The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt. DeWitt David Miller
sting of personal insult the hostile predisposition of the judges.
At the foot of the table around which the Court sat – the table standing parallel with the north side of the room – there was another, around which were gathered the three prosecuting officers, who, according to military procedure, were also members of the Commission.
First, was Brigadier-General Joseph Holt, the Judge-Advocate of the U. S. Army, and the Recorder of the Commission. During his past military career he had distinguished himself on many a bloody court-martial.
Second, designated by General Holt as First Assistant or Special Judge-Advocate, was Hon. John A. Bingham, of Ohio – long a Representative in Congress, then for a short interval a Military Judge-Advocate, now a Representative in Congress again, and to become in the strange vicissitudes of the near future, one of the managers of the impeachment of President Johnson, whom he now cannot praise too highly. He was one of those fierce and fiery western criminal lawyers, gifted with that sort of vociferous oratory which tells upon jurors and on the stump, by nature and training able to see but one side to a case and consequently merciless to his victims. His special function was to cross-examine and brow-beat the witnesses for the defense, a branch of his profession in which he was proudly proficient, and, above all, by pathetic appeals to their patriotism and loyalty, and by measureless denunciations of the murder of their Commander-in-Chief and of the Rebellion, to keep up at a white heat the already burning passions of the officers composing the tribunal. Next to him came Colonel Henry L. Burnett; brought from Indiana where he had won recent laurels in conducting the trial of Milligan for treason before a Military Commission – laurels, alas! soon to be blasted by the decision of the U. S. Supreme Court pronouncing that and all other Military Commissions for the trial of citizens in places where the civil courts are open illegal, and setting free the man this zealous public servant had been instrumental in condemning to death.
In the centre of the room was a witness-stand facing the Court. To the left of the witness-stand a table for the official reporters. Along the western side and directly opposite the Court was a platform about a foot high and four feet broad, with a strong railing in front of it. This was the prisoners’ dock. The platform was divided near the left hand or southern corner by the doorway which led to the cells. In front of the southern end of the dock and behind the witness-stand was the table of the prisoners’ counsel.
At the appointed hour the door in the western side opens and an impressive and mournful procession appears. Six soldiers armed to the teeth are interspersed among seven male prisoners and one woman.
First walks Samuel Arnold, the young Baltimorean, who is to sit at the extreme right (i. e., of the spectators), followed close by his armed guard; next, Dr. Samuel T. Mudd and a soldier; next, Edward Spangler and a soldier; next, Michael O’Laughlin, another Baltimorean, and his soldier; next, George B. Atzerodt and a soldier; next, Lewis Payne, a tall gladiator, though only twenty years old, and his soldier; and then David E. Herold, looking like an insignificant boy, who is to sit next the door. As they enter, their fetters clanking at every step, they turn to their left and take seats on the platform in the order named, the six soldiers being sandwiched here and there between two of the men.
Each of these prisoners, during the entire trial, was loaded down with irons made as massive and uncomfortable as possible. Their wrists were bound with the heaviest hand-cuffs, connected by bars of iron ten inches long (with the exception of Dr. Mudd, whose hand-cuffs were connected by a chain), so that they could not join their hands. Their legs were weighed down by shackles joined by chains made short enough to hamper their walk. In addition to these fetters, common to all, Payne and Atzerodt had, attached by chains to their legs, huge iron balls, which their guards had to lift and carry after them whenever they entered or left the Court room.
Last, there emerges from the dungeon-like darkness of the doorway the single female prisoner, Mary E. Surratt. She, alone, turns to her right and, consequently, when she is seated has the left hand corner of the platform to herself. But she is separated from her companions in misery by more than the narrow passage-way that divides the dock; for she is a lady of fair social position, of unblemished character and of exemplary piety, and, besides, she is a mother, a widow, and, in that room amongst all those soldiers, lawyers, guards, judges and prisoners, the sole representative of her sex. Her womanhood is her peculiar weakness, yet still her only shield.
Is she too ironed?
The unanimous testimony of eye-witnesses published at the time of the trial is, that, though not hand-cuffed, she was bound with iron “anklets” on her feet. And this detail, thus universally proclaimed in the Northern Press and by loyal writers, was mentioned not as conveying the slightest hint of reprobation, but as constituting, like the case of the male prisoners, a part of the appropriate treatment by the military of a person suffering under such a charge. And, moreover, no contemporaneous denial of this widespread circumstance was anywhere made, either by Provost-Marshal, Counsel, Judge-Advocate or member of the Court. It passed unchallenged into history, like many another deed of shame, over which it is a wonder that any man could glory, but which characterized that period of frenzy.
Eight years after, during the bitter controversy between Andrew Johnson and Joseph Holt over the recommendation of mercy to Mrs. Surratt, General Hartranft, the former Special Provost-Marshal in charge of the prisoners, first broke silence and, coming to the aid of the sorely-tried Ex-Judge-Advocate, sent him a vehement categorical denial that Mrs. Surratt was ever manacled at any time, or that there was ever a thought of manacling her in any one’s mind. Now, what force should be given to such a denial by so distinguished an officer, so long delayed and in the face of such universal contemporaneous affirmation?
No one knows how close and exclusive the charge of the prisoners by the special Provost-Marshal was, nor how liable to interruption, interference and supersession by the omnipotent Bureau of Military Justice, or by the maddened Secretary of War and his obsequious henchmen.
At the time the naked assertion was made, to heap indignities upon the head of the only woman in the whole country whom the soldiery took for granted was the one female fiend who helped to shed the blood of the martyred President, was so consonant with the angry feeling, in military circles, that an officer, having only a general superintendence over the custody and treatment of what was called “a band of fiends,” would be very likely to overlook such a small matter as that the she-assassin was not exempted, in one detail, from the contumelies and cruelties it was thought patriotic to pile upon her co-conspirators. The only wonder ought to be that they relieved her from the hand-cuffs. They appear to have discriminated in the case of Dr. Mudd also, substituting a chain for an inflexible bar so that he for one could move his hands. There may have been some unmentioned physical reasons for both of these alleviations, but we may rest assured that neither sex, in the one case, nor profession in the other, was among them.
General Hartranft (or any other General) never denied, or thought it necessary to deny, that the seven male prisoners sat through the seven weeks of the trial, loaded, nay tortured, with irons. And there is no doubt that this unspeakable outrage, if thought of at all at the trial by the soldiery – high or low – so far from being thought of as a matter of reprobation, was a subject of grim merriment or stern congratulation.
Eight years, however, passed away – eight years, in which a fund of indignation at such brutality, above all to a woman, had been silently accumulating, until at length to a soldier, whose beclouding passions of the moment had in the meantime cooled down, its weight made every loop-hole of escape an entrance for the very breath of life.
The entire atmosphere had changed, and denials became the order of the day. Memory is a most convenient faculty; and to forget what the lapse of years has at last stamped with infamy is easy, when the event passed at the time as a mere matter of course. Leaving these tardy repudiators of an iniquity, the responsibility for which in the day of its first publication they tacitly assumed with the utmost complacency, to settle the question with posterity; – we insist that the preference is open to writers upon the events of the year 1865 to rely upon the unprejudiced and unchallenged statements of eye-witnesses; and, therefore, we do here reaffirm that Mary E. Surratt walked into the court-room, and sat during her trial, with shackles upon her limbs.
At this late day it is a most natural supposition that these nine stalwart military heroes,