SURRATT 193

The Assassination of ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND ITS EXPIATION By David Miller DEWITT The MACMILLAN COMPANY 1909
CHAPTER VIII The Trial of John H. SURRATT 193. The trial opened on the tenth of June, 1867, and the first week was taken up in arguing a challenge by the United States to the array, which, if successful, would have postponed the cause until the next fall; and by the examination of the jurors. It was during this interval that Pierrepont saw fit to give notice that “the public mind would be set right with regard to a great many subjects about which there have been such active and numerous reports and innuendoes,” among the rest, “that the United States dared not bring forward the diary found upon the murderer of the President because that diary would prove things they did not want to have known.” When, on Monday, the seventeenth, the assistant district attorney was about to open the case, the scene in the court room afforded a speaking contrast to the corresponding scene before the military commission. The court was not held within the walls of a prison guarded at all points by soldiers; and the unpretentious court house, standing in its peaceful square, with its doors and windows open, when compared with the Old Penitentiary pervaded by scarcely suppressed passion and undisguised thirst for blood, seemed the very sanctuary of even-handed justice. 194 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN As the prisoner entered and advanced to the bar, no clank of fetters jarred upon the ear; and, as he sat at his ease by the side of his counsel like a citizen the law presumes to be innocent until proved guilty, the memory of that group of culprits loaded down with irons as they crouched before their imperious doomsmen served to consecrate anew the benignity of the common law of peace in contradistinction to the barbarity of the common law of war. One overmastering impression there was, moreover, striking awe into the heart of the most indifferent spectator. All felt that the woman who had suffered the extreme penalty of the law two years before was again on trial with her son, and, as the defendant stood in the flesh with upraised hand to answer to the indictment, the ghost of his mother seemed to hover above his head, echoing with shadowy lips the plea of not guilty, with the feeble repetition of which she had tottered to the scaffold. The prosecution was fully alive to the fearful alternative with which it was confronted. Though a conviction, it was likely, would condone the judgment of the military commission notwithstanding its legal invalidity, an acquittal or even a failure to convict would brand the execution of its sentence upon the mother of the defendant as nothing short of judicial murder under military rule. In the presence of such a tremendous issue— as inexorable as the riddle of the sphinx— the prosecuting officers dared not forego a single branch or phase of their case, no matter how incompatible, one with another, they might have become. Trial of John H. SURRATT 195. For instance, the testimony taken before the commission implicating Surratt with the conspirators before that tribunal tended to demonstrate the existence of a plot to capture as contradistinguished from a plot to kill; yet, although the names of Arnold, 0’Laughlin, Spangler and Mudd did not appear in the present indictment and the prosecution was pledged to produce the diary of Booth, they refused to recognize the existence of the former plot and followed the judge advocates in blending the two— a course rendered much more difficult, if not wholly out of question, by the explosion of the charge of complicity on the part of the Confederate government. And in this course they stubbornly persisted after they had come to the determination, despite of convincing evidence to the contrary, in their own possession, to hinge their whole case upon the presence of the prisoner in Washington on the fatal night. The blending of the two plots was not necessary to convict a conspirator like Payne or Atzerodt whose presence on the scene of action was undisputed; this device was originally resorted to bring within the compass of the charge parties at a distance, especially the authorities at Richmond. The presence of Surratt in Washington once established, to resort to the tactics of the Bureau in the matter of the Great Conspiracy was a mere work of supererogation. The truth is that, oppressed by the magnitude of their task and the alarming uncertainty of the result, they had not sufficient confidence in the strength of either branch of their case to dispense with the aid of the other. Both must be utilized for all they were worth. One might be sufficient for the conviction of the son but the other was necessary to uphold the conviction of the mother. 196 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN Accordingly, they lavished their resources, exhausted their energies and distracted their aim by pushing to the front two independent lines of proof, the substantiation of either of which was all-sufficient for every legitimate purpose; and, in consequence, like a person attempting to ride two horses at once, they fell between the two. The assistant district attorney stated in his opening address: “On the Monday before the assassination, Surratt received a summons from his co-conspirator, Booth, requiring his immediate presence in this city. In obedience to that preconcerted signal he at once left Canada and arrived here on the thirteenth. By numerous, I had almost said a multitude of witnesses, we shall make the proof to be as clear as the noon-day sun, and as convincing as the axioms of truth, that he was here during the day of that fatal Friday, as well as present at the theatre at night. We shall show him to you on Pennsylvania Avenue booted and spurred, awaiting the arrival of the fatal moment. We shall show him in conference with Herold in the evening; we shall show him purchasing a contrivance for disguise an hour or two before the murder.” Such being the case, there was, surely, no necessity for another attempt to prove a series of allegations which the Conspiracy Trial left doubtful and subsequent developments showed to be unmaintainable; allegations which the assistant district attorney restated as follows: Trial of John H. SURRATT 197. “The butchery that ensued was the ripe result of a long-premediated plot, in which the prisoner was the chief conspirator”; “he made his home in this city the rendezvous for the tools and agents in what he called his ‘bloody work’; and his hand provided . . . the very weapons . . . one of which fell from Booth’s death-grip at the moment of his capture.” As a matter of fact, the diary they themselves put in evidence pointed unmistakably to the “ ‘six months’ work to capture” and the sudden inception of the design “to kill”; and their starwitness Wiechmann placed the collapse of the former at least three weeks before the development of the latter. Yet they strenuously contended that the work to capture and the design to kill were but parts of one conspiracy set on foot in the summer of 1863. Beside the mass of testimony adduced on the other trial, they further enriched the literature of the subject by bringing forward two witnesses:— one a druggist in whose employ during the summer of the last-mentioned year, Herold charged the President on the books of the shop with “a small vial of castor oil,” to show that “poison” was then contemplated;* the other, a woman who in April, 1864, overheard three men talking on a street corner in Washington about killing the President with “a telescopic rifle.” † Two of the men she fancied she recognized among the prisoners at the Conspiracy Trial, though she did not report them to the authorities, and the third she had since become convinced was John Wilkes Booth whom she had seen on the stage. * See Note III to Chap. I in Appendix; S. T., 510, 517. † S. T., 365. 198 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN The “Selby” letter was again made use of, this time, not as written to Booth by some person unknown, but as written by Booth in a disguised hand to lure Payne from that imaginary being— his broken-hearted wife.* They followed Booth and Surratt to the capitol on the evening of the second inauguration; Surratt riding during the next day in the rear of the procession, and both of them at Mrs. Surratt’s in the evening; but there was no attempt to prove that Booth, in trying to force his way through the crowd in the rotunda on that occasion, was arrested; the policeman who, it was said, was the hero of such an achievement and promoted for his heroism, not being produced as a witness.† * See Chap. I, Note III; S. T., 365, 1305-6. † Note to Chap. II in Appendix; S. T., 379. It is not our purpose to dwell upon this branch of the case, which in one sense has grown obsolete; but something must be said upon that portion of the testimony on this trial which bore directly upon Mrs. Surratt. Of course, the two witnesses who turned state’s-evidence reappeared. Lloyd manifested a superstitious reluctance to speak of the woman whom he had been instrumental in sending to a felon’s grave; but he was forced to repeat his former testimony; his cross-examination, however, bringing into stronger light the gross intoxication that rendered his evidence unreliable at the points where it was calculated to be most deadly. Wiechmann came also; a spruce, dapper figure, careful to remind the audience that his name originally was spelled “Wie” instead of “Wei,” as the reporters would have it at the other trial and as he thought proper to spell it since. Trial of John H. SURRATT 199. After his performance on that occasion, which in some respects was not satisfactory to the judge advocate, and before the execution of the condemned, he made overtures to the friends of his dead benefactress, pleading duress; but, being met with loathing by every mourner of his victim, he turned back to the government, his position under which he had forfeited. On the eleventh day of August, 1865, he sent to Colonel Burnett, at Cincinnati, his own affidavit; containing, as he informs that officer, “facts which have come to my knowledge since the rendition of my testimony.” In this paper, he puts into the mouth of the woman, executed but little over a month ago, remarks made in the confidence of domestic intercourse indicative of her sympathy with the Southern cause which she had every reason to believe her favorite boarder shared, and embellishes his former narrative of their drive to Surrattsville on the fatal Friday with a few poisonous details; among the rest, identifying the caller on their return, whose footsteps, in his former testimony, he said he heard over-head, but whom he did not see, as Booth.* For this service he was rewarded by an appointment in the Philadelphia customhouse, which, owing to the rupture between President and Congress, he enjoyed but little over a year. When the extradition of his former room-mate made another trial inevitable, he began preparing himself to face an ordeal where ex parte affidavits would not pass muster. The official report of the “Trial of the Assassins,” he carefully studied; copied his own testimony; collated it with his affidavit; and produced a revised version which he handed to the district attorney before going as a witness before the grand jury. * Note I to this chapter in Appendix. 200 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN After the indictment was found, believing, as he said, that his “character was at stake in this issue,” intending to do all he could “to aid the prosecution,” “hunted and prosecuted,” as he charged he was, by the relatives and friends of his victim, he sat down to make another study of Pitman’s book, comparing it with a Boston record of the trial, touching and retouching the revised version, correcting errors in dates, raising innuendoes into positive averments, straightening the logical sequences, and decorating the whole with a few damning details unheard of before.* * Note II to chapter in Appendix. For all his self-possession and careful study, the witness did not escape so easily as upon the former trial. Where third parties happened to be present, the defence was able to contradict him on several material points. His looseness in dates, though he strove hard to correct such discrepancies, was made apparent. His intense anxiety to help on a conviction as a vindication of his turning against the mother of the prisoner was painfully visible in his demeanor and audible in every word he spoke; and the more important of the details contained in his affidavit and those first disclosed in his present testimony were shown to be false. One other circumstance which, as we have already stated, has been cited by writers on the subject ever since the Conspiracy Trial as strong evidence of the guilt of Mrs. Surratt must be adverted to. Trial of John H. SURRATT 201. Her non-recognition of Payne on the night of the arrest of that conspirator at her house was gone over in much more elaborate detail than on her own trial; a diagram of the hall, showing the relative positions of the parties to the scene being made a part of the evidence. The same witnesses were called— the two leaders of the expedition still vieing with each other in setting themselves right in the eyes of their superiors. Major Smith laid on the colors and deepened the shades of his dramatic recital before the military commission; and Colonel Morgan tried his utmost to tone down his point-blank contradictions of his rival on the same occasion. His efforts were vain, however; the sole result being a demonstration of the unreliability of the testimony of detective officers employed by the government in cases where large rewards are at stake and the government deeply interested in the establishment of its side of the issue. Moreover, as was pointed out on the former trial, there were subordinates present whose testimony might have cleared away the chaos, and not one of them was sworn.* * See Note III in Appendix to Chap. III Leaving this branch of the case, we come to what was after all the real gist of the contention on the Surratt Trial. Without satisfactory evidence that the prisoner was present in Washington on the night of the assassination, the prosecuting officers were aware that they could gain no hold on the jury. Indeed, nothing short of the certitude that there was no other way open leading to a conviction could have driven them to enter upon so hopeless an undertaking. 202 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN In the first place, that the prisoner was absent from the scene of the crime was clear from the evidence on the Conspiracy Trial, and at that date but a single witness could be ferreted out who testified that he saw Surratt at about three o’clock in the afternoon on Pennsylvania Avenue. Before this hour or after, not another human being had laid eyes on him; not an acquaintance, not an inmate of his household, not even Wiechmann, since the fourth of April. In the second place, as we have already intimated, they had in their possession strong affirmative testimony that on the thirteenth and fourteenth he was either far away in the interior of the state of New York, or, at the nearest, in its metropolitan city. Yet, they had the hardihood to instruct the assistant district attorney in opening the case to make the sweeping declaration quoted above. And the number of persons that they were able to corral, prepared to testify as they desired, is absolutely astounding. In addition to the single witness of the Conspiracy Trial, the district attorney called thirteen. Of these three were witnesses on the former trial:— Lee, sworn against Atzerodt; Cleaver, the liveryman at whose stables Booth and Surratt hired and kept horses; and Dye, sworn against Spangler; none of whom was interrogated anent Surratt nor volunteered mention of his presence. Trial of John H. SURRATT 203. On the present occasion, however, Lee testified that, about three o’clock in the afternoon of the fourteenth, he passed a man on the avenue “whom he took to be Surratt”; Cleaver, that, a little after four, he on horseback met Surratt on horseback and spoke to him; Dye was able to identify the stranger who, he swore in his former testimony, called out the hour in the front of the theatre, as Surratt, because as he said “that face” had appeared in his dreams for the past two years— “so exceedingly pale.” Of the ten witnesses sworn for the first time, six were not positive. Cooper, a comrade of Dye’s, not having seen the face that so haunted his companion, did little to corroborate him; Grillo, who kept a restaurant adjoining the theatre, “believed,” but could not say he knew, the young man he saw at Willard’s Hotel in the afternoon to be the prisoner; Coleman and Cushman, two officers of the Treasury, saw Booth on horeback at about six o’clock in the evening talking earnestly to a man standing on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue, who, the former swore, “looked like” the prisoner and the latter, that he “did not resemble” him “very much”; Heaton, a clerk in the land office, on first coming into the court room discovered “a very distinct resemblance” between the face of the prisoner and a face which had attracted his attention in front of the theatre more than two years before; and Ramsel, a soldier in the war, who, between four and five o’clock on the morning of Saturday, the fifteenth, saw a horseman riding towards the pickets on the Bladensburg road, whose back was in the opinion of the witness the back of the prisoner. The four witnesses remaining, though none of them had ever seen Surratt until summoned for this trial, were positive in their identification. The Trial of Page 204. John H. SURRATT Page 184. TaxJudas.com LandGrab.us

The Assassination of
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
AND ITS EXPIATION

By David Miller DEWITT
The MACMILLAN COMPANY 1909

CHAPTER VIII
The Trial of John H. SURRATT 193.

The trial opened on the tenth of June, 1867, and the first week was taken up in arguing a challenge by the United States to the array, which, if successful, would have postponed the cause until the next fall; and by the examination of the jurors. It was during this interval that Pierrepont saw fit to give notice that “the public mind would be set right with regard to a great many subjects about which there have been such active and numerous reports and innuendoes,” among the rest, “that the United States dared not bring forward the diary found upon the murderer of the President because that diary would prove things they did not want to have known.”
When, on Monday, the seventeenth, the assistant district attorney was about to open the case, the scene in the court room afforded a speaking contrast to the corresponding scene before the military commission. The court was not held within the walls of a prison guarded at all points by soldiers; and the unpretentious court house, standing in its peaceful square, with its doors and windows open, when compared with the Old Penitentiary pervaded by scarcely suppressed passion and undisguised thirst for blood, seemed the very sanctuary of even-handed justice.

194 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

As the prisoner entered and advanced to the bar, no clank of fetters jarred upon the ear; and, as he sat at his ease by the side of his counsel like a citizen the law presumes to be innocent until proved guilty, the memory of that group of culprits loaded down with irons as they crouched before their imperious doomsmen served to consecrate anew the benignity of the common law of peace in contradistinction to the barbarity of the common law of war. One overmastering impression there was, moreover, striking awe into the heart of the most indifferent spectator. All felt that the woman who had suffered the extreme penalty of the law two years before was again on trial with her son, and, as the defendant stood in the flesh with upraised hand to answer to the indictment, the ghost of his mother seemed to hover above his head, echoing with shadowy lips the plea of not guilty, with the feeble repetition of which she had tottered to the scaffold.
The prosecution was fully alive to the fearful alternative with which it was confronted. Though a conviction, it was likely, would condone the judgment of the military commission notwithstanding its legal invalidity, an acquittal or even a failure to convict would brand the execution of its sentence upon the mother of the defendant as nothing short of judicial murder under military rule. In the presence of such a tremendous issue— as inexorable as the riddle of the sphinx— the prosecuting officers dared not forego a single branch or phase of their case, no matter how incompatible, one with another, they might have become.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 195.

For instance, the testimony taken before the commission implicating Surratt with the conspirators before that tribunal tended to demonstrate the existence of a plot to capture as contradistinguished from a plot to kill; yet, although the names of Arnold, 0’Laughlin, Spangler and Mudd did not appear in the present indictment and the prosecution was pledged to produce the diary of Booth, they refused to recognize the existence of the former plot and followed the judge advocates in blending the two— a course rendered much more difficult, if not wholly out of question, by the explosion of the charge of complicity on the part of the Confederate government. And in this course they stubbornly persisted after they had come to the determination, despite of convincing evidence to the contrary, in their own possession, to hinge their whole case upon the presence of the prisoner in Washington on the fatal night. The blending of the two plots was not necessary to convict a conspirator like Payne or Atzerodt whose presence on the scene of action was undisputed; this device was originally resorted to bring within the compass of the charge parties at a distance, especially the authorities at Richmond. The presence of Surratt in Washington once established, to resort to the tactics of the Bureau in the matter of the Great Conspiracy was a mere work of supererogation. The truth is that, oppressed by the magnitude of their task and the alarming uncertainty of the result, they had not sufficient confidence in the strength of either branch of their case to dispense with the aid of the other. Both must be utilized for all they were worth. One might be sufficient for the conviction of the son but the other was necessary to uphold the conviction of the mother.

196 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Accordingly, they lavished their resources, exhausted their energies and distracted their aim by pushing to the front two independent lines of proof, the substantiation of either of which was all-sufficient for every legitimate purpose; and, in consequence, like a person attempting to ride two horses at once, they fell between the two. The assistant district attorney stated in his opening address: “On the Monday before the assassination, Surratt received a summons from his co-conspirator, Booth, requiring his immediate presence in this city. In obedience to that preconcerted signal he at once left Canada and arrived here on the thirteenth. By numerous, I had almost said a multitude of witnesses, we shall make the proof to be as clear as the noon-day sun, and as convincing as the axioms of truth, that he was here during the day of that fatal Friday, as well as present at the theatre at night. We shall show him to you on Pennsylvania Avenue booted and spurred, awaiting the arrival of the fatal moment. We shall show him in conference with Herold in the evening; we shall show him purchasing a contrivance for disguise an hour or two before the murder.” Such being the case, there was, surely, no necessity for another attempt to prove a series of allegations which the Conspiracy Trial left doubtful and subsequent developments showed to be unmaintainable; allegations which the assistant district attorney restated as follows:

Trial of John H. SURRATT 197.

“The butchery that ensued was the ripe result of a long-premediated plot, in which the prisoner was the chief conspirator”; “he made his home in this city the rendezvous for the tools and agents in what he called his ‘bloody work’; and his hand provided . . . the very weapons . . . one of which fell from Booth’s death-grip at the moment of his capture.” As a matter of fact, the diary they themselves put in evidence pointed unmistakably to the “ ‘six months’ work to capture” and the sudden inception of the design “to kill”; and their starwitness Wiechmann placed the collapse of the former at least three weeks before the development of the latter. Yet they strenuously contended that the work to capture and the design to kill were but parts of one conspiracy set on foot in the summer of 1863. Beside the mass of testimony adduced on the other trial, they further enriched the literature of the subject by bringing forward two witnesses:— one a druggist in whose employ during the summer of the last-mentioned year, Herold charged the President on the books of the shop with “a small vial of castor oil,” to show that “poison” was then contemplated;* the other, a woman who in April, 1864, overheard three men talking on a street corner in Washington about killing the President with “a telescopic rifle.” † Two of the men she fancied she recognized among the prisoners at the Conspiracy Trial, though she did not report them to the authorities, and the third she had since become convinced was John Wilkes Booth whom she had seen on the stage.
* See Note III to Chap. I in Appendix; S. T., 510, 517.
† S. T., 365.

198 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The “Selby” letter was again made use of, this time, not as written to Booth by some person unknown, but as written by Booth in a disguised hand to lure Payne from that imaginary being— his broken-hearted wife.* They followed Booth and Surratt to the capitol on the evening of the second inauguration; Surratt riding during the next day in the rear of the procession, and both of them at Mrs. Surratt’s in the evening; but there was no attempt to prove that Booth, in trying to force his way through the crowd in the rotunda on that occasion, was arrested; the policeman who, it was said, was the hero of such an achievement and promoted for his heroism, not being produced as a witness.†
* See Chap. I, Note III; S. T., 365, 1305-6.
† Note to Chap. II in Appendix; S. T., 379.

It is not our purpose to dwell upon this branch of the case, which in one sense has grown obsolete; but something must be said upon that portion of the testimony on this trial which bore directly upon Mrs. Surratt. Of course, the two witnesses who turned state’s-evidence reappeared. Lloyd manifested a superstitious reluctance to speak of the woman whom he had been instrumental in sending to a felon’s grave; but he was forced to repeat his former testimony; his cross-examination, however, bringing into stronger light the gross intoxication that rendered his evidence unreliable at the points where it was calculated to be most deadly. Wiechmann came also; a spruce, dapper figure, careful to remind the audience that his name originally was spelled “Wie” instead of “Wei,” as the reporters would have it at the other trial and as he thought proper to spell it since.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 199.

After his performance on that occasion, which in some respects was not satisfactory to the judge advocate, and before the execution of the condemned, he made overtures to the friends of his dead benefactress, pleading duress; but, being met with loathing by every mourner of his victim, he turned back to the government, his position under which he had forfeited. On the eleventh day of August, 1865, he sent to Colonel Burnett, at Cincinnati, his own affidavit; containing, as he informs that officer, “facts which have come to my knowledge since the rendition of my testimony.” In this paper, he puts into the mouth of the woman, executed but little over a month ago, remarks made in the confidence of domestic intercourse indicative of her sympathy with the Southern cause which she had every reason to believe her favorite boarder shared, and embellishes his former narrative of their drive to Surrattsville on the fatal Friday with a few poisonous details; among the rest, identifying the caller on their return, whose footsteps, in his former testimony, he said he heard over-head, but whom he did not see, as Booth.* For this service he was rewarded by an appointment in the Philadelphia customhouse, which, owing to the rupture between President and Congress, he enjoyed but little over a year. When the extradition of his former room-mate made another trial inevitable, he began preparing himself to face an ordeal where ex parte affidavits would not pass muster. The official report of the “Trial of the Assassins,” he carefully studied; copied his own testimony; collated it with his affidavit; and produced a revised version which he handed to the district attorney before going as a witness before the grand jury.
* Note I to this chapter in Appendix.

200 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

After the indictment was found, believing, as he said, that his “character was at stake in this issue,” intending to do all he could “to aid the prosecution,” “hunted and prosecuted,” as he charged he was, by the relatives and friends of his victim, he sat down to make another study of Pitman’s book, comparing it with a Boston record of the trial, touching and retouching the revised version, correcting errors in dates, raising innuendoes into positive averments, straightening the logical sequences, and decorating the whole with a few damning details unheard of before.*
* Note II to chapter in Appendix.

For all his self-possession and careful study, the witness did not escape so easily as upon the former trial. Where third parties happened to be present, the defence was able to contradict him on several material points. His looseness in dates, though he strove hard to correct such discrepancies, was made apparent. His intense anxiety to help on a conviction as a vindication of his turning against the mother of the prisoner was painfully visible in his demeanor and audible in every word he spoke; and the more important of the details contained in his affidavit and those first disclosed in his present testimony were shown to be false.
One other circumstance which, as we have already stated, has been cited by writers on the subject ever since the Conspiracy Trial as strong evidence of the guilt of Mrs. Surratt must be adverted to.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 201.

Her non-recognition of Payne on the night of the arrest of that conspirator at her house was gone over in much more elaborate detail than on her own trial; a diagram of the hall, showing the relative positions of the parties to the scene being made a part of the evidence. The same witnesses were called— the two leaders of the expedition still vieing with each other in setting themselves right in the eyes of their superiors. Major Smith laid on the colors and deepened the shades of his dramatic recital before the military commission; and Colonel Morgan tried his utmost to tone down his point-blank contradictions of his rival on the same occasion. His efforts were vain, however; the sole result being a demonstration of the unreliability of the testimony of detective officers employed by the government in cases where large rewards are at stake and the government deeply interested in the establishment of its side of the issue. Moreover, as was pointed out on the former trial, there were subordinates present whose testimony might have cleared away the chaos, and not one of them was sworn.*
* See Note III in Appendix to Chap. III

Leaving this branch of the case, we come to what was after all the real gist of the contention on the Surratt Trial. Without satisfactory evidence that the prisoner was present in Washington on the night of the assassination, the prosecuting officers were aware that they could gain no hold on the jury. Indeed, nothing short of the certitude that there was no other way open leading to a conviction could have driven them to enter upon so hopeless an undertaking.

202 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

In the first place, that the prisoner was absent from the scene of the crime was clear from the evidence on the Conspiracy Trial, and at that date but a single witness could be ferreted out who testified that he saw Surratt at about three o’clock in the afternoon on Pennsylvania Avenue. Before this hour or after, not another human being had laid eyes on him; not an acquaintance, not an inmate of his household, not even Wiechmann, since the fourth of April. In the second place, as we have already intimated, they had in their possession strong affirmative testimony that on the thirteenth and fourteenth he was either far away in the interior of the state of New York, or, at the nearest, in its metropolitan city. Yet, they had the hardihood to instruct the assistant district attorney in opening the case to make the sweeping declaration quoted above. And the number of persons that they were able to corral, prepared to testify as they desired, is absolutely astounding. In addition to the single witness of the Conspiracy Trial, the district attorney called thirteen. Of these three were witnesses on the former trial:— Lee, sworn against Atzerodt; Cleaver, the liveryman at whose stables Booth and Surratt hired and kept horses; and Dye, sworn against Spangler; none of whom was interrogated anent Surratt nor volunteered mention of his presence.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 203.

On the present occasion, however, Lee testified that, about three o’clock in the afternoon of the fourteenth, he passed a man on the avenue “whom he took to be Surratt”; Cleaver, that, a little after four, he on horseback met Surratt on horseback and spoke to him; Dye was able to identify the stranger who, he swore in his former testimony, called out the hour in the front of the theatre, as Surratt, because as he said “that face” had appeared in his dreams for the past two years— “so exceedingly pale.” Of the ten witnesses sworn for the first time, six were not positive. Cooper, a comrade of Dye’s, not having seen the face that so haunted his companion, did little to corroborate him; Grillo, who kept a restaurant adjoining the theatre, “believed,” but could not say he knew, the young man he saw at Willard’s Hotel in the afternoon to be the prisoner; Coleman and Cushman, two officers of the Treasury, saw Booth on horeback at about six o’clock in the evening talking earnestly to a man standing on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue, who, the former swore, “looked like” the prisoner and the latter, that he “did not resemble” him “very much”; Heaton, a clerk in the land office, on first coming into the court room discovered “a very distinct resemblance” between the face of the prisoner and a face which had attracted his attention in front of the theatre more than two years before; and Ramsel, a soldier in the war, who, between four and five o’clock on the morning of Saturday, the fifteenth, saw a horseman riding towards the pickets on the Bladensburg road, whose back was in the opinion of the witness the back of the prisoner.

The four witnesses remaining, though none of them had ever seen Surratt until summoned for this trial, were positive in their identification.

The Trial of Page 204.
John H. SURRATT Page 184.

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