evidently thinking about a game of quoits with his comrades in the jail
yard; he wonders why lawyers are so very dry, and is surprised to find a
trial for murder as tedious as a thanksgiving sermon.
But on the soldier's other hand is a figure which makes the center and
cynosure of this thrilling scene. Taller by a whole head than either his
companions or the sentries, Payne, the assassin, sits erect, and flings
his barbarian eye to and fro, radiating the tremendous energy of his
colossal physique.
He is the only man worthy to have murdered Mr. Seward. When against the
delicate organization, the fine, subtle, nervous mind of the Secretary
of State, this giant, knife in hand, precipitated himself, two forms of
civilization met as distinctly as when the savage Gauls invaded the
Roman senate.
Lawlessness and intelligence, the savage and the statesman, body and
mind, fought together upon Mr. Seward's bed.
The mystery attending Payne's home and parentage still exists to make
him more incomprehensible. Out of the vague, dim _ultima thule_, like
those Asiatic hordes which came from nowhere and shivered civilization,
Payne suddenly appeared and fought his way to the _sanctum sanctorum_ of
law. I think his part in the assassination more remarkable than Booth's,
The latter's crime was shrewdly plotted, as by one measuring
intelligence with the whole government. But Payne did not think--he only
struck!
With this man's face before me as I write, I am reminded of some Maori
chief waging war from the lust of blood or the pride of local dominion.
His complexion is bloodless, yet so healthy that a passing observer
would afterward speak of it as ruddy. His face is broad, with a
character nose, sensual lips, and very high cheek bones; the cranium is
full and the brow speaking, while the head runs back to an abnormal apex
at the tip of the cerebellum. His straight, lusterless black hair, duly
parted, is at the summit so disturbed that tufts of it rise up like Red
Jacket's or Tecumseh's; but the head is kept well up, and rests upon a
wonderfully broad throat, muscular as one's thigh, and without any
trace, as he sits, of the protuberance called Adam's apple. Withal, the
eye is the man Payne's power. It is dark and speechless, and rolls here
and there like that of a beast in a cage which strives in vain to
understand the language of its captors. It seems to say, if anything,
that, it has no sympathy with anybody approximate, and has submitted,
like a lion bound, to the logic of conviction and of chains.
Payne looks at none of his fellow-prisoners: assassins caught seldom
cares to recognise each other; for while there is faithfulness among
thieves, there is none among murderers. His great white eyeball never
roves to anybody's in the dock, nor theirs to his. He has confessed his
crime and they know it; so they have no mutual hope; they listen to the
evidence because it concerns them; ho looks at it only, because it
cannot save him. He is entirely beardless, yet in his boyish chin more
of a man physically than the rest, combined.
While I watch this man I am constantly repeating to myself that stanza
of Bryant's:
"Upon the market place he stood,--
A man of giant frame,
Amid the gathering multitude
That shrank to hear his name;
All proud of step and firm of limb,
His dark eye on the ground--
And silently they gazed on him,
As on a lion bound."
His dress, which we scarcely notice in the grander contrast of his pose
and stature, is an old shirt of woolen blue, with a white nap at the
button-holes, and upon his knees of black cloth he twirls, as if for
relaxation, between his powerful manacles, a soiled white
handkerchief--if from his mother, we conjecture, a gift to a bloodhound
from his dam. His heavy handcuffs make his broad shoulders more narrow.
Yet we can see by the outline of the sleeves what girth the muscles has,
and the hand at the end of his long and bony arm is wide and huge, as if
it could wield a claymore as well as a dirk. He also wears carpet
slippers, but his ankles are clogged with so heavy irons that two men
must carry them when he enters or leaves the dock. For this man there
can be no sentiment--no more than for a bull. The flesh on his face is
hard, as if cast, rather than generated, and while we see how he towers
above the entire court, we watch him in wonder, as if he were some
maniac denizen of a zone where men without minds grow to the stature and
power of fiends.
The face of Payne is not of the traditional southern peculiarities. He
resembles rather a Pennsylvania mountaineer than a Kentucky rustic.
Three weeks ago I gave, in an account of the conspiracy which many
gainsayed, but which the trial has fully confirmed, a sketch of this
man, to which I still adhere. He was furnished to Booth and John Surratt
from Canada; sent upon special service with his life in his hands; and
he faced the murder he was to commit like any prize-fighter. I pity
Beall, who died intelligently for a wretched essay against civilians,
that his biography and fate must be matched by this savage's!
Next to Payne, and crouching under him like a frog under a rock, is an
inconsiderable soldier, who chews his cud, and would cheerfully hang his
protege for the sake of being rid of him. My sympathies are entirely
enlisted for this soldier; he has neither the joy of being acquitted,
nor the excitement of being tried. He is quite a sizable man by himself,
but Payne overhangs him, and the dullness of the trial quite stultifies
him. The few points of law which are admitted here are not so evident to
this soldier as the point of his bayonet. I see what ails him.
He wants to swear.
A beam running overhead divides the court lengthwise in half, and as the
prisoners sit at the end of the court, the German Atzerott, or Adzerota,
has a place just beneath the beam. This is very ominous for Atzerott.
The filthiness of this man denies him sympathy. He is a disgusting
little groveler of dry, sandy hair, oval head, ears set so close to the
chin that one would think his sense of hearing limited to his jaws, and
a complexion so yellow that the uncropped brownness of his beard does
not materially darken it. He wears a grayish coat, low grimy shirt, and
the usual carpet slippers of threadbare red over his shifting and
shiftless feet. His head is bent forward, and seems to be anxiously
trying to catch the tenor of the trial. Many persons outside of the
court, Atzerott, are equally puzzled!
From as much examination of this man as his insignificance permits, I
should call him a "gabby" fellow--loud of resolution, ignoble of effort.
Over his lager no man would be braver. His face is familiar to me from a
review of those detective cabinets usually called "Rogues' Galleries."
As a "sneak thief" or "bagman," I should convict him by his face; the
same indictment would make me acquit him instantly of assassination. In
this estimate I rely upon evidence as well as upon appearance. Atzerott
swaggered about Kirk wood's Hotel asking for the Vice-President's room;
Payne or Booth would have done the murder silently. Nobody pities a
dirty man. The same arts of dress and cleanliness which please ladies
influence juries.
Next to Atzerott sits a soldier--a very jolly and smooth faced
soldier--who at one time hears a witness say something laughable. The
soldier immediately grins to the farthest point of his scalp. But he is
chagrined to find that the joke is too trivial to admit of a laugh of
duration. Very few jokes before the present court do so. But this
soldier being of long charity and excellent patience, awaits the next
joke like a veteran under orders, and reposes his chin upon the dock as
if aware that between jokes there was ample time for a nap.
The next prisoner to the right is O'Laughlin. He is a small man, about
twenty-eight years of age, attired in a fine, soiled coat, but without
white linen upon either his bosom or neck, and handcuffs rest hugely
upon his mediocrity. His moustache, eye-brows, and hair are regular and
very black. He does not look unlike Booth, though he seems to have
little bodily power, and he is very anxious, as if more earnest than any
of the rest, to have a fair lease upon life. His countenance is not
prepossessing, though he might be considered passably good looking in a
mixed company.
Between O'Laughlin and the next prisoner, Spangler, sits a soldier in
ultramarine--a discontented soldier, a moody, dissatisfied, and
arbitrary soldier. His definition of military justice is like the boy's
answer at school to the familiar question upon the Constitution of the
United States:
"What rights do accused persons enjoy ?"
The boy wrote out, very carefully, this answer:
"Death by hanging."
The boy would have been correct had the question applied to accused
persons before a court-martial.
Spangler, the scene-shifter and stage-carpenter, has the face and
bearing of a day-laborer. His blue woollen shirt does not confuse him,
as he is used to it. He has an oldish face, wrinkled by fearful
anticipations, and his hair is thin. He is awkwardly built, and watches
the trial earnestly, as if striving to catch between the links of
evidence vistas of a life insured. This man has a simple and pleading
face, and there is something genial in his great, incoherent
countenance. He is said to have cleared the stage for Booth's escape,
but this is indifferently testified to. He had often been asked by Booth
to take a drink at the nearest bar. Persons who drink assure me that the
greatest mark of confidence which a great man can show a lesser one is
to make that tender; this, therefore, explains Booth's power over
Spangler.
Spangler is the first scene-shifter who may become a _dramatis personę_.
A soldier sits between Spangler and Doctor Mudd. The soldier would like
Spangler to get up and go away, so that he could have as much of the
bench as he might sleep upon. This particular soldier, I may be
qualified to say, would sleep upon his post.
Doctor Mudd has a New England and not a Maryland face. He compares, to
those on his left, as Hyperion to a squatter. His high, oval head is
bald very far up, but not benevolently so, and it is covered with light
red hair, so thin as to contrast indifferently with the denseness of his
beard and goatee. His nose would be insignificant but for its sharpness,
and at the nostrils it is swelling and high-spirited. His eyes impinge
upon his brows, and they are shining and rather dark, while the brows
themselves are so scantily clothed with hair that they seem quite naked.
Mudd is neatly dressed in a green-grass duster, and white bosom and
collar; if he had no other advantages over his associates these last
would give it to him. He keeps his feet upon the rail before him in true
republican style, and rolls a morsel of tobacco under his tongue.
The military commission works as if it were delegated not to try, but to
convict, and Dr. Mudd, if he be innocent, is in only less danger than if
he were guilty. He has a sort of home-bred intelligence in his face, and
socially is as far above his fellows as Goliah of Gath above the rest of
the Philistines.
On the right of Doctor Mudd sits a soldier, who is striving to look
through his legs at the judge-advocate, as if taking a sort of secret
aim at that person, with the intent to fetch him down, because he makes
the trial so very dry, and the soldier so very thirsty.
The last man, who sits on the extreme right of the prisoners, is Mr.
Sam. Arnold. He is, perhaps, the best looking of the prisoners, and the
least implicated. He has a solid, pleasant face; has been a rebel
soldier, foolishly committed himself to Booth, with perhaps no intention
to do a crime, recanted in pen and ink, and was made a national
character. Had he recanted by word of mouth he might have saved himself
unpleasant dreams. This shows everybody the absurdity of writing what
they can so easily say. The best thing Arnold ever wrote was his letter
to Booth refusing to engage in murder. Yet this recantation is more in
evidence against than then his original purpose.
Arnold looks out of the window, and feels easy.
The reporters who are present are generally young fellows, practical and
ardent, like Woods, of Boston; Colburn, of THE WORLD; and Major Poore,
who has been the chronicler of such scenes for twenty years. Ber.
Pitman, one of the authors of phonetic writing, is among the official
reporters, and the Murphies, who could report the lightning, if it could
talk, are slashing down history as it passes in at their ears and runs
out at their fingers' ends.
The counsel for the accused strike me as being commonplace lawyers. They
either have no chance or no pluck to assert the dignity of their
profession. Reverdy Johnson is not here. The first day disgusted him, as
he is a practitioner of _law_. Yet the best word of the trial has been
his:
"I, gentlemen, am a member of that body of legislators which creates
courts-martial and major-generals!"
The commission has collectively an imposing appearance: the face of
Judge Holt is swarthy; he questions with slow utterance, holding the
witness in his cold, measuring eye. Hunter, who sits at the opposite end
of the table, shuts his eyes now and then, either to sleep or think, or
both, and the other generals take a note or two, and watch for occasions
to distinguish themselves.
Excepting Judge Holt, the court has shown as little ability as could be
expected from soldiers, placed in unenviable publicity, and upon a duty
for which they are disqualified, both by education and acumen. Witness
the lack of dignity in Hunter, who opened the court by a coarse allusion
to "humbug chivalry;" of Lew. Wallace, whose heat and intolerance were
appropriately urged in the most exceptional English; of Howe, whose
tirade against the rebel General Johnson was feeble as it was
ungenerous! This court was needed to show us at least the petty tyranny
of martial law and the pettiness of martial jurists. The counsel for the
defence have just enough show to make the unfairness of the trial
partake of hypocrisy, and the wideness of the subjects discussed makes
one imagine that the object of the commission is to write a cyclopedia,
and not to hang or acquit six or eight miserable wretches.
LETTER IX.
THE EXECUTIONS.
Washington, Friday, July 7th.
The trial is over; four of the conspirators have paid with their lives
the penalty of the Great Conspiracy; the rest go to the jail, and with
one exception for the remainder of their lives.
Whatever our individual theories may be, the great crime is ended, and
this is the crowning scene:
It was a long and dusty avenue, along which rambled soldiers in bluishly
white coats, cattle with their tongues out, straying from the herd, and
a few negroes making for their cabins, which dotted the fiery and vacant
lots of the suburbs. At the foot of this avenue, where a lukewarm river
holds between its dividing arms a dreary edifice of brick, the way was
filled with collected cabs, and elbowing people, abutting against a
circle of sentinels who kept the arsenal gate. The low, flat, dust-white
fields to the far left were also lined with patrols and soldiers lying
on the ground in squads beside their stacked muskets. Within these a
second blue and monotonous line extended. The drive from the arsenal
gate to the arsenal's high and steel-spiked wall was beset by companies
of exacting sabremen, and all the river bank to the right was edged with
blue and bayonets. This exhibition of war was the prelude to a very
ghastly but very popular episode--an execution. Three men and a woman
were to be led out in shackles and hung to a beam. They had conspired to
take life; they had thrilled the world with the partial consummation of
their plot; they were to reach the last eminence of assassins, on this
parched and oppressive noon, by swinging in pinioned arms and muffled
faces in the presence of a thousand people.
The bayonets at the gate were lifted as I produced my pass. It was the
last permission granted. In giving it away the General seemed relieved,
for he had been sorely troubled by applications. Everybody who had
visited Washington to seek for an office, sought to see this expiation
also. The officer at the gate looked at my pass suspiciously. "I don't
believe that all these papers have been genuine," he said. Is an
execution, then, so great a warning to evil-doers, that men will commit
forgery to see it?
I entered a large grassy yard, surrounded by an exceedingly high wall.
On the top of this wall, soldiers with muskets in their hands, were
thickly planted. The yard below was broken by irregular buildings of
brick. I climbed by a flight of rickety outside stairs to the central
building, where many officers were seated at the windows, and looked
awhile at the strange scene on the grassy plaza. On the left, the long,
barred, impregnable penitentiary rose. The shady spots beneath it were
occupied by huddling spectators. Soldiers were filling their canteens at
the pump. A face or two looked out from the barred jail. There were many
umbrellas hoisted on the ground to shelter civilians beneath them.
Squads of officers and citizens lay along the narrow shadow of the
walls. The north side of the yard was enclosed on three sides by columns
of soldiers drawn up in regular order, the side next to the penitentiary
being short to admit of ingress to the prisoner's door; but the opposite
column reached entirely up to the north wall.
Within this enclosed area a structure to be inhabited by neither the
living nor the dead was fast approaching completion. It stood gaunt,
lofty, long. Saws and hammers made dolorous music on it. Men, in their
shirt sleeves, were measuring it and directing its construction in a
business way. Now and then some one would ascend its airy stair to test
its firmness; others crawled beneath to wedge its slim supports, or
carry away the falling debris.
Toward this skeleton edifice all looked with a strange nervousness. It
was the thought and speculation of the gravest and the gayest.
It was the gallows.
A beam reached, horizontally, in the air, twenty feet from the ground;
four awkward ropes, at irregular intervals, dangled from it, each noosed
at the end. It was upheld by three props, one in the center and one at
each end. These props came all the way to the ground where they were
morticed in heavy bars. Midway of them a floor was laid, twenty by
twelve feet, held in its position on the farther side by shorter props,
of which there were many, and reached by fifteen creaking steps, railed
on either side. But this floor had no supports on the side nearest the
eye, except two temporary rods, at the foot of which two inclined beams
pointed menacingly, held in poise by ropes from the gallows floor.
And this floor was presently discovered to be a cheat, a trap, a
pitfall.
Two hinges only held it to its firmer half. These were to give way at
the fatal moment, and leave only the shallow and unreliable air for the
bound and smothering to tread upon.
The traps were two, sustained by two different props.
The nooses were on each side of the central support.
Was this all?
Not all.
Close by the foot of the gallows four wooden boxes were piled upon each
other at the edge of four newly excavated pits, the fresh earth of which
was already dried and brittle in the burning noon.
Here were to be interred the broken carcasses when the gallows had let
go its throttle. They were so placed as the victims should emerge from
the gaol door they would be seen near the stair directly in the line of
march.
And not far from these, in silence and darkness beneath the prison where
they had lain so long and so forbodingly, the body of John Wilkes Booth,
sealed up in the brick floor, had long been mouldering. If the dead can
hear he had listened many a time to the rattle of their manacles upon
the stairs, to the drowsy hum of the trial and the buzz of the garrulous
spectators; to the moaning, or the gibing, or the praying in the bolted
cells where those whom kindred fate had given a little lease upon life
lay waiting for the terrible pronouncement.
It was a long waiting, and the roof of a high house outside the walls
was seen to be densely packed with people. Others kept arriving moment
by moment; soldiers were wondering when the swinging would begin and
officers arguing that the four folks "deserved it, damn them!" Gentlemen
of experience were telling over the number of such expiations they had
witnessed. Analytic people were comparing the various modes of shooting,
garroting, and guillotining. Cigars were sending up spirals of soothing
smoke. There was a good deal of covert fear that a reprieve might be
granted. Inquires were many and ingenuous for whisky, and one or two
were so deeply expectant that they fell asleep.
How much those four dying, hoping, cringing, dreaming felons were
grudged their little gasp of life! It was to be a scene, not a
postponement or a prolongation. "Who was to be the executioner?" "Why
had not the renowned and artistic Isaacs been sent for from New York?"
"Would they probably die game, or grow weak-kneed in the last
extremity?" Ah, the gallows' workmen have completed the job! "Now then
we should have it."
Still there was delay. The sun peeped into the new-made graves and made
blistering hot the gallows' floor. The old pump made its familiar music
to the cool plash of blessed water. The grass withered in the fervid
heat. The bronzed faces of the soldiers ran lumps of sweat. The file
upon the jail walls looked down into the wide yard yawningly. No wind
fluttered the two battle standards condemned to unfold their trophies
upon this coming profanation. Not yet arrived. Why? The extent of grace
has almost been attained. The sentence gave them only till two o'clock!
Why are they so dilatory in wishing to be hanged?
Suddenly the wicket opens, the troops spring to their feet, and stand at
order arms, the flags go up, the low order passes from company to
company; the spectators huddle a little nearer to the scaffold; all the
writers for the press produce their pencils and note-books.
First came a woman pinioned.
A middle-aged woman, dressed in black, bonnetted and veiled, walking
between two bare-headed priests.
One of these held against his breast a crucifix of jet, and in the folds
of his blue-fringed sash he carried an open breviary, while both of them
muttered the service for the dead.
Four soldiers with musket at shoulder, followed, and a captain led the
way to the gallows.
The second party escorted a small and shambling German, whose head had a
long white cap upon it, rendering more filthy his dull complexion, and
upon whose feet the chains clanked as he slowly advanced, preceded by
two officers, flanked by a Lutheran clergyman, and followed, as his
predecessor, by an armed squad.
The third, preacher and party, clustered about a shabby boy, whose limbs
tottered as he progressed.
The fourth, walked in the shadow of a straight high stature, whose tawny
hair and large blue eye were suggestive rather of the barbarian striding
in his conqueror's triumph, than the assassin going to the gallows.
All these, captives, priests, guards, and officers, nearly twenty in
all, climbed slowly and solemnly the narrow steps; and upon four arm
chairs, stretching across the stage in the rear of the traps, the
condemned were seated with their spiritual attendants behind them.
The findings and warrants were immediately read to the prisoners by
General Hartrauft in a quiet and respectful tone, an aid holding an
umbrella over him meantime. These having been already published, and
being besides very uninteresting to any body but the prisoners, were
paid little heed to, all the spectators interesting themselves in the
prisoners.
There was a fortuitous delicacy in this distribution, the woman being
placed farthest from the social and physical dirtiness of Atzerott, and
nearest the unblanched and manly physiognomy of Payne.