denounced to the present and future generations.

Garrett Davis told no more than the exact truth when he declared in his place in the Senate of the United States:

"There is no power in the United States, in time of war or peace, that can legitimately and const.i.tutionally try a civilian who is not in the naval or military service of the United States, or in the militia of a State in the actual service of the United States, by a court-martial or by a military commission. It is a usurpation, and a flagitious usurpation of power for any military court to try a civilian, and if any military court tries a civilian and sentences him to death and he is executed under the sentence, the whole court are nothing but murderers, and they may be indicted in the State courts where such military murders are perpetrated; and if the laws were enforced firmly and impartially every member of such a court would be convicted, sentenced and punished as a murderer."

Although the actual guilt of any of the victims const.i.tutes no legal defense to this fearful charge, yet as the unquestioning obedience which the soldier yields, as a matter of course, to the commands of his superior officer must alleviate, if it do not wipe away, the guilt of the members of the Commission, in the forum of morals; so the ascertainment that the sufferers on the scaffold and in prison, in fact, deserved their doom, cannot but blunt the edge of our condemnation of the iniquity of the trial, as well as weaken our pity for the condemned and our sense of shame over the tyrannous acts of the government.

A word or two, therefore, will be appropriate in respect to the sufficiency of the testimony to establish the guilt of the accused.

I. As to Arnold and O'Laughlin, it may be said in one emphatic word, that there was no evidence at all against them of complicity in the plot to kill. The letter of Arnold to Booth shows, when fairly construed, that, if the writer had conspired with the actor, he conspired to abduct; and, also, for the time being, even that conspiracy he had abandoned. He was at Fort Monroe for the two weeks prior to the a.s.sa.s.sination. His confession, used on the trial against himself not only but also against O'Laughlin because he was mentioned in it as present at a meeting of the conspirators, was a confession only of a conspiracy to abduct which had been given up. The condemnation of these two men was brought about by the conduct of Judge Bingham, to which we have drawn attention, in systematically shutting his eyes to the existence of any conspiracy to capture, and employing the letter and confession as proof that both these men were guilty of conspiracy to murder.

II. As to Dr. Mudd, the evidence leaves it doubtful whether or not he recognized Booth under his disguise on the night he set his broken leg, and therefore whether he may have been an accessory after the fact or not; but the testimony of the informer Weichman, by which chiefly if not solely the prosecution sought to implicate the doctor in the conspiracy to murder, was greatly damaged, if not completely broken down, by the proof on the part of the defense that Dr. Mudd had not been in Was.h.i.+ngton from November or December, 1864, until after the a.s.sa.s.sination.

III. As to Payne, his guilt of the a.s.sault on Seward in complicity with Booth was clear, and confessed by himself. He was but twenty years of age, of weak mind, entirely dominated by the superior intellect and will of Booth. He claimed he acted under the command of his captain. He was so stolidly indifferent during the trial as to raise suspicion of his sanity, and he repeatedly expressed his wish for the termination of the trial so that he might cease to live.

IV. As to the boy Herold, it was manifest that, as the mere tool and puppet of Booth, he was acquainted beforehand with the design of his master to kill the President, but there is no evidence that he aided or abetted Booth in the actual a.s.sa.s.sination in any way except to partic.i.p.ate in his flight after he had got out of Was.h.i.+ngton.

V. As to Atzerodt, for whom there appears to have been no pity or sign of relenting, it is nevertheless a fact, that the testimony to his lying in wait for Andrew Johnson is so feeble as to be almost farcical. The poor German was a coward and never went near Johnson. There is no circ.u.mstance in the evidence inconsistent with his own confession, that he was in the plot to capture, knew nothing of the design to murder until 8 o'clock on the evening of the 14th, and then refused to enact the part a.s.signed him by Booth.

Indeed, it would appear as if the Commission, by a sort of proleptic vision of the future course of the President in his desperate struggle with the Congress, in grim irony actually hung Atzerodt because he did _not_ kill Andrew Johnson.

VI. And as to Mrs. Surratt, the only witnesses of importance against her are Weichman and Lloyd. Without their testimony the case for the prosecution could not stand for a moment. Weichman, a boarder and intimate in her house, the college chum of her son, and, equally with him, the a.s.sociate of Payne, Atzerodt, Herold and Booth, who, frightened almost to death at the outlook, was swearing, under a desperate strain, to clear his own skirts from the conspiracy and thus save his threatened neck:--Weichman's testimony before the Commission, even at such a pa.s.s, is for some reason quite vague and indefinite, and only becomes deadly when supplemented by Lloyd's. This man Lloyd it was who, in fact, furnished the only bit of evidence directly connecting Mrs. Surratt with the crime. He testifies to two conversations he had with her--one on the 11th and the other on the 14th of April--when she alluded to the weapons left weeks before at the hotel at Surrattsville owned by her and kept by Lloyd--on the 11th, that the "shooting-irons" would be wanted soon; on the 14th, that they would be called for that night. Lloyd, himself, however, admits, and it is otherwise clearly shown, that on the 14th he was so drunk as hardly to be able to stand up. Lloyd, also, was deeply implicated in the conspiracy to capture if not to a.s.sa.s.sinate. He had aided the fugitive a.s.sa.s.sins to escape, had kept their weapons hidden in his house, and he had, for two days after his arrest, denied all knowledge of Booth and Herold's stopping at his hotel at midnight after the murder. He had been placed in solitary confinement and threatened with death. His nervous system, undermined by debauchery, gave way; his terrors were startling to witness and drove him well-nigh mad, and, at last, in a moment of distraction, he turned against Mrs. Surratt and her son. Like Weichman's, his, also, was the frenzied effort of a terror-stricken wretch to avoid impending death by pus.h.i.+ng someone forward to take his place. Reverdy Johnson, at the close of his plea to the jurisdiction of the court, let fall the following words, no less weighty for their truth than their force:

"This conclusion in regard to these witnesses must be, in the minds of the Court, and is certainly strongly impressed upon my own, that, if the facts which they themselves state as to their connection and intimacy with Booth and Payne are true, their knowledge of the purpose to commit the crimes and their partic.i.p.ation in them, is much more satisfactorily established than the alleged knowledge and partic.i.p.ation of Mrs. Surratt."

Moreover, the testimony of both these witnesses, suborned as they were alike by their terrors and their hopes, is perfectly reconcilable with the alternative hypothesis, either that the woman in what she did was an innocent dupe of the fascinating actor, or that she was unaware of the sudden transformation of the long-pending plot to capture, of which she might have been a tacit well-wisher, into an extemporaneous plot to kill.

Much stress was laid by Mr. Bingham on her solemn denial of any prior acquaintance with Payne when confronted with him on the night of her arrest. But it is more than probable that the non-recognition was unsimulated, because of the disguise and pitiable plight of the desperado, who had been hidden in the mud of the suburbs three days and three nights, and, also, because the non-recognition was shared with her by the other ladies of the house. Besides, that a woman, caught in the toils in which Booth and her own son had unwittingly involved her, under the terror of recent arrest and imminent imprisonment, should have shrunk from any acknowledgment of this midnight intruder, even to the extent of falsehood, certainly is in no wise incompatible with innocence.

These are the only circ.u.mstances by which Mrs. Surratt is brought nearer than conjectural connection with the a.s.sa.s.sination, and the force of these is greatly weakened by the testimony in her defense.

It is neither necessary, nor relevant to this exposition, to enter into a lengthy discussion upon the _pros_ and _cons_ of her case. Her innocence has been demonstrated in a more decisive manner by subsequent events, and stands tacitly admitted by the acts of the officers of the government. Few impartial hearers would have said then, and no impartial readers will say now, that the testimony against her is so strong as to render her innocence a mere fanciful or even an improbable hypothesis. No one can say that a jury, to a trial by which she was ent.i.tled under the Const.i.tution, would have p.r.o.nounced her guilty, and every one will admit that had her sentence been commuted to imprisonment for life, as five of her judges recommended, she would have been pardoned with Arnold, Spangler and Mudd, and might have been living with her daughter to-day. The circ.u.mstances of the whole tragedy warrant the a.s.sertion that, had John H. Surratt been caught as were the other prisoners, he, and not she, would have been put upon trial; he, and not she, would have been condemned to death; he, and not she, would have died by the rope. If he was innocent, then much more was she. Mary E. Surratt, I repeat, suffered the death of shame, not for any guilt of her own, but as a vicarious sacrifice for the presumed guilt of her fugitive son.

PART II.

THE VINDICATION.

CHAPTER I.

SETTING ASIDE THE VERDICT.

When the President of the United States, the Secretary of War, the Military Commission, the Judge-Advocates, and the Executioner-General had buried the woman against whose life the whole military power of the Government, fresh from its triumph over a gigantic rebellion, had been levelled;--buried her broken body deep beneath the soil of the prison-yard, in close contact with the bodies of confessed felons; flattened the earth over her grave, replaced the pavement of stone, locked the door of entrance to the charnel-house and placed the key in the keeping of the stern Secretary;--they may have imagined that the iniquity of the whole proceeding was hidden forever.

But, _horribile dictu!_ the ghost of Mary E. Surratt would not down. It troubled the breast of the witness Weichman. It haunted the precincts of the Bureau of Military Justice. It pursued Bingham into the House of Representatives. It blanched the laurels of the great War Minister.

Politics, history and the very vicissitudes of human events seemed subservient to the vindication of this humble victim.

Hardly had the delivery of the prisons of Was.h.i.+ngton, which followed the close of the trial, taken place, before the man who, as he himself swore, always had been treated as a son by the woman he betrayed, began to make advances to her sorrowing friends. He pretended to make confession of his perjury. He told a friend that his testimony would have been very much more favorable had it not been dictated to him by the officers who had him in charge; that the meeting of Lloyd and Mrs. Surratt was accidental, as she and he (Weichman) had already started for home before Lloyd returned, and only turned back because the buggy was discovered to be broken. The traitor soon discovered that he made no headway by such disclosures, but only met with a sterner repulse and a deeper loathing. His troubled soul then turned to another quarter. It has been stated that his testimony on the trial was somewhat indefinite and inconclusive. Complaints had been uttered by the officers conducting the prosecution. It was proved upon a subsequent occasion that one of these officers had actually threatened the witness that he would hang as an accomplice in the a.s.sa.s.sination did he not make his evidence more satisfactory. It appeared, also, that the Secretary of War had promised to protect and take care of him. Driven back by Mrs. Surratt's friends from his attempt at propitiation, Weichman resolved that he would yet earn his reward by retouching his former testimony so as to make it more definite and telling. He saw, at last, that to save himself from everlasting ignominy he must, as far as in him lay, make sure of the guilt of his victim. Actuated by these or similar motives, he, on the 11th day of August, 1865, wrote out, and swore to, a statement in which he, by a suspicious exercise of memory, detailed conversations with Mrs. Surratt and significant incidents, all pointing to complicity with Booth, no mention of which had been made on the trial, and which this candid witness stated "_had come to my_ (his) _recollection since the rendition of my_ (his) _testimony_."

This affidavit, containing (if true) more evidence of the guilt of Mrs.

Surratt than his whole testimony on the trial, but, on the other hand, drawn up to suit himself without fear of cross-examination--he transmitted to Colonel Burnett, who, as though he, too, distrusted the sufficiency of the evidence against the dead woman as it had been actually given on the trial, was careful to append the _ex parte_ statement to the published report.

Weichman, at length, gets his reward in the shape of a clerks.h.i.+p in the Custom House at Philadelphia.

But the final breaking down of the fabric of testimony against the leaders of the rebellion, as instigators of the a.s.sa.s.sination, threw consternation into the Bureau of Military Justice and the Cabinet. Jefferson Davis was still confined in Fort Monroe, and two companies of United States soldiers, who had fought and shed each other's blood in their eagerness to be the first to seize the fugitive, were already quarreling over the $100,000 reward for his arrest as an accomplice of Booth. Clement C. Clay, for whose arrest $25,000 reward had been offered, as another accomplice, was also still in the hands of the authorities. Jacob Thompson, George N.

Sanders and Beverly Tucker, for the arrest of each of whom $25,000 had been offered, were still at large. Every one of these men, it should be borne in mind, had been p.r.o.nounced guilty by the military board which had condemned Mrs. Surratt. John H. Surratt, her son, for whose capture an enormous reward had been offered both by the Government and by the City of Was.h.i.+ngton, and whom the Military Commission had condemned as the go-between of the President of the Confederacy and his agents in Canada in the instigation of the murderous conspiracy, and also as the active aider and abettor of both Booth and Payne in the perpetration of their b.l.o.o.d.y crimes; he, too, had so far eluded all efforts to find even his whereabouts. It is only fair to presume that the astute lawyers connected with the Bureau of Military Justice must have had serious misgivings from the first, concerning the testimony of the spies, Montgomery, Conover and others, going to implicate Davis and the Canadian Rebels in the a.s.sa.s.sination. Such testimony was hearsay or secondary evidence at best; and they could have cherished no hope that such loose talk and the fragmentary repet.i.tion of letters heard read would ever be allowed to pa.s.s muster by an impartial judge in a civil court. And they had reason to believe that public opinion would not tolerate the experiment of another military commission. As early as July, 1865, an attempt was made to buy the papers of Jacob Thompson, among which it was supposed were the criminatory letters of Davis; and Attorney-General Speed was dispatched with $10,000 government money to effect the purchase. William C. Cleary, for whom $10,000 reward had been offered as one of the conspirators, and who had just been found guilty by the Military Commission, was to deliver the letters and receive the money. Speed met Cleary at the Clifton House, but the latter, in the meanwhile, had seen in a newspaper a portion of the testimony before the Military Commission implicating him, and he utterly refused to give up the papers, as he had to rely upon them, as he said, to vindicate himself. The shadows thus began to darken over the credibility of the corps of spies that the Bureau had employed. Indictments for perjury against Montgomery, Conover and other paid witnesses began to be talked of. Friends, and enemies as well, of the imprisoned ex-President began to clamor for his trial or release. Even the implicated agents in Canada showed a bold front, and professed a willingness to meet the terrible charge if guaranteed a trial by jury. A jury! A jury of twelve men! Trial by jury! If there was anything that could shake the souls of the members of the Bureau of Military Justice, it was to hear of trial by jury. It was a d.a.m.nable inst.i.tution. It impeded justice. It screened the guilty. It was beyond control. It could not be relied on to convict. And yet it was to this tribunal they foresaw they must come.

In September, 1865, embarra.s.sing news arrived at the Department of State.

The consul at Liverpool informed the American Minister at London that John H. Surratt was in England and could be extradited at any time. Here was the villain who was, with Booth, the prime mover of the conspiracy and the active accomplice of Booth and Payne in their work of blood. At least, so the Military Commission found, who hung his mother in his stead. And yet the United States Government informed Mr. Adams, and Mr. Adams so informed the consul, that the Government did not intend to prosecute. On the 24th of November ensuing, the War Department, by general order, revoked the "rewards offered for the arrest of Jacob Thompson, Beverly Tucker, George N. Sanders, William S. Cleary and John H. Surratt." Where now was the redoubtable Bingham who, over and over again, had a.s.sured the Commission he guided of the unmistakable guilt of all these persons? The whole theory of the Secretary of War, which he had preconceived in the midst of the panic following the a.s.sa.s.sination, that the murder of the President was the outcome of a deep-laid and widespread conspiracy, of which Jefferson Davis was the head and Booth and Payne the b.l.o.o.d.y hands--this theory, which the Bureau of Military Justice, aided by Baker and his detectives, had so sedulously labored to establish, and which Judge Bingham had so persistently pressed upon the nine military men who composed the Court, to the exclusion of any such hypothesis as a plot to capture--this preconceived theory all at once fell to the ground. The perjured spies, who had been the willing and paid tools to build it up, were about to be unmasked and their poisoned fangs drawn. After no great interval, Conover was, in fact, convicted of perjury in another case, and sentenced to imprisonment in the Albany penitentiary. The whole prosecution of the so-called conspirators, from its inception to its tragic close, turned out to have been founded on an enormous blunder. The findings of the Commission were falsified. Whatever the guilt of the doomed victims, they were not guilty of the crime of which they were convicted. The terrible conspiracy, stretching from Richmond to Canada, and from Canada back to Was.h.i.+ngton, involving statesmen and generals, and crowning the wickedness of rebellion with the Medusa-head of a.s.sa.s.sination, shrank into the comparatively common-place and isolated offense of the murder of Lincoln and the a.s.sault upon Seward, suddenly concocted by Booth, on the afternoon of the 14th of April, in wild despair over the collapse of the rebellion.

In such a predicament, the hanging of Mrs. Surratt could not have been a pleasing reminiscence to the Secretary of War, to Judge-Advocate Holt, or to the hangers-on of the Bureau of Military Justice. At such a moment they certainly had no use for her son John.

On the 12th of November, Preston King, who held one side of the door of the White House while the daughter of Mrs. Surratt pleaded for admission, walked off a ferry-boat into the Hudson River, with two bags of shot in the pockets of his overcoat, and was seen no more. This event might have pa.s.sed as a startling coincidence, to be interpreted according to the feelings of the hearer, had it not been followed by the suicide of Senator James S. Lane, who held the other side of the door, and who, on the 11th day of July, 1866, blew his brains out on the plains of Kansas. That these two men had together stood between the President and the filial suppliant for mercy, in a case of life and death, and that, then, within a year, both had perished by their own hands, aroused whispers in the air, caused a holding of the breath and a listening, as if to catch the faint but increasing cry of innocent blood, coming up from the ground.

When the Congress met in December, 1865, the leaders of the dominant party were in a fierce and bitter humor. The Rebellion had been suppressed, the South subjugated and its chiefs captured, yet no one--not even the arch-traitor Davis--had been hung. And, more deeply exasperating still, the man they had elected Vice-President, and who had thus succeeded the martyred Lincoln, upon whom their hopes had been fixed to make treason odious, to hang the leaders higher than Haman, and to set aside the humane policy of reconstruction his predecessor had already outlined and subst.i.tute a more radical and retributive method--this man, whose precious life had been providentially spared from the pistol of the a.s.sa.s.sin to be the Moses of the colored people, and for harboring any such blasphemous purpose as lying in wait for him, a Court, appointed by himself and whose sentence he himself had approved, had hung a bewildered German--why this man had already shown himself a renegade, was bent on a general amnesty, appeared to have forgotten the a.s.sa.s.sination, was already hobn.o.bbing with southern traitors, and was attempting to carry out a policy of reconstruction in the South, the result of which could be nothing less than the dethronement of the party who had brought the war for the Union to a triumphant end. These men resolved that such treachery should be balked at whatever cost. Ignorant as yet of the tainted character and of the break-down of the evidence adduced to show Confederate complicity in the a.s.sa.s.sination, the House of Representatives pa.s.sed resolutions calling for the trial of Jefferson Davis for treason and for the other crimes with which he was charged; the ill-starred Bingham, once again in the House, insisting that the Confederate Chief should be put upon trial before a military tribunal for the same offense of which his former court had found him guilty in his absence. The House appointed a committee to investigate the complicity of Davis and others in the a.s.sa.s.sination, and in July, 1866, through its chairman, Mr. Boutwell, made a report, followed by a resolution, "that it is the duty of the executive department of the Government to proceed with the investigation of the facts connected with the a.s.sa.s.sination of the late President without unnecessary delay, that Jefferson Davis and others named in the proclamation of President Johnson of May 2d, 1865, may be put upon trial," which was adopted _nem. con._ In this action, little as they reeked, these radical politicians were the unconscious tools of that Nemesis which stalks after lawlessness and triumphant crime. This resolution, and the news that John H. Surratt had been betrayed by one of his comrades in the Papal Zouaves into the hands of the Roman authorities, who had detained him to await the order of the American Government, and that the prisoner had escaped from his guard and fled to Malta, forced the Department of War to revoke the order of November, 1865, withdrawing the reward for the arrest of the fugitive.

Meanwhile the great contest over the reconstruction of the South waxed fiercer and fiercer. Congress, during this session, became farther and farther alienated from the President, so that when that body met in December, 1866, the reckless majority in both Houses united in the resolve to get rid of Andrew Johnson, not indeed by the b.l.o.o.d.y method employed by Booth, but by the no less efficient, though more insidious and less bold, expedient of impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate. No sooner had Congress convened than Mr. Boutwell made an attack upon the Executive for its dilatory action in the arrest of John H. Surratt, stating that he had reason to believe that the Government knew where the a.s.sa.s.sin was the May before. A committee appointed to investigate the matter made a report just at the close of the session obliquely censuring the Executive Department for its lack of diligence in effecting the arrest. On January 7th, 1867, the famous Ashley introduced his resolutions impeaching Andrew Johnson. The Judiciary Committee, to which they were referred, took testimony during the winter and made a report at the close of the session that it was unable to complete the investigation, and handed it over to the Fortieth Congress. That Congress met immediately at the close of the Thirty-ninth, and the testimony already taken was referred to the Judiciary Committee of its House, which proceeded with the matter during the spring and summer, and in November, 1867, after the recess; with the final result of a failure to pa.s.s the resolution of impeachment reported by a bare majority of the committee.

In process of this investigation all sorts of accusations and charges were made against the President. His enemies now employed the very same weapons against him which had been employed to convict the alleged a.s.sa.s.sins of his predecessor and the alleged conspirators against his own life. General Baker and his detectives, Conover and his allies, appear once more upon the scene. They actually invaded the privileged quarters of the White House and stationed spies in the very private apartments of the President.

This time, however, they are ready to swear, and in fact do swear, not to having seen letters from Jefferson Davis to his agents in Canada advising a.s.sa.s.sination, but letters from Andrew Johnson to Davis squinting in that direction. They actually charged the President with being an accomplice in the a.s.sa.s.sination of Abraham Lincoln. Forgetting that a human being had been hung for lying in wait to kill Andrew Johnson as a part of a general conspiracy to murder the heads of the Government, these desperate men propose to impeach the President for being an accomplice in his own attempted murder. Ashley openly denounced him, in the House of Representatives on the 7th of March, 1867, as "the man who came into the Presidency through the door of a.s.sa.s.sination," and alluded to the "dark suspicion which crept over the minds of men as to his complicity in the a.s.sa.s.sination plot," and "the mysterious connection between death and treachery which this case presents." Ashley had private interviews in the jail with Conover and Cleaver, who were confined there for their crimes, and they a.s.sured him of the guilt of Andrew Johnson. They furnished him with memoranda and letters purporting to show that Andrew Johnson and Booth were in communication with each other before the murder of Lincoln, and that Booth had said before his death that if Andrew Johnson dared go back on him he would have him hung higher than Haman. To such preposterous stuff, from professional perjurers, did the zealous Ashley seriously incline.

It was during this investigation that the evidence given by Secretaries Seward and Stanton and by Attorney-Generals Speed and Stansbery, demonstrated the utter futility of an attempt to establish complicity in the a.s.sa.s.sination on the part of Davis, Thompson and the rest, by witnesses who had been shown, in other cases, to be unworthy of a moment's belief.

While the impeachers were in the very act of pursuing the President as an accomplice in the murder of Abraham Lincoln, while the mighty Bingham, who had so eloquently defended President Johnson before the Military Commission against the charge of usurpation of power, and so bitterly denounced Jefferson Davis for alluding to Johnson as "The Beast," now, with a complete change of tune, was clamoring for the impeachment of "his beloved Commander-in-Chief;"--Jefferson Davis, himself, is brought, by direction of the Secretary of War, in obedience to a writ of habeas corpus, before the United States Court at Richmond; there, without a word of remonstrance, transferred to the custody of the civil authority; and forthwith discharged on bail, Horace Greeley, who had never seen him before, becoming one of his bondsmen. Since that day in May, 1867, no attempt has ever been made to call the ex-President of the Southern Confederacy to account as one of the conspirators in the murder of Lincoln. Clay had been let go on parole as long before as April 19th, 1866; his property was restored to him in February, 1867; and proceedings under an indictment found against him for treason and conspiracy, indefinitely suspended on the 26th of March of the same year. Thompson and Sanders and Tucker returned to their country and appeared unmolested amongst us. Jefferson Davis died recently full of years and honors. At the death of Thompson, the flags of the Interior Department were lowered half-mast. Tucker was appointed to office not long ago by President Harrison. And all this, notwithstanding the Judge-Advocate had a.s.sured the Military Commission that the guilt of these men was as clear as the guilt of Booth or of Surratt, notwithstanding the Military Commission under his guidance so found, and, had these men been present before that tribunal, would doubtless have hung them on the same scaffold with Mrs. Surratt.

It was during this same investigation, that the diary of Booth, which had been so carefully concealed by the War Department and the Bureau of Military Justice from the Military Commission, was unearthed. Its publication produced a profound sensation, as it made clear the reality of a plan to capture the President; a plan, which had been blasted by the collapse of the Rebellion and, only at the last moment and without consultation, arbitrarily superseded by a hurried resolution to kill. When produced by Judge Holt before the committee, its mutilated condition gave rise to a terrible suspicion. Holt, himself, and Stanton were confident the book was in the same condition as when they first saw it. Colonel Conger, also, though not positive, thought it was unchanged since he took it from the dead body of Booth. But, to the great wonder of everybody, the distinguished detective, General Baker, testified, and stuck to it with emphasis when recalled, that, when he first examined the diary before it was lodged with the Secretary of War, there were no leaves missing and no stubs, although the diary, as exhibited to the committee, showed by means of the stubs remaining that sixteen or twenty leaves had been cut or torn out. The disclosures made by the production of the diary, together with the fact of its suppression, stirred the soul of General Butler; and, in this way, it came about that the ghost of Mrs. Surratt stalked one day into the House of Representatives. Judge Bingham, in his rollicking way, was upbraiding General Butler for having voted for Jefferson Davis fifty times as his candidate for President, and slurring his war record by calling him "the hero of Fort Fisher;" when, suddenly, at the petrific retort of his adversary that "the only victim of the gentleman's prowess was an innocent woman hung upon the scaffold!" the spectre stood before him, forcing, as from "white lips and chattering teeth," the exclamation of Macbeth: "Thou canst not say I did it!"

"Look to the true and brave and honorable men who found the facts upon their oaths and p.r.o.nounced the judgment!" he retorted, clutching at the self-soothing sophistry of the murderer of Banquo, ignoring the fact that he himself was a part of the tribunal and virtually dictated the judgment.

Another discovery was made by the Judiciary Committee in the "Article"

which, as recorded in his diary, Booth had left behind him for publication in the National Intelligencer. John Matthews, a fellow actor and an intimate friend of the a.s.sa.s.sin, testified that on the afternoon of the 14th of April Booth had met him in the street and left with him a letter directed to that newspaper, to be delivered in the morning. The witness was on the stage of the theatre that night at the time the fatal shot was fired, and, in the confusion that followed, he called to mind the communication. Hurrying to his lodgings he opened the envelope, read the letter, and, fearing to be compromised by the possession of such a doc.u.ment, burnt it up. The substance of the letter, as near as Matthews could recollect, was that for a long time he (Booth) had devoted his money, time and energies to the accomplishment of an end, but had been baffled. "The moment has at length arrived when my plans must be changed.

The world may censure me for what I do; but I am sure that posterity will justify me." And the communication was signed (all the names being in the hand-writing of Booth): "Men who love their country better than gold or life. J. W. Booth, ---- Payne, ---- Atzerodt, ---- Herold."

The significance of this piece of testimony was negative. The name of Surratt was not there.