These are the only circumstances by which Mrs. Surratt is brought nearer than conjectural connection with the assassination, 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 entitled under the Constitution, would have pronounced 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 circumstances of the whole tragedy warrant the assertion 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.
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.