That the petition 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 petition had been suppressed or made invisible; Seward, that the petition never had been before the Cabinet.
It throws a glimmer, faint it is true, on the shameful attitude 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 bloody consummate flower of his “common law of war.”
It furnishes the only plausible reason why such an historic document 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 petition 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.