The Reign Of Terror. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln burst upon the City of Washington like a black thunder-bolt out of a cloudless sky. On Monday, the 3d of April, 1865, Richmond was taken. On the succeeding Sunday (the ninth), General Lee with the main Army of the South surrendered. The rebellion of nearly one-half the nation lay in its death-throes. The desperate struggle for the unity of the Republic was ending in a perfect triumph; and the loyal people gave full rein to their joy. Ever

The Bureau of Military (In)justice. Mingling with the varied emotions evoked by the capture and death of the chief criminal was a feeling of deepest exasperation that the foul assassin should after all have eluded the ignominious penalty of his crime. Thence arose a savage disposition on the part of the governing powers to wreak this baffled vengeance first, on his inanimate body; secondly, on the lives of his associates held so securely in such close custody; and thirdly, on all those in high p

The Opening of the Court. On the ninth day of May the Commission met but only to adjourn that the prisoners might employ counsel. On the same day, two of its members, General Cyrus B. Comstock and Colonel Horace Porter—names to be noted for what may have been a heroic refusal—were relieved from the duty of sitting upon the Commission, and two other officers substituted in their stead. So that Tuesday, May 10th, 1865—twenty-six days after the assassination, a period much too short for the intense

Animus of the Judges. On Saturday, the 13th of May, an incident occurred which throws much light upon the judicial temper of the Court at the very beginning of the trial. On that day Reverdy Johnson appeared as counsel for Mrs. Surratt. Admitted to the bar in 1815, Senator of the United States as far back as 1845, Attorney-General of the United States as long ago as 1849, and holding the position of Senator of the United States again at that very moment; having taken the constitutional oath in a

The Conduct of the Trial. The whole conduct of the trial emphasizes this conclusion. The Court, in weighing the evidence, adopted and acted upon the following proposition; that any witness, sworn for any of the prisoners, who had enlisted in the Confederate service, or had at any time expressed secession sentiments, or sympathized in any way with the South, was totally unworthy of credit. The Court went a step farther, and adopted the monstrous rule that participation in the Rebellion was eviden

Arguments For The Defense. The testimony for the several defenses of the eight accused closed on the 7th of June, and the testimony in rebuttal ended on the 14th, with the evidence of the physicians on the sanity of Payne. Thereupon, General Ewing endeavored to extract from the Judge-Advocate an answer to the two following questions: First.—Whether his clients were on trial for but one crime, viz.: Conspiracy, or four crimes, viz.: Conspiracy, Murder, Attempt at murder, Lying in wait? and Second

Charge of Judge Bingham. From the sixteenth to the twenty-seventh of June the time was consumed by the summing up of the several counsel for the prisoners on the facts disclosed by the evidence; and on the last mentioned day and the succeeding one, Special Judge-Advocate Bingham delivered his address in answer to all the foregoing pleas, both as to the jurisdiction of the Court and also as to the merits of the case. This long, carefully prepared and yet impassioned speech may be fairly considere

The Verdict, Sentence and Petition. With the loud and repeated denunciations of this elaborate and vindictive harangue, full as it was of rhetorical appeals to the members of the Commission to avenge the murder of “their beloved Commander-in-Chief,” and of repeated and most emphatic assurances of the undoubted guilt of each and every one of the prisoners, as well as of all their alleged accomplices, still ringing in the ear of the Court; the room is for the last time cleared of spectators, couns

The Death Warrant and the Execution. From Friday afternoon, the thirtieth of June, through Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, the first four days of July, the record of the findings and sentences remained under the seal of sworn secrecy in the custody of the Judge-Advocate-General. To consummate the work of the Commission, the signature of the President to a warrant approving its action and directing the execution of its judgment was necessary. But, during this interval, as it was given out f

Was it not Murder? And now what shall be said as to this taking of human life? Maintaining the most rigorous allegiance to the simple unadulterated truth, what can be said? Arraigned at the bar of the common law as expounded by the precedents of centuries, and confronted by plain provisions of the Constitution of the United States, which need no exposition and yet have been luminously expounded; but one thing can be said. Had Mary E. Surratt the right guaranteed by the Constitution to a trial si

Setting Aside the Verdict. 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; flattened the earth over her grave, replaced the pavement of sto

Reversal upon the Merits. The new trial was in fact at hand. In the summer of the year 1867, the interest excited by the investigation of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, referred to in the last chapter, suddenly became merged into the intenser and more widespread interest excited by the trial of John H. Surratt in the Criminal Court of the District of Columbia. Surratt, after escaping from his captors in Italy by leaping down a precipice, fled to Malta and thence to Alex

The Recommendation to Mercy. The worst was still behind. It was left to Time to disclose the astounding fact, that all the military machinery of the War Department, its Bureaus, its Court, its Judge-Advocates, its unconstitutional, anti-constitutional and extra-constitutional processes, would not have compassed the death of this helpless woman, had not the prosecutors, in the last extremity, called in the help of Fraud. It has been narrated in the chronological order of events, how five members

The Trial of Joseph Holt. On the threshold of his Vindication, Gen. Holt revives the discredited and apparently forgotten declaration made by Mr. Pierrepont on the trial of John H. Surratt, and stakes his whole case upon the establishment of the truth of the allegation that the petition for commutation, attached as it was to the record of the findings and sentences of the Military Commission, was the subject of consideration at a meeting of the Cabinet of President Johnson, and its prayer reject

Andrew Johnson Signs Another Death-Warrant. Let us turn from the case made by General Holt, which on a cursory inspection seems so strong, but the seeming strength of which, on a closer scrutiny, dissipates itself among such perplexing questions, and lands us at last in the “enjoined silence” of Stanton, to the first public, authoritative charge made by the ex-President. It appeared, November 12th, 1873, in the same newspaper which had published General Holt’s Vindication, to which it was a repl

Conclusion. 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 u