“It is almost imposing upon the patience of the Court to consume time in demonstrating the fact, which none conversant with the testimony of this case can for a moment doubt, that John H. Surratt and Mary E. Surratt were as surely in the conspiracy to murder the President as was John Wilkes Booth himself.”
He lets out the secret that the mother is on trial as a substitute for her son, whom the Secretary of War and the Bureau of Military Justice had failed to capture, by saying:
“Nothing but his conscious coward guilt could possibly induce him to absent himself from his mother, as he does, upon her trial.”
After having reiterated over and over again, with all the authority of his office, what he had for hours endeavoured to enforce by all the resources of his intellect, that the guilt “of all these parties, both present and absent” is proved “beyond any doubt whatever,” and “is no longer an open question;” he closes by formally, and with a very cheap show of magnanimity, leaving “the decision of this dread issue” to the Court.
CHAPTER VI.
The Verdict, Sentence and Petition.
With the loud and repeated denunciations of this elaborate and vindictive harangue, full as it was of rhetorical appeals to the members of the Commission to avenge the murder of “their beloved Commander-in-Chief,” and of repeated and most emphatic assurances of the undoubted guilt of each and every one of the prisoners, as well as of all their alleged accomplices, still ringing in the ear of the Court; the room is for the last time cleared of spectators, counsel for the prisoners and reporters; the mournful procession of the accused marches for the last time from the dock to their solitary cells, their fetters clanking as they go; and the Commission meets to deliberate upon its verdict. But who remains in the room, meets with the Court and participates in its secret and solemn deliberations? Who but Colonel Burnett, the officer who had so zealously conducted the preliminary examinations of the witnesses and marshalled the evidence for the prosecution? Who but Recorder Joseph Holt, the head of the Bureau of Military Justice, the left hand of Stanton as Baker was his right? Who but John A. Bingham, the Special Judge-Advocate, who had so mercilessly conducted the trial, assailing counsel, browbeating witnesses for the defense, declaring that all participants in the rebellion were virtually guilty of the assassination, and who had just closed his long speech, in which he had done his utmost to stir up the Commission to the highest pitch of loyalty, unreasoning passion and insatiable desire for vengeance?
Where can we look in the history of the world for a parallel to such a spectacle? A woman of refinement and education, thrown together in one mass with seven men, to be tried by nine soldiers, for the crime of conspiring with Jefferson Davis, the arch-enemy of every member of the tribunal, to kill, and killing, the beloved Commander-in-Chief of every member of the tribunal; three experienced criminal lawyers eagerly engaging in the task of proving her guilty; pursuing it for days and weeks with the unrelenting vigor of sleuth-hounds; winding up by reiterating in the most solemn manner their overwhelming conviction of her guilt; and then all three being closeted with the Court to take part in making up the doom of death!