This controversy over the petition of clemency was the only thing needed to round out and decorate the entire, complete and perfect iniquity of the whole drama. It is immaterial and indifferent to history where the truth lies between these combatants in so unsavory a strife. Each one tears off the burning brand of shame, not to extinguish it, but to pass it on to his colleague. If we credit Holt, it is difficult to conceive the malignity of soul of Andrew Johnson, who could invent so foul a charge, the meanness of spirit of Edwin M. Stanton, who, knowing its blackness, could forbid the promulgation of the truth, the cowardly silence of John A. Bingham, whose lips the death of the dreaded Stanton alone could unclose. If we credit Johnson, then in all the crowded catalogue of inquisitors, persecutors, cruel or pettifogging prosecuting officers, devil’s advocates and murderous Septembrisers, there is not one who would not spurn with profane emphasis association with Holt or Bingham or Stanton.
As the choicest specimen in this shower of accusations and counter-accusations, listen to the tender-hearted ex-Judge-Advocate of 1873—once the stony head of the death-dealing Bureau—rebuking Andrew Johnson for his cold-blooded cruelty! “I would have shuddered to propose the brief period of two days within which the sentences should be executed, for with all the mountain of guilt weighing on the heads of those convicted culprits I still recognized them as human beings, with souls to be saved or lost, and could not have thought for a moment of hurrying them into the eternal world, as cattle are driven to the slaughter-pen, without a care for their future.”
Listen again to the former expounder of the “common law of war” before the Military Commission, as he arraigns the ex-President for his disregard of the writ of habeas corpus: “The object of which was, and the effect of which would have been, had it been obeyed, to delay the execution of Mrs. Surratt at least until the questions of law raised had been decided by the civil courts of the District; yet this writ was, by the express order of the President, rendered inoperative. And so, under this Presidential mandate, the execution proceeded. * * * But for his direct intervention and defiant action on the writ, whatever might have been the final result, it is perfectly apparent her life would not then have been taken.”
Once more. Hear J. Holt, the Recorder of the Commission! “As Chief Magistrate he was, under the Constitution,” (Hear Him!) “the depositary of the nation’s clemency and mercy to the condemned, and a pressing responsibility rested upon him as such to hear the victims of the law before he struck them down.” (The italics are his who wrote out the death-warrant.) “Did he do this? On the contrary, * * he gave * * a peremptory order to admit nobody seeking to make an appeal in behalf of the prisoners, saying that he would ‘see no one on this business.’
“He closed his door, his ears, and his heart against every appeal for mercy in her behalf, and hurried this hapless woman almost unshrived to the gallows.”
What a picture is this!
The minion of Stanton, the colleague of Bingham, the tutor of Weichman, the tutor of Lloyd, the procurer of the death-warrant, weeping over the empty grave in the Arsenal, which, after his master’s relentless watch was over, had at length given up its dead!
Here we are forced to stop. After such an exhibition, we can linger no longer over this miserable scramble to shirk responsibility. Its only consequence of historic importance, after all, is the light it casts upon the memory of the sacrificial victim. Out of the cloud of mutual vituperation, which covers the men who, among them, somehow, compassed her slaughter, her innocence rises clearer and clearer, like the images of retribution from the foul fumes of the witches’ cauldron.
Her vindication must be held to be final, complete and unassailable, when John A. Bingham is anxious to acquaint the country that he drafted a petition to save her life; when J. Holt pretends to weep for her; when Andrew Johnson is forced, by the inexorable pressure of events, to confess that when he signed her death-warrant he knew not what he did.