The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt Part 16

When in the following summer he died, his body was followed to its grave in the mountains by what it is hardly an exaggeration to call the whole people of his State. When Congress rea.s.sembled, the Senate and the House clothed themselves with c.r.a.pe. One of his former judges, who had voted him guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors (Morton, of Indiana), thus spoke of him in the Senate:

"In every position in life he showed himself to be a man of ability and courage, and I believe it proper to say of Andrew Johnson that his honesty has never been suspected; that the smell of corruption was never upon his garments."

The same Senator related that when Johnson, as the newly appointed Military Governor, arrived at Nashville "he was threatened with a.s.sa.s.sination on the streets and in the public a.s.semblies, but he went on the streets; he defied those dangers; he went into public a.s.semblies, and on one occasion went into a public meeting, drew his pistol, laid it on the desk before him, and said: 'I have been told that I should be a.s.sa.s.sinated if I came here. If that is to be done then it is the first business in order, and let that be attended to.' No attempt having been made he said: 'I conclude the danger has pa.s.sed by;' and then proceeded to make his speech."

Again the Senator said: "After I had voted for his impeachment, and met him accidentally, he wore the same kindly smile as before, and offered me his hand. I thought that showed n.o.bility of soul. There were not many men who could have done that."

The man, of whom two such incidents could be truthfully related, could never have invented so foul a charge against an innocent subordinate.

A Senator from a neighboring State, (McCreery), on the same mournful occasion said of him:

"When he went to Greeneville he was a stranger, and a tailor's "kit,"

his thimbles and his needles, were probably the sum-total of his earthly possessions; at his death, the hills and the valleys and the mountains and the rivers, sent forth their thousands to testify to the general grief at the irreparable loss.

"I honor him for that manly courage which sustained him on every occasion, and which never quailed in presence of opposition, no matter how imposing. I honor him for that independence of soul which had no scorn for the lowly, and no cringing adulation for the exalted. I honor him for that sterling integrity which was beyond the reach of temptation, and which, at the close of his public service, left no blot, no stain upon his escutcheon. I honor him for that magnanimity which after the war cloud had pa.s.sed, and the elements had settled, would have brought every citizen under the radiant arch of the bow of peace and pardon."

Another Senator (Paddock, of Nebraska) gave utterance to the following unchallenged statement:

"I believe, sir, notwithstanding the fact that a painful chapter relating to the official acts of Andrew Johnson was made in this very chamber, that no Senator here present will refuse to-day to join me in the declaration that he was essentially an honest man; aye, sir, a patriot in the fullest sense of the term."

Yet another (Bogy, of Missouri), said:

"His last election to a seat on this floor as Senator was the work of his own hands, brought about by his own indomitable will and pluck, the reward of a long and terrible contest, continuing for seven years, unsuccessful for a time, and appearing to all the world besides himself as utterly hopeless; nevertheless, finally he was triumphant.

From what I have learned from those who are familiar with this, his last contest, he exhibited more openly his true and peculiar nature, than at any other period of his life--which was to fight with all his might and all his ability, asking no quarter and granting none; and although like b.l.o.o.d.y Richard now and then unhorsed, still to fight and never surrender, until victory perched upon his banner."

Senator Bayard said: "Friend or foe alike must admit his steady, unshaken love of country; his constant industry; his simple integrity and honesty; his courage of conviction, that never faltered."

Truly, the solemn word of a man, of whom such things can be said, is no light thing,--to be thrust aside by windy abuse or vociferous denial.

Now, what conceivable motive had such a man, seated in the chair of the Chief Magistracy of this republic, surrounded by Cabinet officers who had been the advisers of his predecessor, to invent, in the first place, so horrible a story as that a friendly subordinate officer had deliberately, in a case of life and death, suppressed so vital a doc.u.ment? For it is contradictory of historical fact, that he never openly made the charge until the year 1873.

This may be true of the period from about the time of the execution up to the disclosures of the John H. Surratt trial in 1867. But our review of the incidents of that trial, which General Holt in his refutation seemed to have totally forgotten, proves, beyond the possibility of controversy, that the President then first thought himself driven to inspect the record to ascertain the existence of such a paper, and then first, after the discovery that there was in fact a recommendation, at once, and at all times afterwards, openly a.s.serted that he had not seen it or read it.

Every one around him knew that he so said. Stanton, his great enemy, Seward, his great friend, knew it. Bingham, at the very beginning when Stanton forbade him to refute it; Bingham, when Butler pierced his shield in the House of Representatives, and Bingham, when at the bar of the Senate as manager of the impeachment he belabored his old-time Commander-in-Chief, knew it; Holt, when he delivered his contradiction through Judge Pierrepont to the Surratt jury, and when he felt the shadows darkening over his head because of the "inexplicable conduct" of the great War Minister in "perpetuating the pitiless outrage," knew it, and recognized the President of the United States as the responsible author of the tremendous accusation.

If Holt is to be credited, the President must have known that four at least of his confidential advisers stood ready to shatter the baseless calumny. What conceivable motive, we ask again, to invent such a story--so easy of refutation, so ruinous to himself, if refuted?

The necessity to make some reply to this pressing question seems to have driven both General Holt himself and his defenders into the maintenance of the most absurd, antagonistic and untenable positions.

Holt's theory on this subject in his "Refutation" is even ingenious in its absurdity. He would have us believe that when Johnson originally fabricated the calumny, "he had not yet broken with the Republican party, and was, doubtless, in his heart at least, a candidate for reelection," of course by that party. If this is true, then the "fabrication" was made before the fall of 1865, for by that time the President was in full swing of opposition to the men who had elected him Vice-President. During this brief transitory period, according to Holt, Johnson discovered that the hostility of the Catholics (especially, as may be inferred, those of the Republican party), on account of his signature to the death-warrant of Mrs. Surratt, would blast this otherwise felicitous prospect. Accordingly, to abate this uncomfortable hostility, this Republican candidate concocted the vile slander and set it secretly and anonymously circulating among his friends and followers;--even his greed for reelection being not strong enough to give full effect to his cowardly policy by openly clearing his own skirts. Could the fatuity of folly farther go? The dream of Andrew Johnson as a Republican candidate for President had ceased to be possible even before the execution of Mrs. Surratt. The Catholics who could be conciliated by any such story might be numbered on Johnson's fingers. And the undisguised signature to the death-warrant could be obliterated by no plea of abatement which the pet.i.tioner dared not avow.

On the other hand, the other suggestion put forward, if not by Holt himself; by several of his defenders, viz.: that the President propagated the lie "to curry favor with the South in the hope to be elected to the Presidency," has the one merit of being in direct antagonism to the foregoing theory, but nevertheless is yet more flimsy and preposterous. At the time he invented the story, if invention it was, (as Holt appears to have perceived), the road to the Presidency was to curry favor with the North and not with the down-trodden South. And after Johnson had escaped conviction and removal by but one vote, and had retired from office execrated by the North and distrusted even yet by the South, the chance of the Presidency for such a character as he was popularly considered then--especially by truckling to the discredited South--could only look fair in the imagination of a lunatic.

No Southern man has seriously thought of being, or has been seriously thought of as, a candidate for President of either political party since the termination of the war, let alone the one Southerner reputed to have been false alternately to both parties and both sections.

Besides, Andrew Johnson never apologized for his appointment of the Military Commission, for his approval of its judgment, or for his signature to the death-warrant. He pardoned Dr. Mudd on the very eve of the Impeachment Trial. And he pardoned the two remaining prisoners just before he went out of office. And he may, therefore, be held to have thus signified his reawakened reverence for const.i.tutional rights as expounded in the Milligan decision.

But in no other way did he ever acknowledge that in taking the life of Mary E. Surratt he had done wrong. On the contrary, he defended his action in his answer of 1873, and he justified his denial of the habeas corpus, which the ex-Judge-Advocate had the exquisite affrontery to cast up against him. That a President in his situation could cherish aspirations--or hope--of reelection, based on such a phantom foundation as the whining plea that he would have commuted the unlawful sentence of a woman, hung by his command, to imprisonment for life, had he been permitted to see the pet.i.tion of five of her judges;--such an imputation can only be made by men mad enough to believe him to have been the accomplice of Booth and Atzerodt.

Finally, let us sternly put the question:--What right has Holt to ask us, on the word of himself and his a.s.sociates, to reject the testimony of Andrew Johnson, who at the best was their accomplice or their tool? He, and his a.s.sociates, demanded the life of Atzerodt for barely imagining the death of so precious a Vice-President. He, and his a.s.sociates, hounded the woman to the scaffold, welcoming with delight the stories of spies, informers, personal enemies, false friends, against her, and meeting with contumely and violence the least sc.r.a.p of testimony in her favor. He suppressed the "Diary." Why may he not have been bad enough to suppress the recommendation? Two of the same band of woman-stranglers kept back from the President the pet.i.tion for mercy, which wailed out from the lips of the stricken daughter. Why should he not have kept back the timorous suggestion of five officers, who were so soft-hearted as to "discriminate"

as to s.e.x? His fate will be--and therein equal and exact justice will be done him--to go down through the ages, stealing away, in the dusk of the evening, from the private entrance of the White House, bearing the fatal missive--the last feeble hope of the trembling widow crushed in his furtive hand.

CHAPTER VI.

CONCLUSION.

That the pet.i.tion for commutation was a device of the Triumvirate of prosecutors to secure the coveted death-sentence, employed in reliance upon the temporary ascendency of the chief of the three over the beleaguered President, and upon the momentary pliability, heedlessness, or, it may be, semi-stupefaction of the successor of the murdered Lincoln, to smother the offensive prayer:--such an hypothesis alone seems adequate in any degree to reconcile the apparent contradictions, clear up the perplexities and solve the mysteries, which hang around this dark affair.

It furnishes the only rational answer to the else insoluble question, how it happened that a court, a majority of whose members had the inclination and the power to lower the punishment of the solitary woman before them to life-long imprisonment, as the court did with the three men who were tried with her and convicted of the same crime, did nevertheless, by at least a two-thirds vote, condemn her to die by the rope.

It lights up the else inscrutable prohibition by Stanton of a public exculpation of his subordinate officer, softened by the sardonic admonition "to rely" for justification "on the final judgment of the people." A source of glorification, rather, it should be, that no maudlin pity for a woman had been suffered to intercept the death-stroke of a righteous vengeance.

It accounts for the "scrupulous obedience" of Bingham, not only until Stanton's death, but three years after, until Seward, too, had gone.

Stanton knew the pet.i.tion had been suppressed or made invisible; Seward, that the pet.i.tion never had been before the Cabinet.

It throws a glimmer, faint it is true, on the shameful att.i.tude of Speed, eight years after the death of Johnson--still shutting his ears to the repeated appeals of his agonized friend, and still falling back on his propriety. According to Judge Harlan, the whole record had been examined by the Attorney-General, as well as the Secretary of War. Speed, too, under the spell of Stanton, may have fingered the obnoxious paper, which might nip the b.l.o.o.d.y consummate flower of his "_common law of war_."

It furnishes the only plausible reason why such an historic doc.u.ment did not appear in the published official record of the proceedings of the Military Commission, in November, 1865, or in the reports of the Judge-Advocate, first, to the President, and, second, to the Congress.

It illumines with a baleful light the atmosphere of sinister secrecy, in which this adjunct to the record, for no lawful reason, has been enshrouded; the mysterious incidents at the Surratt trial, such as the tardy and reluctant production, the faltering and imperfect exhibition, and the hasty withdrawal of the "roll of papers;" the two statements of Mr. Pierrepont; the shrinking of the "full Cabinet meeting" into a "confidential interview," until after Seward's death; and the singularly equivocal language that the pet.i.tion was "_before the President_" when he signed the warrant.

And, finally, when it is considered that the suppression of the paper was not the overt act of any one man, but the result of a strictly formal presentation of the record on the part of the Judge-Advocate, aided, it may be, by a timely sleight-of-hand in writing the order of approval, and of a blind carelessness on the part of the President in the examination of the papers; this hypothesis goes far to explain the reluctance of General Holt to rest his defense on his own evidence of the confidential interview, his eager grasping after Cabinet corroboration, and the abstention of both Judge-Advocate and President from taking official action upon the charge, the one for vindication, the other for punishment.

And so the history of this murder of a woman by the forms of military rule slowly unrolls itself, to disclose, as its appropriate finis, the writer of the death-warrant struggling in the meshes of his own fraud.

The draughtsman of the unaddressed pet.i.tion for commutation, after waiting eight years for death to clear the way, comes to the help of his old colleague, only to be caught in the same net.

The entangled twain call up the sullen shade of their departed master, and force him to father the trick he fain would have scorned.

These three are the men who, when the summary methods of martial law would else have failed to crush out entirely the life of their victim, contrived to attain their b.l.o.o.d.y end by cool and deliberate chicanery.

The other actors on the scene may plead the madness of the time. For these three no such plea is open. They superadded to the common madness of the time the particular malice of the felon. Upon their three heads should descend the full weight of criminal turpitude involved in this most unnatural execution.

They sat upon the thrones of power. They dragged a woman from her humble roof and thrust her into a dungeon. They chose nine soldiers to try her for the murder of their Commander-in-Chief. They chained her to the bar along with seven men. They baited her for weeks with their Montgomerys and Conovers, their Weichmans and Lloyds, the sp.a.w.n of their bureau, dragooned by terror or suborned by hope. They shouted into the ears of the court appeal on appeal for her head. And, when at last five of their chosen sons sickened at the task, and shrank from shedding a woman's blood, they procured the death-sentence by a trick. They forged the death-warrant by another. They turned thimble-riggers under the very shadow of the gallows.

They cheated their own court. They cheated their own President. They cheated the very executioner. They sneaked a woman into the arms of death by sleight-of-hand. They played their confidence game with the King of Terrors. They managed to hide the cheat from the country until they quarreled with their new Commander-in-Chief. Then ensued an interval of ambiguous mutterings, dark equivocations, private accusation, private defenses. From one side: "I never saw the paper." From the other: "It was right before his eyes."

The twin ex-Judge-Advocates, at length, brace each other up to the sticking-point and venture on an appeal to the public. The ex-President, thus driven at bay, fulminates the secret infamy in all its foul extent to the whole world. Thereupon, Great Nemesis finds her opportunity, and makes these once high-placed, invulnerable woman-slayers the sport of her mighty hands.

Every one, as if coerced by some magic power, comes at last to act as though he were afraid of the other, and, willing or unwilling, contrives to show how profoundly base the others are.

Stanton slinks mysteriously into the shadow of death, refusing to cut his co-conspirator down from the gibbet where the dreaded Johnson has swung him. Bingham, standing like an Indian with a single female scalp bleeding from his girdle, presses his finger to his lips until Stanton and Seward die. Speed, with the obnoxious pet.i.tion pressed again and again to his nostrils, feebly yet persistently refuses to open his mouth.