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.