Kitabı oku: «The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt», sayfa 10
Weichman “came also:” this time with his story carefully elaborated, touched and retouched here and there, and written down beforehand. He had been engaged for three or four months in aiding the prosecution, had prepared a carefully detailed statement for the use of the Assistant District Attorney, and now openly acknowledged that “his character was at stake” in this trial, and that he “intended to do all he could to help the prosecution.” He had conned over and over again the report of his evidence on the Conspiracy Trial, had corrected it to meet objections subsequently made and to eliminate discrepancies and contradictions, and had thus brought its several disjointed parts into some logical sequence; he then had added to it the incidents and conversations disclosed for the first time in the affidavit sent to Colonel Burnett, which was appended to the published report of the trial, to which allusion has been made; and, now, in the final delivery of his deadly charge, coolly averring that his memory was much more distinct now than at the time of the former trial two years ago, he, with a superadded concentrated venom, flavored his narrative with a few damning incidents never heard of before – one, the most poisonous of all, that on the evening of the fatal 14th, while Booth was about his murderous work, Mrs. Surratt was pacing her parlor floor begging her pious boarder “to pray for her intentions.” This time, however, the witness did not escape unscathed. When he emerged from the skillful hands of Mr. Bradley, his malicious and sordid animus laid bare, – his self-contradictions, his studied revisions, his purposeful additions to his testimony, exposed – his intimacy with the conspirators, his terrified repentance, his abject self-surrender and his cowardly eagerness to shift his peril upon the head of his protectress, – and then his simulated remorse and his later recantation – all made clear – he was an object of loathing to gentlemen; a stumbling block to the philanthropist; to the indifferent, an enigma; and to the common man, a perpetual provocation to a breach of the peace.
Twelve witnesses testified that they saw John H. Surratt in Washington on the 14th of April, only one of whom had testified to that effect on the other trial. It is curious now to discern how the memory of the witnesses, it may be unconsciously, swerved under pressure toward the mark of identification. The witnesses for the defense established that the prisoner was in Elmira on the afternoon of the 13th, made it more than probable he was there on the 14th, and almost certain he was there on the 15th. The prosecution, under the force of this proof, suddenly conceded his presence in Elmira on the 13th, and then, by the accident of a special train and the testimony of a ferryman whom the notorious Montgomery unearthed in the very crisis of the emergency, contrived with much straining to land him in Washington at 10 o’clock on the morning of the fatal day. Any calm observer, reading the account of the trial now, can see plainly that the truth is, the prisoner had not been in Washington since the 3rd of April.
The production of Booth’s diary by the prosecuting officers was forced upon them by the popular indignation over its suppression before the Military Commission; otherwise, it is clear they would not have been guilty of such a mistake in tactics as its introduction as a part of the case for the United States. Its opening sentences – “Until to-day nothing was ever thought of sacrificing to our country’s wrongs. For six months we had worked to capture. But our cause being almost lost something decisive and great must be done” – settled the question of a plot to kidnap suddenly given up; and the testimony of Weichman indicated the hour of abandonment.
That every conceivable effort to obtain the conviction of the prisoner was made, and that a most formidable array of circumstances was marshalled against him, compared to which the two disconnected pieces of evidence which were so magnified against his mother seem weak indeed, will be controverted by no sane person. From June 10th to August 7th – nearly two months – the contest went on. On the last-mentioned day, which was Wednesday, Judge Fisher delivered his remarkable charge, and a little before noon the jury retired. At one o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday, the 10th, after a session of three days and three nights, a communication was received from the jury to the effect that they stood as at first, nearly equally divided, that they could not possibly agree, and the health of several of their numbers was becoming seriously impaired. The Court, notwithstanding the protest of the prisoner, discharged the jury, and the prisoner was remanded to jail.
There he did not long remain, however. Every one recognized the futility of another trial. The strength of the proof of the prisoner’s presence in Elmira on the day of the assassination wrought a reaction of public opinion in his favor. The administration was glad to escape with less than an unequivocal condemnation. The Bureau of Military Justice was silent. John H. Surratt was quietly let go.
This obscure occurrence, the discharge of John H. Surratt, which caused not a ripple on the surface of human affairs, nevertheless constituted a cardinal event; for it worked a national estoppel. When that young man stepped forth from the threshold of the prison, to which the United States had brought him in irons from Egypt across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, not to follow his mother to the scaffold and a felon’s grave, but to walk the earth a living, free man, – the innocence of the mother was finally and forever established by the universal acknowledgment of all fair men. No condemnation of the Military Commission could be so heavy, and at the same time so indubitably final, as the simultaneous conviction arrived at by all men, that if the son had been tried by such a tribunal he would assuredly have been put to death, and that if the mother had been reserved to calmer times and the tribunal guaranteed by the Constitution to every man and woman, she would now have been living with her daughter, instead of lying, strangled to death, beneath the pavement of a prison.
CHAPTER III.
The Recommendation to Mercy
The worst was still behind.
It was left to Time to disclose the astounding fact, that all the military machinery of the War Department, its Bureaus, its Court, its Judge-Advocates, its unconstitutional, anti-constitutional and extra-constitutional processes, would not have compassed the death of this helpless woman, had not the prosecutors, in the last extremity, called in the help of Fraud.
It has been narrated in the chronological order of events, how five members of the Military Commission were, in all probability, beguiled into the abdication of their own power of commutation and did, as matter of fact, sign a paper “praying” the President, “if he could find it consistent with his sense of duty to the country,” to commute the death sentence of Mrs. Surratt; how that the paper may have been carried to the President by Judge Holt and have been present at the confidential interview when the death warrant was composed; and how that Judge Holt, in drafting the death warrant, went out of his way to so write it out, as in fact, if not by design, to withdraw from the eye of the President, as he signed it, this paper praying him to withhold his signature.
But it should be borne in mind that all this was shrouded in the deepest secrecy. That there had been any hesitation among the members of the Commission in fixing the sentence of Mrs. Surratt – any more than in the cases of Herold, Atzerodt and Payne – much more that it had been found necessary to resort to a petition to the President, was entirely unknown to the public at large. As to what had taken place in the sessions of the Court when the sentences were made up, every member thereof and the three Judge-Advocates were sworn to secrecy; and, outside these officers, the knowledge of the petition was confined to the Secretary of War (possibly the Attorney-General) and one or two subordinates in the War Department. The record of the findings and sentences, to which the petition was attached, was kept from the official reporters, and not a soul outside a close coterie in the War Department was allowed to set eyes on it.
In the recital of the death sentences in the order of the Adjutant-General directing their execution, the sentence of the woman differed in no respect from the three sentences of the men which preceded it. So far as the public eye could discover, there was not a gleam of mercy for the woman in the bosom of the Commission.
It is true, that even before the execution there were rumors that the Court had united in a recommendation to mercy, and it was stated in the newspapers of the 6th and 7th of July that five members of the Commission had signed such a recommendation and the whole Court concurred in it. It is also certain, that almost immediately after the execution the story sprang up that the President had never been allowed to see the recommendation which the Court had addressed to him.
But all these statements remained without corroboration from any authentic source, and could not stand before the indubitable facts of the sentence, its approval by the President, and its summary execution. The single indication that in all these reports the paper is miscalled “a recommendation to mercy” shows of itself that the real nature of the secret was well kept.
In November, 1865, there appeared a volume compiled by Benn Pitman styled “The Recorder to the Commission,” claiming to be “An authentic record of the trial of the assassins of the late President,” to which was prefixed a certificate “to its faithfulness and accuracy” by Colonel Burnett, who had been assigned by Judge Holt to superintend the compilation and “made responsible for its strict accuracy.” This work, so authenticated, was on its face intended by its compiler to be a complete history “for future use and reference” of the proceedings of the Commission, from the order of the President convening it to the approval of the President of its findings and sentences. It had for frontispiece portraits of the conspirators and a map of portions of Maryland and Virginia showing the route of Booth, and for afterpiece a diagram of the stage of Ford’s theatre and a diagram of the streets in its vicinity. Beside matter strictly of record, such as the testimony and the findings and sentences, it included the arguments of all the counsel, the approval of the President, the order changing the place of imprisonment from Albany to the Dry Tortugas, the proceedings under the writ of habeas corpus in the case of Mrs. Surratt; and (in the appendix) the opinion of Attorney-General Speed; army instructions in ten sections; a proclamation of President Lincoln; a poisonous affidavit of Weichman, inclosed in a letter to Colonel Burnett; and an affidavit of Captain Dutton, who took Dr. Mudd to the Dry Tortugas, giving the confessions the Captain swears the Doctor made on the way, sent to General Holt in obedience to his request for such information. Nevertheless, amid all this wealth of illustration, there is not the faintest allusion to any such thing as a recommendation to mercy, in the volume. On the one hand, Pittman may not have seen the paper. His findings and sentences are obviously taken from the order of the Adjutant-General, and not from the original record, as he puts them in the same order, which is not the order of the record. But, if he never saw the paper, it must have been purposely kept from his knowledge, and thus from the knowledge of the public, by some person interested in its suppression. And Colonel Burnett, who had himself attached the paper “at the end” of the record, instead of certifying to the “faithfulness and accuracy” of a compilation omitting it, ought rather to have insisted that so important and interesting a document, about the existence of which so much talk had arisen, be at last given to the world.
On the other hand, if Pitman knew of the paper, he certainly would not have voluntarily left it out of his book for the reason, he himself felt constrained afterwards to assign, that “it formed no part of the proceedings, was not mentioned in open session;” since he had given room to so much matter, not of record, solely for the purpose of adding interest and completeness to his work, and this critical document could add so much to the one and its absence detract so much from the other.
Moreover, in December, the report of the Judge-Advocate-General to the Secretary of War appeared, in which the trial was reviewed, and to which the report to the President, dated July 5th, 1865, was appended. But in both the existence of the petition was ignored.
Whatever may have been the true inwardness of these significant omissions, their inevitable effect was to convince the mass of the people of the non-existence of a recommendation to mercy; and the petition of the five officers might have reposed in silence in the secret archives of the War Department, had it not been for the alienation of the President from the party which had elected him, his gradual gravitation towards his own section, and finally his revolt from the sway of Stanton. During this period, the rumors that the Court had recommended Mrs. Surratt to the clemency of the Executive and that the paper had never reached the Executive, coupled with stories that from the close of the trial to the hour of the execution the President had been kept under confinement and in a state of semi-stupefaction by a band of reckless partisans who were bound there should be no clemency, grew louder and louder. But they were never traceable to any reliable source. In fact, the coolness which had been for a long time growing between Andrew Johnson and Edwin M. Stanton did not break out into an open rupture until as late as the month of March, 1867. The other members of the Cabinet, which Johnson had inherited from Lincoln, who disagreed with Johnson on the question of Reconstruction, Harlan, Dennison and Speed, resigned, on account of that disagreement, in the summer of 1866; but Stanton stayed on. When the Tenure of Office bill was passed by the Congress in February, 1867, the Secretary of War was still so much in accord with the President as to unite with the other members of the reconstructed Cabinet in an emphatic condemnation of the bill as unconstitutional, and to be asked by the President to draft his veto message.
But, on the passage of that Act over the veto, Stanton, thinking his tenure of office secure, at last threw off the double-faced mask he seems to have worn in every Cabinet to which he ever had the honor to belong. From that time he stood alone in the Cabinet, irreconcilable in his hostility to every move of his Chief, in open league with his Chief’s active enemies, and determined to remain where he was not wanted and could only act as a hindrance and a spy. In this perilous state of affairs, a secret like that of the petition of the five officers burned towards disclosure. Yet, so far as is at present ascertainable, no authoritative affirmation of the existence of such a paper, on the one hand, and no authoritative denial that it had been presented to the President, on the other, had yet been made.
Upon such an arrangement of combustible material, the trial of John H. Surratt acted like a spark of fire.
On the second day (June 11th, 1867), during the impanelling of the jury, Mr. Pierrepont, the leading counsel for the United States, alluding to the rumors then flying about, took occasion to predict that the Government on that trial would set all these false stories at rest.
Among other things he said:
“It has likewise been circulated through all the public journals that after the former convictions, when an effort was made to go to the President for pardon, men active here at the seat of government prevented any attempt being made or the President being even reached for the purpose of seeing whether he would not exercise clemency; whereas the truth, and the truth of the record which will be presented in this court, is that all this matter was brought before the President and presented to a full Cabinet meeting, where it was thoroughly discussed; and after such discussion, condemnation and execution received not only the sanction of the President but that of every member of his Cabinet.”
The testimony in the case closed, however, and the summing up began, and there had been no attempt at a fulfillment of this prediction.
On Thursday afternoon, August 1st, Mr. Merrick, the junior counsel for the prisoner, then nearing the close of his address, twitted the prosecution with this breach of its promise in these words:
“Where is your record? Why didn’t you bring it in? Did you find at the end of the record a recommendation to mercy in the case of Mrs. Surratt that the President never saw? You had the record here in Court.
“Mr. Bradley: And offered it once and withdrew it?
“Mr. Merrick: Yes, sir; offered it and then withdrew it.
“Did you find anything at the close of it that you did not like? Why didn’t you put that record in evidence, and let us have it here?”
Stung by the necessity of making some answer to this defiant challenge, Mr. Pierrepont on the moment sent for the record. And in response to the summons, Judge-Advocate Holt, who naturally must have followed the prosecution and trial with the most absorbing anxiety, on that very afternoon brought the record “with his own hand,” “with his own voice” told its history, in the presence of “three gentlemen,” to Mr. Pierrepont, and then left the papers with him.
On the succeeding day, August 2nd, Mr. Bradley, the senior counsel of the prisoner, renewed the attack:
“It was boastfully said in the opening of this case that they would vindicate the conduct of the law officers of the Government engaged in the conspiracy trials. They would produce Booth’s diary; they would show that the judgment of the court was submitted to the Cabinet and fully approved; that no recommendation for mercy for Mrs. Surratt – that no petition for pardon to the Government – had been withheld from the President. Is it so?”
The next morning, Saturday, August 3d, Mr. Pierrepont began his address to the jury. Having kept possession of the record since Thursday afternoon, and having been made acquainted with its history by Judge-Advocate Holt in such an impressive manner, he, thus, in his exordium, at last, redeemed the promise of the prosecution:
“The counsel certainly knew when they were talking about that tribunal” (i. e. the Military Commission), “and when they were thus denouncing it, that President Johnson * * * ordered it with his own hand, that President Johnson * * * signed the warrant that directed the execution, that President Johnson * * * when that record was presented to him, laid it before his Cabinet, and that every single member voted to confirm the sentence, and that the President with his own hand wrote his confirmation of it, and with his own hand signed the warrant. I hold in my hand the original record, and no other man as it appears from that paper ordered it. No other one touched this paper, and when it was suggested by some of the members of the Commission that in consequence of the age and the sex of Mrs. Surratt, it might possibly be well to change her sentence to imprisonment for life, he signed the warrant for her death with the paper right before his eyes – and there it is (handing the paper to Mr. Merrick). My friend can read it for himself.”
This is the first appearance in public of the precious record. On Wednesday, July 5th, 1865, Andrew Johnson put his name to the death-warrant written on its back by Judge Holt. And, now, two years after, emerging from its hiding-place, it is flung upon a table in a court-room by the counsel for the United States.
Even now it seems to be destined to a most unsatisfactory publication. For the counsel of the prisoner decline to look at it, because (as Mr. Merrick subsequently explained), “he mistrusted whatever came from the Judge-Advocate-General’s office;” because it “had been carefully withheld until all opportunity had passed for taking evidence in relation to it;” and because the official report of the trial contained no recommendation of mercy. The mysterious roll of paper, consequently, lies there unopened, until Judge Holt comes to reclaim it that same afternoon; and that officer is careful, when receiving it back, to repeat over again, before other witnesses, the same history of the document, he had told before to the counsel for the prosecution, and which that counsel had just retold to the jury.
But that had been said and done which must blow away the atmosphere of unwholesome secrecy which had so long enveloped this addendum to the record. The explicit declaration of the counsel for the United States, made in a crowded court-room on so celebrated a trial, with the “identical paper” in his hand, that the President had laid the record before his Cabinet and “every single member voted to confirm the sentence,” and that the President had signed the death-warrant with the “suggestion” of commutation “right before his eyes,” was immediately published far and wide, and must have been read on Sunday, the 4th, or at latest on Monday, the 5th, by the President himself. And the President was certainly astounded. By a most singular providence, Judge Holt himself, in a letter written to himself, at his request, by his chief clerk, and published by him in 1873 for another purpose, has furnished independent proof that the President was now for the first time startled into sending for the record.
Here is what Chief Clerk Wright says:
“On the 5th day of August, 1867, Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, sent for me, and in the presence of General Grant asked me who was in charge of the Bureau in your absence. I informed him Colonel Winthrop. He requested I should send him over to him, which I did. The Colonel returned and asked me for the findings and sentence of the conspiracy trial, telling me he had to take it to the President. On taking the portion of the record referred to from the bundle, I found, from the frequent handling of it, several of the last leaves had torn loose from the ribbon fastening, and to secure them I put the eyelet in one corner of it.”
The Judge-Advocate-General, though in court on Saturday getting back the record and retelling its history, was absent, it would appear, from his office on Monday, or was considered absent by Stanton, who it also appears was still Secretary of War and in communication with Johnson. It was thought best to employ a deputy to carry the papers to the President. Holt, probably, had no stomach for another “confidential interview,” with the identical record in his hand.
Let Andrew Johnson himself tell what followed. The statement is from his published reply to Holt in 1873, and was made with no reference to, and apparently with no recollection of, the foregoing incidents of the John H. Surratt trial:
“Having heard that the petition had been attached to the record, I sent for the papers on the 5th day of August, 1867, with a view of examining, for the first time, the recommendation in the case of Mrs. Surratt.
“A careful scrutiny convinced me that it was not with the record when submitted for my approval, and that I had neither before seen nor read it.”
It may have been only a coincidence, but on this very day, Monday, August 5th, 1867, and necessarily after the sending for the record, because that was done through the Secretary of War, the following interesting missive was dispatched by the President to that member of his Cabinet:
“Sir: Public considerations of a high character constrain me to say that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.”
Stanton immediately replied:
“Public considerations of a high character constrain me not to resign before the next meeting of Congress.”
And, on the 12th, he was suspended from office.
But Andrew Johnson was not the only interested personage who read the explicit declaration of Mr. Pierrepont. The statement that every member of the Cabinet voted to confirm the sentence of Mrs. Surratt, with the record, including, of course, the recommendation, before them, must have been read also by William H. Seward, Edwin M. Stanton, Hugh McCulloch, and Gideon Welles, the members of that “full Cabinet” who still remained in office. They surely knew the truth of the statement, if it was true, or its falsity, if it was false. If it was true, is it not perfectly inconceivable that the President, conscious that these four of his confidential advisers had seen the record and voted to deny the petition, would have dared to enact the comedy of sending for the record, and then brazenly assert that the petition had not been attached to it when before him, and that he had neither seen nor read it?
And if he had been guilty of so foolhardy a course of action, now was the time for the Judge-Advocate to fortify the declaration which he had inspired Mr. Pierrepont to make, by appealing to these members of the Cabinet to confront their shameless chief with their united testimony, and forever silence the “atrocious accusation.”
From his course of proceeding at a later day, it is not probable that he made any such attempt. At all events, he got no help from Seward, from McCulloch or from Welles. Nay, he got no help to sustain his history of the record, even from Stanton. If help came from that quarter at all, it was to shield him from the awakened wrath of the hood-winked Executive, by drawing the fire upon the head of his department.
But what the Judge-Advocate-General did do, in view of the crisis, is sufficiently apparent. He took immediate measures to retract all that portion of Mr. Pierrepont’s declaration of Saturday, which expressed or implied any knowledge on the part of the Cabinet of the disputed paper.
The counsel for the United States had continued his speech to the jury all day Monday, apparently unconscious of the tempestuous effect of his statement of Saturday, and of the predicament in which it had involved his informant. In the evening, he must have had a “confidential interview” with Judge Holt. For, on rising to resume his speech on Tuesday morning, the 6th of August, from no apparent logical cause arising from the course of his argument, he saw fit to recur to the now absent record, and to interpolate the following perfectly insulated and seemingly superfluous piece of information:
“You will recollect, gentlemen, when a call was made several days ago by Mr. Merrick * * asking that we should produce the record of the Conspiracy Trial, that I brought the original record here and handed it to counsel. I then stated that as a part of that record was a suggestion made by a part of the Court that tried the conspirators, that, if the President thought it consistent with his public duty, they would suggest, in consideration of the sex and age of one of those condemned, that a change might be made in her sentence to imprisonment for life. I stated that I had been informed that when that record was before the President, and when he signed the warrant of execution, that recommendation was then before him. I want no misunderstanding about that, and I do not intend there shall be any. That is a part of the original record which I here produced in Court. It is in the hand-writing of one of the members of that Court, to wit, General Ekin. The original of that is now in his possession and in the hand-writing of Hon. John A. Bingham. When the counsel called for that record, I sent the afternoon of that day to the Judge-Advocate-General, in whose possession these records are. He brought it to me with his own hand, and told me with his own voice, in the presence of three other gentlemen, that that identical paper, then a part of the record, was before the President when he signed the warrant of execution, and that he had a conversation with the President at that time on the subject. That is my authority. Subsequently to this, having presented it here, the Judge-Advocate-General called to receive it back, and reiterated in the presence of other gentlemen the same thing. That is my knowledge and that is my authority.”
Here we have, then, the final statement of his side of the case, made by Judge Holt, through the mouth of counsel, revised and corrected under the stress of the occurrences at the White House and the negatory attitude of the members of the Cabinet present on the spot. Stripped of the allegation that the record was laid before the Cabinet and voted upon by every member of the Cabinet, its affirmations, carefully confined to “the confidential interview” between the President and the Judge-Advocate, go no farther than that “the identical paper” was “before the President,” when he signed the death warrant, and they had a conversation “on the subject.”
“He wants no misunderstanding” and does “not intend there shall be any.” The counsel in great detail relates how he came by his facts. “That is my knowledge and that is my authority.” Of course it is open to everybody to believe, if he choose, that the talk of the Cabinet meeting and of the unanimous vote of its members against the petition, was a mere rhetorical exaggeration of a simple narrative of Holt relating the incidents of an interview between the President and himself, struck off by Judge Pierrepont in the full fervor of his eloquence; but, nevertheless, it remains true that the Judge-Advocate, until the catastrophe befell, was satisfied it should stand, rhetoric and all; because he “reiterated the same thing” on Saturday, after the counsel had concluded his statement, and on Monday the counsel continued his address all day without being advised of the necessity for any retraction.
