The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt. DeWitt David Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ examined on oath, time and again, and on various occasions, it is doubtful whether he has in any one thing told the truth, even by accident. In every important statement he is contradicted by witnesses of unquestioned credibility. And there can be no doubt that to his many previous outrages, entitling him to an unenviable immortality, he has added that of wilful and deliberate perjury; and we are glad to know that no one member of the committee deems any statement made by him as worthy of the slightest credit. What a blush of shame will tinge the cheek of the American student in future ages, when he reads that this miserable wretch for years held, as it were, in the hollow of his hand, the liberties of the American people. That, clothed with power by a reckless administration, and with his hordes of unprincipled tools and spies permeating the land everywhere, with uncounted thousands of the people’s money placed in his hands for his vile purposes, this creature not only had power to arrest without crime or writ, and imprison without limit, any citizen of the republic, but that he actually did so arrest thousands, all over the land, and filled the prisons of the country with the victims of his malice, or that of his masters.”

      In this man’s hands Secretary Stanton placed all the resources of the War Department, in soldiers, detectives, material and money, and commanded him to push ahead and apprehend all persons suspected of complicity in the assumed conspiracy, and to conduct an investigation as to the origin and progress of the crime, upon the theory he had adopted and which, as much as any other, Baker was perfectly willing to accept and then, by his peculiar methods, establish. Forthwith was ushered in the grand carnival of detectives. Far and wide they sped. They had orders from Baker to do two things:

      I. – To arrest all the “Suspect.” II. – By promises, rewards, threats, deceit, force, or any other effectual means, to extort confessions and procure testimony to establish the conspiracy whose existence had been postulated.

      At two o’clock in the morning of Saturday, the fifteenth, they burst into the house of Mrs. Surratt and displaying the bloody collar of the coat of the dying Lincoln, demanded the whereabouts of Booth and Surratt. It being presently discovered that Booth had escaped on horseback across the Navy Yard Bridge with David Herold ten minutes in his rear, a dash was made upon the livery-stables of Washington, their proprietors taken into custody, and then the whole of lower Maryland was invaded, the soldiers declaring martial law as they progressed. Ford’s theatre was taken and held by an armed force, and the proprietor and employees were all swept into prison, including Edward Spangler, a scene-shifter, who had been a menial attendant of Booth’s. The superstitious notion prevailed that the inanimate edifice whose walls had suffered such a desecration was in some vague sense an accomplice; the Secretary swore that no dramatic performance should ever take place there again; and the suspicion was sedulously kept alive that the manager and the whole force of the company must have aided their favorite actor, or the crime could not have been so easily perpetrated and the assassin escaped.

      On the night of the fifteenth (Saturday) a locked room in the Kirkwood House, where Vice President Johnson was stopping, which had been engaged by George A. Atzerodt on the morning of the fourteenth, was broken open, and in the bed were found a bowie-knife and a revolver, and on the wall a coat (subsequently identified as Herold’s), in which was found, among other articles, a bank book of Booth’s. The room had not been otherwise occupied – Atzerodt, after taking possession of it, having mysteriously disappeared.

      On the morning of the seventeenth (Monday), at Baltimore, Michael O’Laughlin was arrested as a friend of Booth’s, and it was soon thought that he “resembled extremely” a certain suspicious stranger who, it was remembered, had been seen prowling about Secretary Stanton’s residence on the night of the 13th, when the serenade took place, and there doing such an unusual act as inquiring for, and looking at, General Grant.

      On the same day at Fort Monroe, Samuel Arnold was arrested, whose letter signed “Sam” had been found on Saturday night among the effects of Booth.

      On the night of the seventeenth, also, the house of Mrs. Surratt with all its contents was taken possession of by the soldiers, and Mrs. Surratt, her daughter, and all the other inmates were taken into custody. While the ladies were making preparations for their departure to prison, a man disguised as a laborer, with a sleeve of his knit undershirt drawn over his head, a pick-axe on his shoulder, and covered with mud, came to the door with the story that he was to dig a drain for Mrs. Surratt in the morning; and that lady asseverating that she had never seen the man before, he was swept with the rest to headquarters, and there, to the astonishment of everybody, turned out to be the desperate assailant of the Sewards.

      During these few days Washington was like a city of the dead. The streets were hung with crape. The obsequies, which started on its march across the continent the colossal funeral procession in which the whole people were mourners, were being celebrated with the most solemn pomp. No business was done except at Military Headquarters. Men hardly dared talk of the calamity of the nation. Everywhere soldiers and police were on the alert to seize any supposed or denounced sympathizer with the South. Mysterious and prophetic papers turned up at the White House and the War Department. Women whispered terrible stories of what they knew about the “Great Crime.” To be able to give evidence was to be envied as a hero.

      And still the arch-devil of the plot could not be found!

      The lower parts of Maryland seethed like a boiling pot, and the prisons of Washington were choking with the “suspect” from that quarter. Lloyd – the drunken landlord of the tavern at Surrattsville, ten miles from Washington, at which Booth and Herold had stopped at midnight of the fatal Friday for carbines and whisky – after two days of stubborn denial was at last frightened into confession; and Doctor Mudd, who had set Booth’s leg Saturday morning thirty miles from Washington, was in close confinement. All the intimate friends of the actor in Washington, in Baltimore, in Philadelphia, in New York and even in Montreal were in the clutches of the government. Surratt himself – the pursuit of whom, guided by Weichman, his former college-chum, his room-mate, and the favorite guest of his mother, had been instant and thorough – it was ascertained, had left Canada on the 12th of April and was back again on the 18th.

      But where was Booth? where Herold? where Atzerodt?

      On the 20th, the Secretary of War applied the proper stimulus by issuing a proclamation to the following effect:

      “$50,000 reward will be paid by this department for the apprehension of the murderer of our late beloved President.

      “$25,000 reward for the apprehension of John H. Surratt, one of Booth’s accomplices.

      “$25,000 reward for the apprehension of Herold, another of Booth’s accomplices.

      “Liberal rewards will be paid for any information that shall conduce to the arrest of either of the above-named criminals or their accomplices.

      “All persons harboring or secreting the said persons, or either of them, or aiding or assisting in their concealment or escape, will be treated as accomplices in the murder of the President and the attempted assassination of the Secretary of State, and shall be subject to trial before a military commission and the punishment of death.”

      What is noteworthy about this document is that Stanton had already made up his mind as to the guilt of the persons named as accomplices of Booth; that he needed only their arrest, being assured of their consequent conviction; and that he had already determined that their trial and the trial of all persons connected with the great crime, however remotely, should be had before a military tribunal, and that the punishment to follow conviction should be death.

      At four o’clock in the morning of the very day this proclamation was issued, Atzerodt was apprehended at the house of his cousin in Montgomery County, Md., about twenty-two miles northward of Washington, by a detail of soldiers, to whom, by the way, notwithstanding the arrest preceded the proclamation, $25,000 reward was subsequently paid. With Atzerodt his cousin, Richter, was taken СКАЧАТЬ