DeWitt

“ He was quite at his easy there.
'We walk up and down, my son,' he said, in answer to a question of mine, 'because there are very few who can; even walking is an art; and if nobody does, the place is dull.'
'The place is pretty well supplied with newspapers,' said Captain DeWitt.
'And dowagers, friend Jorian. They are cousins. 'Tis the fashion to have our tattle done by machinery. They have their opportunity to compare the portrait with the original. Come, invent some scandal for us; let us make this place our social Exchange. ”

“ I think it was:
'When rats smell death in toasted cheese.'
Captain DeWitt sprang up the staircase of our hotel to his bedroom.
'I should not have forced him,' my father mused. 'Jorian DeWitt has at times brilliant genius, Richie—in the way of rejoinders, I mean. This is his happy moment—his one hour's dressing for dinner. I have watched him; he most thoroughly enjoys it! I am myself a quick or slow dresser, as the case may be. But to watch Jorian you cannot help entering into his enjoyment of it. He will have his window with a view of the sunset ”

“ No young man ever joined this Company that evinced more interest in its success and general welfare, than did Mr. Heggie, and no member was more respected. He was in every way calculated to win the esteem and friendship of all with whom he became associated. He very readily became a perfect soldier. With a fervent love for his country, and a desire to do [97] something for its defence in the hour of its peril, he enlisted, August 26th, 1863, in Company G, 15th New York Cavalry ”

“ Weichman, a boarder and intimate in her house, the college chum of her son, and, equally with him, the associate of Payne, Atzerodt, Herold and Booth, who, frightened almost to death at the outlook, was swearing, under a desperate strain, to clear his own skirts from the conspiracy and thus save his threatened neck:—Weichman’s testimony before the Commission, even at such a pass, is for some reason quite vague and indefinite, and only becomes deadly when supplemented by Lloyd’s. ”

“ The twin ex-Judge-Advocates, at length, brace each other up to the sticking-point and venture on an appeal to the public. The ex-President, thus driven at bay, fulminates the secret infamy in all its foul extent to the whole world. Thereupon, Great Nemesis finds her opportunity, and makes these once high-placed, invulnerable woman-slayers the sport of her mighty hands. ”

“ Was engaged the 2d and 3d days of July in the battle of Gettysburg. Was in command of troops that guarded the wagon trains from Nashville, Tenn., to Bridgeport, Ala. Also marched [109] and guarded a wagon train to Chattanooga; arriving as far as Wauhatchie halted for the night, comfortably rolling themselves in their blankets preparatory to a good night's rest. About eleven o'clock firing was heard upon the picket line, when they were ordered out and soon in line, which had hardly been done before they received a sharp volley of musketry from the rebels. ”

“ Is partner in the firm of J. S. Granger & Co., a very extensive Dry-Goods House, who enjoy the reputation of keeping the most carefully selected stock of goods of any establishment of the kind in Central New York.
Robert Goodwin, Baker, enlisted July 3d, 1861. A good soldier and an upright man. Was employed in the Bakery department of the extensive establishment of John L. Whiton, Esq. Removed West about three years ago.
James Stanyon, Blacksmith, enlisted July 3d, 1861. Was Company musician, and served as such until he volunteered in the United States service. ”

“ But, though this hero of so many courts-martial appears to have had no mind for a dose of his own favorite remedy, he began, in his characteristic secret way, to collect testimony corroborative of his version of the confidential interview. He writes no letter to a single Cabinet officer. But, immediately after the close of the John H. Surratt trial (August 24, 1867) , he writes to General Ekin reminding him of an interview, soon after the execution, in which he (Holt) mentioned that the President had seen the petition; and he obtains from that officer the information he sought. ”

“ After all his efforts, he is forced at last to fall back upon the single testimony of the one man without whose encouraging information he frankly informs us he would not have dared to come before [Pg 216] the people, and upon whom he brings himself to believe he might safely rest his defense. That man is John A. Bingham, now, as once before, Special Assistant Judge-Advocate to Joseph Holt. ”

“ Is she not immortal by all the dread memories of the past—by that sublime and voluntary sacrifice of the present, in which the bravest and noblest of her sons have laid down their lives that she might live, giving their serene brows to the dust of the grave, and lifting their hands for the last time amidst the consuming fires of battle! ”

“ The letters he produces from Cabinet officers afford him no assistance. [Pg 210] Judge Harlan can recall only an informal discussion by three or four members of the Cabinet (Seward, Stanton, himself and probably Speed) of the question of the commutation of the sentence of Mrs. Surratt because of her sex; which, she being the one woman under condemnation, would surely arise in a tribunal of gentlemen, whether there was a recommendation or not, as in fact it did even among the stern soldiers of the Military Commission. ”

“ That illustrious Court, speaking by Judge David Davis, thus enunciates the law:
“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At half past ten that night, from the box of the theatre where the President is seated, a shot is heard; a wild figure, hatless and clutching a gleaming knife, emerges through the smoke; it leaps from the box to the stage, falls upon one knee, recovers itself, utters one shout and waves aloft its bloody weapon ”

“ 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. ”

“ Had Mary E. Surratt the right guaranteed by the Constitution to a trial singly and alone, in a regularly constituted civil court, and by a jury of the vicinage, the individuals of which she might select by challenge, both for cause, in all cases, and without cause to a certain number, before she could be legally convicted of any crime whatever, or be lawfully punished by the most trivial loss of property or the minutest injury to limb, to say nothing of the brutal crushing out of her life? That’s the unevadable question which the ages put and will continue to put. ”

“ The necessity for the President of the United States, himself, to come forward as the one sole witness to his own accusation—especially when the charge involved an admission of his own delinquency, and was to be met by the loud and defiant denial of his arraigned subordinate—was enough, of itself, to deter the Chief Magistrate of a great nation from descending into so humiliating a combat. ”

“ Amid the tolling of the bells, sending a shudder through the silent population of the city, and heralded by the tramp of armed men, the death-march of the doomed woman and the doomed men begins. The still breathing men and still breathing woman are clothed already in their shrouds. As she totters first along the corridor, accompanied by her priest and requiring two soldiers to hold her erect, the very extremity of her helplessness and woe bears witness in her favor. ”

“ Culprits arraigned before them, guarded by armed soldiery, without arms themselves—why, in the name of justice, drag them into Court and force them to sit through a long trial, bound with iron, hand and foot? ”

“ 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 ”

“ I have lived too long, gone through too many trials, rendered the country such services as my abilities enabled me, and the confidence of the people in whose midst I am has given me the opportunity, to tolerate for a moment—come from whom it may—such an aspersion upon my moral character. ”

“ These brave warriors could not have feared the naked arm of Payne, nor have indulged the childish apprehension that seven unarmed men and one unarmed woman might overpower six armed soldiers and nine gallant officers, and effect their escape from the third story of a prison guarded on all sides with bayonets and watched by detective police! And yet, so far as appears, no single member of the Court, to whom such a desecration of our common humanity was a daily sight for weeks, thought it deserving of notice, much less of protest. ”

“ At this late day it is a most natural supposition that these nine stalwart military heroes, sitting comfortably around their table, arrayed in their bright uniforms, with their own arms and their own legs unfettered, must have felt at least a faint flush of mingled pity, shame and indignation, as they looked across that room at that ironed row of human beings. ”

“ Bradley, his malicious and sordid animus laid bare,—his self-contradictions, his studied revisions, his purposeful additions to his testimony, exposed—his intimacy with the conspirators, his terrified repentance, his abject self-surrender and his cowardly eagerness to shift his peril upon the head of his protectress,—and then his simulated remorse and his later recantation—all made clear—he was an object of loathing to gentlemen; a stumbling block to the philanthropist ”

“ Great, assuredly, must have been the flurry of the once omnipotent Bureau, when it was ascertained that the tribunal before which it must come could not be “organized to convict;” that there could be no soldiery around the Court, no shackles on the prisoners or the witnesses for the defense, no prosecuting officers in the jury room. Everything must be done decently and in order, with the same calm dignity, unruffled composure, the same presumption of the innocence of the accused, as though the murdered man had been the humblest citizen of the land. ”

“ Surratt was to die by the rope on the same scaffold with Payne, Herold and Atzerodt within twenty-four hours, a chill of despairing terror froze the blood of her relatives and friends, a thrill of consternation swept over the body of the citizens, and dark misgivings disturbed even the most loyal breasts. A stream of supplicants at once set in towards the Executive Mansion—not only friends and acquaintances of the condemned woman, but strangers, high-placed men, and women too, who were haunted by doubts of her guilt and could in some degree realize her agony. ”

“ Murder, not only on the part of the Commission and its lawyers; they too might, possibly, plead—though with still diminishing force—that, although they were warned and took the awful responsibility, still they believed in their competency.
But murder, also, in the President of the United States, who appointed the court, approved its findings, and commanded the execution of its sentence. He stands before the law in the same position as though, sweeping aside all empty forms, he had seized a sword and with his own hand cut off the head of the woman, without the mockery of a trial. ”

“ A Court recognized in, and drawing its life and jurisdiction from, the Constitution was to act as a court of appeal to review the process and judgment of that extra-constitutional tribunal, which had, summarily and without legal warrant, put a free American woman to a felon’s death. ”

“ But the explosion of the great assassination conspiracy; the nol-pros. of the awful charge against Jefferson Davis, Clement C. Clay, Jacob Thompson, and their followers—a crime, which, if capable of proof, no government on earth would have dared to condone—discredited forever the judgment of the Military Commission, reopened wide all questions of testimony, of character, of guilt or innocence, and summoned the silent and dishonored dead to a new and benignant trial. ”

“ The horrid monster of a widespread, treasonable conspiracy to overthrow the government, which had been conjured up in the imagination of the Secretary of War and then cherished in the secret recesses of the Bureau of Military Justice, would have immediately shrunk into the comparatively simple case of an assassination of the President and an attempted assassination of the Secretary of State, by two worthless villains suddenly seizing opportunity by the forelock to accomplish their murderous purpose. ”