This class of testimony continued to be introduced every now and then during the trial—whenever most convenient to the prosecution—and as often as it was given the court-room was cleared of spectators and the session secret; the isolated counsel for Mrs. Surratt, utterly at a loss to imagine the connection of such testimony, given under such solemn precautions, with their own client, and knowing nothing whatever of the witnesses themselves, must have looked on in bewildered amazement, and had no motive for cross-examination.
The chief witnesses who gave this carefully suppressed evidence were spies upon the rebel agents in Canada paid by the United States, and, at the same time, spies upon the United States paid by the rebel agents.
They were, of course, ready to swear to as many conversations with these agents, both before and after the assassination, in which those agents implicated themselves and the heads of government at Richmond in the most reckless manner, as the Judge-Advocates thought necessary or advisable.
The head, parent and tutor of this band of witnesses was a man called Sanford Conover. After giving his testimony before the Commission, he went to Canada and again resumed his simulated intimacy with the Confederates there, passing under the name of James W. Wallace. An unauthorized version of his testimony having leaked out and appearing in the newspapers, he was called to account for it by his Canadian friends. He then made and published an affidavit that the person who had given testimony before the Commission was not himself but an imposter, and at the same time also published an offer of $500 reward for the arrest of “the infamous and perjured scoundrel who secretly personated me under name of Sanford Conover, and deposed to a tissue of falsehood before the military Commission at Washington.”
Being reclaimed by the government from his Canadian perils, he appeared again before the Court after the testimony had been closed and the summing up of all the prisoners’ counsel had been completed (June 27th); when he testified that his affidavit had been extorted from him by the Confederates in Canada by threats of death at the point of a pistol. This man Conover was subsequently (in 1867) tried and convicted of perjury and sent to the penitentiary; and with him the whole structure of perjured testimony, fabricated for reward by him and Montgomery and their co-spies, fell to the ground. Secretary Seward testified before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, in 1867, that, “the testimony of these witnesses was discredited and destroyed by transactions in which Sanford Conover appeared and the evidence of the alleged complicity of Jefferson Davis thereupon failed.”
But, at the period of the trial, when the passionate desire for vengeance was at its height, any plausible scoundrel, whose livelihood depended on the rewards for wholesale perjury, and who was sure to be attracted to Washington by the scent of his favorite game, was thrice welcome to the Bureau of Military Justice. Any story, no matter how absurd or incredible, provided it brought Jefferson Davis within conjectural fore-knowledge of the assassination, was greedily swallowed, and, moreover, was rewarded with money and employment. These harpies flocked, like buzzards, around the doors of the old Penitentiary, and all—black and white, from Richmond, from Washington and from Montreal—were eager, for a consideration, to swear that Davis and Benjamin were the instigators of Booth and Surratt. And such testimony as it was! For the most part the sheerest hearsay! The private impressions of the witness! In one instance, his recollection of the contents of a letter the witness had heard read or talked about, the signature of which, although he did not see it himself, he heard was the signature of Jefferson Davis!! Testimony wholly inadmissible under the most elementary rules of evidence, but swept before the Commission in the absence of counsel for the parties implicated and under the immunity of a secret session.
For example: a blind man, who had been, at an undated period during the war, a hanger-on around the camp at Richmond, being asked whether he had heard any conversations among the rebel officers in regard to the contemplated assassination, answered:
“In a general way, I have heard sums offered, to be paid with a Confederate sum, for any person or persons to go North and assassinate the President.”
Being pressed to name the amount and by what officers, he answered:
“At this moment, I cannot tell you the particular names of shoulder-straps, &c.