SURRATT 204

The Assassination of ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND ITS EXPIATION By David Miller DEWITT The MACMILLAN COMPANY 1909
CHAPTER VIII The Trial of John H. SURRATT 204. The four witnesses remaining, though none of them had ever seen Surratt until summoned for this trial, were positive in their identification. Wood, a colored barber, testified that, at about nine 0’clock in the morning, Booth came into the shop where the witness was at work, accompanied by three strangers, one of whom he— first trimming Booth’s hair— shaved “clean all around his face with the exception of where the mustache was,” and whom he now recognized as the prisoner. Rhodes, a mender of clocks, testified that, near noon, he strolled into Ford’s theatre, walked up into the dress circle, noticed that the curtain was down, saw a man fitting a piece of wood to obstruct entrance from the audience into the passageway behind the private boxes, who told him that the President was to be there that night and they were busy arranging it so that he won’t be disturbed.” This man, the witness had no doubt, was Surratt. Vanderpool, a New York lawyer, who served in the war and happened to be in Washington on the eventful day as a paroled prisoner, testified that in the afternoon he saw Booth and two or three others sitting at a round table in a hall on the avenue where were fifty or sixty persons listening to music and watching a woman dancing; and one of them was Surratt. These three witnesses, although like the rest of the community they must have followed the proceedings of the former trial with the deepest interest, first put themselves into communication with the authorities after the present trial had commenced. To this criticism, however, the fourth witness was not obnoxious. She was a colored servant of Mrs. Surratt’s, first coming to her house in the month of March, 1865, after her son had gone to Richmond. Trial of John H. SURRATT 205. She was arrested, with the other inmates, and was subjected to an examination at General Augur’s headquarters— her answers being taken down in writing. She now testified that between eight and nine o’clock on the Friday night in question, going into the dining room with a pot of tea, she saw a young man there whom Mrs. Surratt told her was her son John— a statement which she, also, swore she made on her examination just after her arrest. One other witness there was, whose testimony took the shape of a confession of the prisoner. The two Canadians, who put the authorities on the track of the prisoner in Europe, had been haunting the capital for months; the liberal rewards pending being the governing motive of their zeal. McMillan, the surgeon of the steamer in which Surratt crossed the ocean, though doing all the damage to the prisoner in his power, could not, in view of his affidavit made before the American consul at Liverpool, venture to put words into the prisoner’s mouth placing him in Washington. Ste. Marie, on the other hand, seemed to have forgotten the averment in his deposition that Surratt told him “he was in New York when the event took place”; the remembrance of which by the prosecuting officers may explain why, when the witness took the stand, they guided him as follows: 206 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN “Q. Did the prisoner tell you anything about his disguises? A. Yes, sir. I asked him how he got out of Washington; if he had a hard time in escaping. He said he had a very hard time. “Q. How did he say he got out of Washington? A. He told me he left that night. “Q. What night? A. The night of the assassination or the next morning, I am not positive.” The counsel for the prisoner not being aware of the affidavit, the witness escaped cross-examination.* * See affidavit of Ste. Marie, Ex. Doc. No. 36, 40th Cong., 2 Sess. in report. Act for payment of his reward in Appendix to Globe of that association, p. 602. A truly formidable array this; furnishing a striking illustration of the coercive power of a place in the service of the government over the mind of its holder, when questions, in which the government is deeply interested, are at stake, and of the magnetism a celebrated trial exerts over persons rabid for notoriety and persons on the watch for prey. But formidable as it was, the defence was able to meet it witness by witness. Lee was conclusively impeached; among a host of other witnesses, the provost-marshal, whose chief detective he once was, pronounced his reputation for truth and veracity bad. Cleaver, also, was impeached; and he acknowledged on the stand that, while lying in jail under a conviction for a shameful crime, he was persuaded by Conover to peach on the prisoner whom hitherto he was inclined to shield. The phantom of Dye’s dream was dispelled by the introduction in the flesh of the very man who called out the hour. The friend Booth was seen earnestly talking to on the avenue was shown to be Matthews, his fellow-actor to whom he delivered the article, to be given to the press. Trial of John H. SURRATT 207. The scene in the dining room of the Surratt house when Susan Ann Jackson first saw her mistress’ son was proved to have occurred, not on the night of the fourteenth, but on the night of the third of April, when Surratt passed through Washington on his way from Richmond to Montreal; the change of date clearing up the mystery of the colored girl’s nonproduction on the Conspiracy Trial. Wood, the barber, was shown to have been mistaken in identifying 0’Laughlin as one of the parties coming into the shop, and it appeared that the man he shaved clean around could not have been the prisoner, who wore a goatee. Rhodes’ strange story was shown to be a fable by proof that the door leading from the vestibule to the dress circle of the theatre was always kept locked in the daytime; that, at the hour the witness swore he entered, the curtain was up and a rehearsal going on, and that the fixing up of the private box did not begin until the rehearsal was over. Vanderpool’s equally improbable tale was refuted by proof that there was no afternoon performance in the hall and no round table on the premises. The identifications of the other four witnesses were so indefinite as, in the opinion of the counsel for the defendant, to call for no explicit refutation. By a marvellous coincidence, in which the trial seemed to abound,* a handkerchief, marked “J. H. Surratt No.2,” which the prosecution proved was dropped in the railroad station at Burlington, presumably by the prisoner, on his flight from Washington, was proved to have been taken by mistake by Holahan, the boarder at the house in H Street, who with Wiechmann was drafted by the officers starting for Canada in pursuit of Surratt.* * Note III to this chapter in Appendix. 208 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN Such was the serious inroad made by the defence on the formidable array marshaled by the United States. But this by no means constituted the whole of the counter-attack. They established an alibi as conclusive as ever was interposed in a court of justice. That the counsel for the government, when it came to close quarters, were prepared, from evidence in their own possession, to concede that the prisoner was at Elmira the day before the assassination, was sedulously concealed during the presentation of their side of the case, and, of course, was undreamed of by the counsel for the defence. Guided by information secured from the prisoner, the Messrs. Bradley, his counsel, had set on foot a “careful, painstaking investigation extending over a period of many weeks,” tracing his whereabouts from his departure from Montreal until his return, ascertaining the nature of his errand, interviewing the persons he had met, visiting the hotels he had stopped at; and they were rewarded by the verification of their client’s story in every particular. The Confederate general Edwin G. Lee, who happened to be in Montreal at the date in question on sick furlough, was put upon the stand to prove the object of the prisoner’s errand to Elmira and that he made a report to the witness on his return; but the testimony was excluded. Trial of John H. SURRATT 209. His presence in that town, however, was proved by four residents of unblemished character and exceptionable loyalty, and wholly disinterested; two of them testifying that they saw and conversed with him, on either the thirteenth or the fourteenth of April, 1865, in the afternoon; the third, that he saw and conversed with him on both the thirteenth and fourteenth; and the fourth, that he held a protracted interview with him on the morning of the fifteenth, at about nine o’clock, just after the news of the death of the President arrived. Their identification was positive and circumstantial, even to the Garibaldi jacket the prisoner wore, which, it was proved, was made for him by a tailor in Montreal just before he started on his trip. The register of the Brainard House of the date in question, though searched for high and low, could not be found; but the counsel, at the last moment, struck the track of a “man upon crutches,” whom their client told them he had conversed with at that hotel; and summoned him by telegram from New York. The man came and testified that, being in Elmira on the fourteenth in search of a witness in his suit for injuries inflicted by an accident on the Erie Railroad, he saw and conversed with the prisoner at the Brainard House; but the reputation of this witness for truth and veracity was seriously impeached, and the defendant’s counsel contented themselves with pointing out the absence of any conceivable motive for this stranger to commit perjury. They had somewhat better luck with the register of the Webster House at Canadaigua, where Surratt stopped on his way back, which they found and produced in court. Under the date of Saturday, April 15th, 1865, appeared the name of “John Harrison,” proved to be in the handwriting of the prisoner. 210 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN But the book having been out of use since the end of that year, and the defence being unable to show the presence of the prisoner when the entry was made, the judge excluded the evidence with the remark: “The name could as well have been written by him in Canada, or Rome, or Egypt, as in Canandaigua. The book has been at the mercy of anybody for more than two years. It could have gone to Canada and back a hundred times; or the prisoner, during his stay there in Canada, could have gone to the book just as often.” * * See Note IV to this chapter in Appendix. Nevertheless, unfortunate as they were with respect to the two registers, the admission of either of which would have settled the question, the testimony actually admitted was strong enough to force the counsel on the other side to play a card which hitherto they had held up their sleeve in view of this very exigency. Their direct testimony left it to be inferred that Surratt traveled from Montreal straight through by the usual route to Washington. But, when testimony for the defendant which they could not contradict and knew to be in accordance with the facts, made it clear that he deviated so far as to fetch up at Elmira, they seized upon the alternative date given by two of the witnesses for the defence, magnamiously conceded his presence in Elmira on the morning of Thursday, the thirteenth, and undertook the herculean labor of transporting him over the three hundred miles between Elmira and Washington within twenty-four hours. Trial of John H. SURRATT 211. In the execution of this flank movement, however, they encountered obstacles that in an ordinary case would have been at once pronounced insurmountable. In the first place, they were obliged to do away with the testimony of two other witnesses for the defence of equal credibility, one of whom was positive that he met the defendant on the fourteenth as well as the thirteenth, and the other that he met him on the fifteenth; and this they did by insisting that the former was mistaken as to the fourteenth and by ignoring the evidence of the latter altogether. In the next place, they themselves had proved that the prisoner left Montreal on the twelfth by the three o’clock New York train, and it was uncontroverted that a passenger by that train could not have reached Elmira before the evening of the thirteenth (unless he had been a “bird,” as Bradley said); an hour so late that it was physically impossible to get to Washington by the next morning. This difficulty the senior counsel for the United States met in characteristic fashion. He astonished every hearer by pointing out that his own witness, on testifying that the prisoner left Montreal by the three o’clock train, omitted to specify whether it was three o’clock A.M. or three o’clock P.M.— supplementing this obvious afterthought by the following declaration which may serve to show the reason for its employment: “We have never taken any pains to overcome this physical impossibility because we cared nothing as to how he got to Elmira. . . . The fact exists that he got to Elmira, and, therefore, the ‘physical impossibility’ is out of the way so far as that is concerned. He could easily have got there by a special train.” 212 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN The special train, which they merely guessed at in this instance, they took extraordinary pains to prove in order to overcome another physical impossibility; namely to get the prisoner (not to Elmira but) from Elmira, where they admitted he was on the morning of the thirteenth, to Washington on the morning of the next day. “Our business,” said Pierrepont, “was to bring him to Washington and that we have done”; that is, they did it in the following manner. The regular train out of Elmira, at 8 o’clock A.M., not being available for their purpose, they proved that a single car, which had brought the superintendent of the road from Williamsport, left Elmira on its return between ten and eleven of that day and overtook the passenger train at Williamsport at half-past twelve; and, although the conductor took up no tickets and saw no passenger, the counsel asked the jury to presume that the prisoner stole a ride on this extra. Having by this clumsy method got him seventy-eight miles on his journey, they were met by the embarrassing circumstance that the regular train laid over until half-past nine in the evening and did not reach Sunbury, forty miles farther on, until after midnight. From Sunbury, a train ordinarily left for Baltimore fifteen minutes later, arriving at its destination at 7:25 Friday morning; and, from Baltimore, a train left at 8:50 A.M. and carried its passengers to Washington by 10:25 A.M. This, it should be borne in mind, was by the regular mode of travel. Trial of John H. SURRATT 213. Unfortunately for the prosecution, however, travel at the date in question was seriously impeded; the railroad bridge over the Susquehanna at Williamsport having been carried away by a freshet, so that passengers had to be taken across by a rope ferry, and the railroad between Williamsport and Sunbury torn up for miles and blocked at intervals by construction trains running to and fro. At this critical juncture, the fine hand of the Bureau of Military Justice becomes plainly visible. Montgomery, who played Bedloe to the Titus Oates of Conover on the Conspiracy Trial, was sent on mission in partibus and returned with two witnesses in tow; one, the trainmaster at Williamsport and the other the ferryman, neither of whom had been confronted with the prisoner until the witness entered the court room on the last days of the trial. The former testified that he remembered a person on the thirteenth (over two years ago), who seemed very anxious to get through, inquiring of him about the trains; and, the prisoner standing up, he swore he could not be positive but he believed him to be the man. The latter testified that, on the same day, he ferried a passenger over the river and, the prisoner standing up, he swore that to the best of his belief that was the man. Having thus got him over the river in the temporary absence of the bridge, they got him over the broken condition of the road by asking the jury to take for granted that the prisoner caught rides on the construction trains and got to Sunbury in time for the train to Baltimore, reaching Washington at 10 :25 A.M. on the Friday of the assassination. This elaborate chain of proof, with so many intermediate links missing, . . . The Trial of Page 214. John H. SURRATT Page 193. 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 204.

The four witnesses remaining, though none of them had ever seen Surratt until summoned for this trial, were positive in their identification. Wood, a colored barber, testified that, at about nine 0’clock in the morning, Booth came into the shop where the witness was at work, accompanied by three strangers, one of whom he— first trimming Booth’s hair— shaved “clean all around his face with the exception of where the mustache was,” and whom he now recognized as the prisoner. Rhodes, a mender of clocks, testified that, near noon, he strolled into Ford’s theatre, walked up into the dress circle, noticed that the curtain was down, saw a man fitting a piece of wood to obstruct entrance from the audience into the passageway behind the private boxes, who told him that the President was to be there that night and they were busy arranging it so that he won’t be disturbed.” This man, the witness had no doubt, was Surratt. Vanderpool, a New York lawyer, who served in the war and happened to be in Washington on the eventful day as a paroled prisoner, testified that in the afternoon he saw Booth and two or three others sitting at a round table in a hall on the avenue where were fifty or sixty persons listening to music and watching a woman dancing; and one of them was Surratt. These three witnesses, although like the rest of the community they must have followed the proceedings of the former trial with the deepest interest, first put themselves into communication with the authorities after the present trial had commenced. To this criticism, however, the fourth witness was not obnoxious. She was a colored servant of Mrs. Surratt’s, first coming to her house in the month of March, 1865, after her son had gone to Richmond.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 205.

She was arrested, with the other inmates, and was subjected to an examination at General Augur’s headquarters— her answers being taken down in writing. She now testified that between eight and nine o’clock on the Friday night in question, going into the dining room with a pot of tea, she saw a young man there whom Mrs. Surratt told her was her son John— a statement which she, also, swore she made on her examination just after her arrest.
One other witness there was, whose testimony took the shape of a confession of the prisoner. The two Canadians, who put the authorities on the track of the prisoner in Europe, had been haunting the capital for months; the liberal rewards pending being the governing motive of their zeal. McMillan, the surgeon of the steamer in which Surratt crossed the ocean, though doing all the damage to the prisoner in his power, could not, in view of his affidavit made before the American consul at Liverpool, venture to put words into the prisoner’s mouth placing him in Washington. Ste. Marie, on the other hand, seemed to have forgotten the averment in his deposition that Surratt told him “he was in New York when the event took place”; the remembrance of which by the prosecuting officers may explain why, when the witness took the stand, they guided him as follows:

206 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

“Q. Did the prisoner tell you anything about his disguises?
A. Yes, sir. I asked him how he got out of Washington; if he had a hard time in escaping. He said he had a very hard time.

“Q. How did he say he got out of Washington?
A. He told me he left that night.

“Q. What night?
A. The night of the assassination or the next morning, I am not positive.”

The counsel for the prisoner not being aware of the affidavit, the witness escaped cross-examination.*

* See affidavit of Ste. Marie, Ex. Doc. No. 36, 40th Cong., 2 Sess. in report. Act for payment of his reward in Appendix to Globe of that association, p. 602.

A truly formidable array this; furnishing a striking illustration of the coercive power of a place in the service of the government over the mind of its holder, when questions, in which the government is deeply interested, are at stake, and of the magnetism a celebrated trial exerts over persons rabid for notoriety and persons on the watch for prey. But formidable as it was, the defence was able to meet it witness by witness. Lee was conclusively impeached; among a host of other witnesses, the provost-marshal, whose chief detective he once was, pronounced his reputation for truth and veracity bad. Cleaver, also, was impeached; and he acknowledged on the stand that, while lying in jail under a conviction for a shameful crime, he was persuaded by Conover to peach on the prisoner whom hitherto he was inclined to shield. The phantom of Dye’s dream was dispelled by the introduction in the flesh of the very man who called out the hour. The friend Booth was seen earnestly talking to on the avenue was shown to be Matthews, his fellow-actor to whom he delivered the article, to be given to the press.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 207.

The scene in the dining room of the Surratt house when Susan Ann Jackson first saw her mistress’ son was proved to have occurred, not on the night of the fourteenth, but on the night of the third of April, when Surratt passed through Washington on his way from Richmond to Montreal; the change of date clearing up the mystery of the colored girl’s nonproduction on the Conspiracy Trial. Wood, the barber, was shown to have been mistaken in identifying 0’Laughlin as one of the parties coming into the shop, and it appeared that the man he shaved clean around could not have been the prisoner, who wore a goatee. Rhodes’ strange story was shown to be a fable by proof that the door leading from the vestibule to the dress circle of the theatre was always kept locked in the daytime; that, at the hour the witness swore he entered, the curtain was up and a rehearsal going on, and that the fixing up of the private box did not begin until the rehearsal was over. Vanderpool’s equally improbable tale was refuted by proof that there was no afternoon performance in the hall and no round table on the premises. The identifications of the other four witnesses were so indefinite as, in the opinion of the counsel for the defendant, to call for no explicit refutation.
By a marvellous coincidence, in which the trial seemed to abound,* a handkerchief, marked “J. H. Surratt No.2,” which the prosecution proved was dropped in the railroad station at Burlington, presumably by the prisoner, on his flight from Washington, was proved to have been taken by mistake by Holahan, the boarder at the house in H Street, who with Wiechmann was drafted by the officers starting for Canada in pursuit of Surratt.*
* Note III to this chapter in Appendix.

208 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Such was the serious inroad made by the defence on the formidable array marshaled by the United States. But this by no means constituted the whole of the counter-attack. They established an alibi as conclusive as ever was interposed in a court of justice. That the counsel for the government, when it came to close quarters, were prepared, from evidence in their own possession, to concede that the prisoner was at Elmira the day before the assassination, was sedulously concealed during the presentation of their side of the case, and, of course, was undreamed of by the counsel for the defence. Guided by information secured from the prisoner, the Messrs. Bradley, his counsel, had set on foot a “careful, painstaking investigation extending over a period of many weeks,” tracing his whereabouts from his departure from Montreal until his return, ascertaining the nature of his errand, interviewing the persons he had met, visiting the hotels he had stopped at; and they were rewarded by the verification of their client’s story in every particular. The Confederate general Edwin G. Lee, who happened to be in Montreal at the date in question on sick furlough, was put upon the stand to prove the object of the prisoner’s errand to Elmira and that he made a report to the witness on his return; but the testimony was excluded.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 209.

His presence in that town, however, was proved by four residents of unblemished character and exceptionable loyalty, and wholly disinterested; two of them testifying that they saw and conversed with him, on either the thirteenth or the fourteenth of April, 1865, in the afternoon; the third, that he saw and conversed with him on both the thirteenth and fourteenth; and the fourth, that he held a protracted interview with him on the morning of the fifteenth, at about nine o’clock, just after the news of the death of the President arrived. Their identification was positive and circumstantial, even to the Garibaldi jacket the prisoner wore, which, it was proved, was made for him by a tailor in Montreal just before he started on his trip. The register of the Brainard House of the date in question, though searched for high and low, could not be found; but the counsel, at the last moment, struck the track of a “man upon crutches,” whom their client told them he had conversed with at that hotel; and summoned him by telegram from New York. The man came and testified that, being in Elmira on the fourteenth in search of a witness in his suit for injuries inflicted by an accident on the Erie Railroad, he saw and conversed with the prisoner at the Brainard House; but the reputation of this witness for truth and veracity was seriously impeached, and the defendant’s counsel contented themselves with pointing out the absence of any conceivable motive for this stranger to commit perjury. They had somewhat better luck with the register of the Webster House at Canadaigua, where Surratt stopped on his way back, which they found and produced in court. Under the date of Saturday, April 15th, 1865, appeared the name of “John Harrison,” proved to be in the handwriting of the prisoner.

210 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

But the book having been out of use since the end of that year, and the defence being unable to show the presence of the prisoner when the entry was made, the judge excluded the evidence with the remark: “The name could as well have been written by him in Canada, or Rome, or Egypt, as in Canandaigua. The book has been at the mercy of anybody for more than two years. It could have gone to Canada and back a hundred times; or the prisoner, during his stay there in Canada, could have gone to the book just as often.” *
* See Note IV to this chapter in Appendix.

Nevertheless, unfortunate as they were with respect to the two registers, the admission of either of which would have settled the question, the testimony actually admitted was strong enough to force the counsel on the other side to play a card which hitherto they had held up their sleeve in view of this very exigency. Their direct testimony left it to be inferred that Surratt traveled from Montreal straight through by the usual route to Washington. But, when testimony for the defendant which they could not contradict and knew to be in accordance with the facts, made it clear that he deviated so far as to fetch up at Elmira, they seized upon the alternative date given by two of the witnesses for the defence, magnamiously conceded his presence in Elmira on the morning of Thursday, the thirteenth, and undertook the herculean labor of transporting him over the three hundred miles between Elmira and Washington within twenty-four hours.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 211.

In the execution of this flank movement, however, they encountered obstacles that in an ordinary case would have been at once pronounced insurmountable. In the first place, they were obliged to do away with the testimony of two other witnesses for the defence of equal credibility, one of whom was positive that he met the defendant on the fourteenth as well as the thirteenth, and the other that he met him on the fifteenth; and this they did by insisting that the former was mistaken as to the fourteenth and by ignoring the evidence of the latter altogether. In the next place, they themselves had proved that the prisoner left Montreal on the twelfth by the three o’clock New York train, and it was uncontroverted that a passenger by that train could not have reached Elmira before the evening of the thirteenth (unless he had been a “bird,” as Bradley said); an hour so late that it was physically impossible to get to Washington by the next morning. This difficulty the senior counsel for the United States met in characteristic fashion. He astonished every hearer by pointing out that his own witness, on testifying that the prisoner left Montreal by the three o’clock train, omitted to specify whether it was three o’clock A.M. or three o’clock P.M.— supplementing this obvious afterthought by the following declaration which may serve to show the reason for its employment: “We have never taken any pains to overcome this physical impossibility because we cared nothing as to how he got to Elmira. . . . The fact exists that he got to Elmira, and, therefore, the ‘physical impossibility’ is out of the way so far as that is concerned. He could easily have got there by a special train.”

212 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The special train, which they merely guessed at in this instance, they took extraordinary pains to prove in order to overcome another physical impossibility; namely to get the prisoner (not to Elmira but) from Elmira, where they admitted he was on the morning of the thirteenth, to Washington on the morning of the next day. “Our business,” said Pierrepont, “was to bring him to Washington and that we have done”; that is, they did it in the following manner. The regular train out of Elmira, at 8 o’clock A.M., not being available for their purpose, they proved that a single car, which had brought the superintendent of the road from Williamsport, left Elmira on its return between ten and eleven of that day and overtook the passenger train at Williamsport at half-past twelve; and, although the conductor took up no tickets and saw no passenger, the counsel asked the jury to presume that the prisoner stole a ride on this extra. Having by this clumsy method got him seventy-eight miles on his journey, they were met by the embarrassing circumstance that the regular train laid over until half-past nine in the evening and did not reach Sunbury, forty miles farther on, until after midnight. From Sunbury, a train ordinarily left for Baltimore fifteen minutes later, arriving at its destination at 7:25 Friday morning; and, from Baltimore, a train left at 8:50 A.M. and carried its passengers to Washington by 10:25 A.M. This, it should be borne in mind, was by the regular mode of travel.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 213.

Unfortunately for the prosecution, however, travel at the date in question was seriously impeded; the railroad bridge over the Susquehanna at Williamsport having been carried away by a freshet, so that passengers had to be taken across by a rope ferry, and the railroad between Williamsport and Sunbury torn up for miles and blocked at intervals by construction trains running to and fro. At this critical juncture, the fine hand of the Bureau of Military Justice becomes plainly visible. Montgomery, who played Bedloe to the Titus Oates of Conover on the Conspiracy Trial, was sent on mission in partibus and returned with two witnesses in tow; one, the trainmaster at Williamsport and the other the ferryman, neither of whom had been confronted with the prisoner until the witness entered the court room on the last days of the trial. The former testified that he remembered a person on the thirteenth (over two years ago), who seemed very anxious to get through, inquiring of him about the trains; and, the prisoner standing up, he swore he could not be positive but he believed him to be the man. The latter testified that, on the same day, he ferried a passenger over the river and, the prisoner standing up, he swore that to the best of his belief that was the man. Having thus got him over the river in the temporary absence of the bridge, they got him over the broken condition of the road by asking the jury to take for granted that the prisoner caught rides on the construction trains and got to Sunbury in time for the train to Baltimore, reaching Washington at 10 :25 A.M. on the Friday of the assassination.
This elaborate chain of proof, with so many intermediate links missing, . . .

The Trial of Page 214.
John H. SURRATT Page 193.
Page 184.

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