Chapter 14

The gentlemen of the commission will please recollect that these statements were rendered by a man addicted to excessive use of intoxicating liquors; that he was even inordinately drunk at the time referred to; that he had voluntarily complicated himself in the concealment of the arms by John H. Surratt and his friends; that he was in a state of maudlin terror when arrested and when forced to confess; that for two days he maintained denial of all knowledge that Booth and Herold had been at his house; and that at last, and in the condition referred to, he was coerced by threats to confess, and into a weak and common effort to exculpate himself by the accusation of another and by statements of conversation already cited. Notwithstanding his utter denial of all knowledge of Booth and Herold having called at his house, it afterward appears, by his own testimony, that immediately Herold commanded him (Lloyd) "For God's sake, make haste and get those things," he comprehended what "things" were indicated, without definition, and brought forth both carbines and whisky. He testifies that John H. Surratt had told him, when depositing the weapons in concealment in his house, that they would soon be called for, but did not instruct him, it seems, by whom they would be demanded.

All facts connecting Lloyd with the case tend to his implication and guilt, and to prove that he adopted the _dernier_ _ressort_ of guilt-- accusation and inculpation of another. In case Lloyd were innocent and Mrs. Surratt the guilty coadjutrix and messenger of the conspirators, would not Lloyd have been able to cite so many open and significant remarks and acts of Mrs. Surratt that he would not have been obliged to recall, in all perversion and weakness of uncertainty, deeds and speech so common and unmeaning as his testimony includes?

It is upon these considerations that we feel ourselves safe and reasonable in the position that there are facts and circumstances, both external and internal, connected with the testimony of Weichmann and Lloyd, which, if they do not destroy, do certainly greatly shake their credibility, and which, under the rule that will give Mrs. Surratt the benefit of all reasonable doubts, seem to forbid that she should be convicted upon the unsupported evidence of these two witnesses. But even admitting the facts to be proven as above recited, it remains to be seen where is the guilty knowledge of the contemplated assassination; and this brings us to the inquiry whether these facts are not explainable so as to exclude guilt.

From one of the most respected of legal authorities the following is taken:--

"Whenever, therefore, the evidence leaves it indifferent which of several hypotheses is true, or merely establishes some finite probability in favor of one hypothesis rather than another, such evidence cannot amount to proof. The maxim of the law is that it is better that ninety-nine offenders should escape than that one innocent man should be condemned." (Starkie on Evidence.)

The acts of Mrs. Surratt must have been accompanied with criminal intent in order to make them criminal. If any one supposes that any such intent existed, the supposition comes alone from inference. If disloyal acts and constant disloyal practices, if overt and open action against the government, on her part, had been shown down to the day of the murder of the President, it would do something toward establishing the inference of criminal intent. On the other hand, just the reverse is shown. The remarks here of the learned and honorable judge advocate are peculiarly appropriate to this branch of the discussion, and, with his authority, we waive all others.

"If the court please, I will make a single remark. I think the testimony in this case has proved, what I believe history sufficiently attests, how kindred to each other are the crimes of treason against a nation and the assassination of its chief magistrate. As I think of those crimes, the one seems to be, if not the necessary consequence, certainly a logical sequence from the other. The murder of the President of the United States, as alleged and shown, was preeminently a political assassination. Disloyalty to the government was its sole, its only inspiration. When, therefore, we shall show, on the part of the accused, acts of intense disloyalty, bearing arms in the field against that government, we show, with him, the presence of an animus toward the government which relieves this accusation of much, if not all, of its improbability. And this course of proof is constantly resorted to in criminal courts. I do not regard it as in the slightest degree a departure from the usages of the profession in the administration of public justice. The purpose is to show that the prisoner, in his mind and course of life, was prepared for the commission of this crime: that the tendencies of his life, as evidenced by open and overt acts, lead and point to this crime, if not as a necessary, certainly as a most probable, result, and it is with that view, and that only, that the testimony is offered."

Is there anything in Mrs. Surratt's mind and course of life to show that she was prepared for the commission of this crime? The business transaction by Mrs. Surratt at Surrattsville, on the fourteenth, clearly discloses her only purpose in making this visit. Calvert's letters, the package of papers relating to the estate, the business with Nothe, would be sufficiently clear to most minds, when added to the fact that the other unknown package had been handed to Mrs, Offutt; that, while at Surrattsville, she made an inquiry for, or an allusion to, Mr. Lloyd, and was ready to return to Washington when Lloyd drove up to the house. Does not this open wide the door for the admission of the plea of "reasonable doubt"? Had she really been engaged in assisting in the great crime, which makes an epoch in our country's history, her only object and most anxious wish would have been to see Lloyd. It was no ruse to transact important business there to cover up what the uncharitable would call the real business. Calvert's letter was received by her on the forenoon of the fourteenth, and long before she saw Booth that day, or even before Booth knew that the President would be at the theatre that night, Mrs. Surratt had disclosed her intention to go to Surrattsville, and had she been one moment earlier in her start she would not have seen Booth at all. All these things furnish powerful presumptions in favor of the theory that, if she delivered the message at all, it was done innocently.

In regard to the nonrecognition of Payne, the third fact adduced by the prosecution against Mrs. Surratt, we incline to the opinion that, to all minds not forejudging, the testimony of Miss Anna E. Surratt, and various friends and servants of Mrs. Surratt, relative to physical causes, might fully explain and account for such ocular remissness and failure. In times and on occasions of casual meeting of intimate acquaintances on the street, and of common need for domestic uses, the eyesight of Mrs. Surratt had proved treacherous and failing. How much more liable to fail her was her imperfect vision on an occasion of excitement and anxiety, like the night of her arrest and the disturbance of her household by military officers, and when the person with whom she was confronted was transfigured by a disguise which varied from the one in which she had previously met him, with all the wide difference between a Baptist parson and an earth-soiled, uncouthly-dressed digger of gutters! Anna E. Surratt, Emma Offutt, Anna Ward, Elize Holohan, Honora Fitzpatrick, and a servant, attest to all the visual incapacity of Mrs. Surratt, and the annoyance she experienced therefrom in passing friends without recognition in the daytime, and from inability to sew or read even on a dark day, as well as at night. The priests of her church, and gentlemen who have been friendly and neighborhood acquaintances of Mrs. Surratt for many years, bear witness to her untarnished name, to her discreet and Christian character, to the absence of all imputation of disloyalty, to her character for patriotism. Friends and servants attest to her voluntary and gratuitous beneficence to our soldiers stationed near her; and, "in charges for high treason, it is pertinent to inquire into the humanity of the prisoner toward those representing the government," is the maxim of the law; and, in addition, we invite your attention to the singular fact that of the two officers who bore testimony in this matter, one asserts that the hall wherein Payne sat was illuminated with a full head of gas; the other, that the gaslight was purposely dimmed. The uncertainty of the witness who gave the testimony relative to the coat of Payne may also be called to your notice.

Should not this valuable testimony of loyal and moral character shield a woman from the ready belief, on the part of judges who judge her worthiness in every way, that during the few moments Booth detained Mrs. Surratt from her carriage, already waiting, when he approached and entered the house, she became so converted to diabolical evil as to hail with ready assistance his terrible plot, which must have been framed (if it were complete in his intent at that hour, half-past two o'clock), since the hour of eleven that day?

If any part of Lloyd's statements is true, and Mrs. Surratt did verily bear to his or Mrs. Offutt's hands the field glass, enveloped in paper, by the evidence itself we may believe she knew not the nature of the contents of the package; and had she known, what evil could she or any other have attached to a commission of so common a nature? No evidence of individual or personal intimacy with Booth has been adduced against Mrs. Surratt; no long and apparently confidential interviews; no indications of a private comprehension mutual between them; only the natural and not frequent custom on the part of Booth--as any other associate of her son might and doubtless did do--of inquiring through the mother, whom he would request to see, of the son, who, he would learn, was absent from home. No one has been found who could declare any appearance of the nursing or mysteriously discussing of anything like conspiracy within the walls of Mrs. Surratt's house. Even if the son of Mrs. Surratt, from the significancies of associations, is to be classed with the conspirators, if such a body existed, it is monstrous to suppose that the son would weave a net of circumstantial evidences around the dwelling of his widowed mother, were he never so reckless and sin-determined; and that they (the mother and the son) joined hands in such dreadful pact, is a thought more monstrous still!

A mother and son associate in crime, and such a crime as this, which half of the civilized world never saw matched in all its dreadful bearings! Our judgments can have hardly recovered their unprejudiced poise since the shock of the late horror, if we can contemplate with credulity such a picture, conjured by the unjust spirits of indiscriminate accusation and revenge. A crime which, in its public magnitude, added to its private misery, would have driven even the Atis-haunted heart of a Medici, a Borgia, or a Madame Bocarme to wild confession before its accomplishment, and daunted even that soul, of all the recorded world the most eager for novelty in license, and most unshrinking in sin--the indurated soul of Christina of Sweden; such a crime the profoundest plotters within padded walls would scarcely dare whisper; the words forming the expression of which, spoken aloud in the upper air, would convert all listening boughs to aspens, and all glad sounds of nature to shuddering wails. And this made known, even surmised, to a woman a _materfamilias_ the good genius, the _placens_ _uxor_ of a home where children had gathered all the influences of purity and the reminiscences of innocence, where religion watched, and the Church was minister and teacher!

Who--were circumstantial evidence strong and conclusive, such as only time and the slow-weaving fates could elucidate and deny--who will believe, when the mists of uncertainty which cloud the present shall have dissolved, that a woman born and bred in respectability and competence--a Christian mother, and a citizen who never offended the laws of civil propriety; whose unfailing attention to the most sacred duties of life has won for her the name of "a proper Christian matron"; whose heart was ever warmed by charity; whose door unbarred to the poor; and whose Penates had never cause to veil their faces--who will believe that she could so suddenly and so fully have learned the intricate arts of sin? A daughter of the South, her life associations confirming her natal predilections, her individual preferences inclined, without logic or question, to the Southern people, but with no consciousness nor intent of disloyalty to her government, and causing no exclusion from her friendship and active favors of the people of the loyal North, nor repugnance in the distribution among our Union soldiery of all needed comforts, and on all occasions.

A strong but guileless-hearted woman, her maternal solicitude would have been the first denouncer, even the abrupt betrayer of a plotted crime in which one companion of her son could have been implicated, had cognizance of such reached her. Her days would have been agonized, and her nights sleepless, till she might have exposed and counteracted that spirit of defiant hate which watched its moment of vantage to wreak an immortal wrong--till she might have sought the intercession and absolution of the Church, her refuge, in behalf of those she loved. The brains which were bold and crafty and couchant enough to dare the world's opprobrium in the conception of a scheme which held as naught the lives of men in highest places, would never have imparted it to the intelligence, nor sought the aid nor sympathy, of any living woman who had not, like Lady Macbeth, "unsexed herself"--not though she were wise and discreet as Maria Theresa or the Castilian Isabella. This woman knew it not. This woman, who, on the morning preceding that blackest day in our country's annals, knelt in the performance of her most sincere and sacred duty at the confessional, and received the mystic rite of the Eucharist, knew it not. Not only would she have rejected it with horror, but such a proposition, presented by the guest who had sat at her hearth as the friend and convive of the son upon whose arm and integrity her widowed womanhood relied for solace and protection, would have roused her maternal wits to some sure cunning which would have contravened the crime and sheltered her son from the evil influences and miserable results of such companionship.

The mothers of Charles IX. and of Nero could harbor underneath their terrible smiles schemes for the violent and unshriven deaths, or the moral vitiation and decadence which would painfully and gradually remove lives sprung from their own, were they obstacles to their demoniac ambition. But they wrought their awful romances of crime in lands where the sun of supreme civilization, through a gorgeous evening of Sybaritic luxury, was sinking, with red tints of revolution, into the night of anarchy and national caducity. In our own young nation, strong in its morality, energy, freedom, and simplicity, assassination can never be indigenous. Even among the desperadoes and imported lazzaroni of our largest cities, it is comparatively an infrequent cause of fear.

The daughters of women to whom, in their yet preserved abodes, the noble mothers who adorned the days of our early independence are vividly remembered realities and not haunting shades--the descendants of earnest seekers for liberty, civil and religious, of rare races, grown great in heroic endurance, in purity which comes of trial borne, and in hope born of conscious right, whom the wheels of fortune sent hither to transmit such virtues--the descendants of these have no heart, no ear for the diabolisms born in hotbeds of tyranny and intolerance. No descendant of these--no woman of this temperate land--could have seen, much less joined, her son, descending the sanguinary and irrepassable ways of treason and murder to an ignominious death, or an expatriated and attainted life, worse than the punishing wheel and bloody pool of the poets' hell.

In our country, where reason and moderation so easily quench the fires of insane hate, and where the vendetta is so easily overcome by the sublime grace of forgiveness, no woman could have been found so desperate as to sacrifice all spiritual, temporal, and social good, self, offspring, fame, honor, and all the desiderata of life, and time, and immortality, to the commission, or even countenance, of such a deed of horror, as we have been compelled to contemplate during the two months past.

In a Christian land, where all records and results of the world's intellectual, civil, and moral advancement mold the human heart and mind to highest impulses, the theory of old Helvetius is more probable than desirable.

The natures of all born in equal station are not so widely varied as to present extremes of vice and goodness, but by the effects of rarest and severest experience. Beautiful fairies and terrible gnomes do not stand by each infant's cradle, sowing the nascent mind with tenderest graces or vilest errors. The slow attrition of vicious associations and law-defying indulgences, or the sudden impetus of some terribly multiplied and social disaster, must have worn away the susceptibility of conscience and self-respect, or dashed the mind from the height of these down to the depths of despair and recklessness, before one of ordinary life could take counsel with violence and crime. In no such manner was the life of our client marked. It was the parallel of nearly all the competent masses. Surrounded by the scenes of her earliest recollections, independent in her condition she was satisfied with the _mundus_ of her daily pursuits, and the maintenance of her own and children's status in society and her Church.

Remember your wives, mothers, sisters, and gentle friends whose graces, purity, and careful affection, ornament and cherish and strengthen your lives. Not widely different from their natures and spheres have been the nature and sphere of the woman who sits in the prisoner's dock to-day, mourning with the heart of Alcestis her children and her lot; by whose desolated hearthstone a solitary daughter wastes her uncomforted life away in tears and prayers and vigils for the dawn of hope; and this wretchedness and unpitied despair have closed like a shadow around one of earth's common pictures of domestic peace and social comfort, destroyed by the one sole cause--suspicion fastened and fed upon the facts of acquaintance and mere fortuitous intercourse with that man in whose name so many miseries gather, the assassin of the President.

Since the days when Christian teachings first elevated woman to her present free, refined, and refining position, man's power and honoring regard have been the palladium of her sex.

Let no stain of injustice, eager for a sacrifice to revenge, rest upon the reputation of the men of our country and time!

This woman, who, widowed of her natural protectors, who, in helplessness and painfully severe imprisonment, in sickness and in grief ineffable, sues for mercy and justice from your hands, may leave a legacy of blessings, sweet as fruition-hastening showers, for those you love and care for, in return for the happiness of fame and home restored, though life be abbreviated and darkened through this world by the miseries of this unmerited and woeful trial. But long and chilling is the shade which just retribution, slow creeping on, _ped_ _claudo_, casts around the fate of him whose heart is merciless to his fellows bowed low in misfortune.

ALBERTUS MAGNUS (1205-1280)

Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus), teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, was one of the most celebrated orators and theologians of the Church in the thirteenth century. He was born at Lauingen on the Danube in 1205 (according to some in 1193), and, becoming a Dominican at the age of twenty-nine, he taught in various German cities with continually increasing celebrity, until finally the Pope called him to preach in Rome. In 1260 he was made Bishop of Ratisbon, but after three years resigned the bishopric and returned to his work in the ranks of the clergy. While teaching at Cologne he suddenly lost his memory, probably as a result of his excessive studies. He died November 15th, 1280. He was placed on the calendar of saints in 1615. His works, collected by Peter Jammy, and published at Lyons in 1651, make twenty-one volumes, folio.

THE MEANING OF THE CRUCIFIXION

It was surrounded by the thick wreath of thorns even to the tender brain. Whence in the Prophet,--the people hath surrounded me with the thorns of sin. And why was this, save that thine own head might not suffer--thine own conscience might not be wounded? His eyes grew dark in death; and those lights, which give light to the world, were for a time extinguished. And when they were clouded, there was darkness over all the earth, and with them the two great lights of the firmament were moved, to the end that thine eyes might be turned away, lest they should behold vanity; or, if they chance to behold it, might for his sake condemn it. Those ears, which in heaven unceasingly hear "Holy, Holy, Holy," vouchsafed on earth to be filled with: "Thou hast a devil,--Crucify him, Crucify him!" to the intent that thine ears might not be deaf to the cry of the poor, nor, open to idle tales, should readily receive the poison of detraction or of adulation. That fair face of him that was fairer than the children of men, yea, than thousands of angels, was bedaubed with spitting, afflicted with blows, given up to mockery, to the end that thy face might be enlightened, and, being enlightened, might be strengthened, so that it might be said of thee, "His countenance is no more changed." That mouth, which teaches angels and instructs men "which spake and it was done," was fed with gall and vinegar, that thy mouth might speak the truth, and might be opened to the praise of the Lord; and it was silent, lest thou shouldst lightly lend thy tongue to the expression of anger.

Those hands, which stretched abroad the heavens, were stretched out on the cross and pierced with most bitter nails; as saith Isaiah, "I have stretched forth my hands all the day to an unbelieving people." And David, "They pierced my hands and my feet; I may tell all my bones." And Saint Jerome says, "We may, in the stretching forth of his hands, understand the liberality of the giver, who denieth nothing to them that ask lovingly; who restored health to the leper that requested it of him; enlightened him that was blind from his birth; fed the hungry multitude in the wilderness." And again he says, "The stretched-out hands denote the kindness of the parent, who desires to receive his children to his breast." And thus let thy hands be so stretched out to the poor that thou mayest be able to say, "My soul is always in my hand." For that which is held in the hand is not easily forgotten. So he may be said to call his soul to memory, who carries it, as it were, in his hands through the good opinion that men conceive of it. His hands were fixed, that they may instruct thee to hold back thy hands, with the nails of fear, from unlawful or harmful works.