But Andrew Johnson was not the only interested personage who read the

explicit declaration of Mr. Pierrepont. The statement that every member of

the Cabinet voted to confirm the sentence of Mrs. Surratt, with the

record, including, of course, the recommendation, before them, must have

been read also by William H. Seward, Edwin M. Stanton, Hugh McCulloch, and

Gideon Welles, the members of that "full Cabinet" who still remained in

office. They surely knew the truth of the statement, if it was true, or

its falsity, if it was false. If it was true, is it not perfectly

inconceivable that the President, conscious that these four of his

confidential advisers had seen the record and voted to deny the petition,

would have dared to enact the comedy of sending for the record, and then

brazenly assert that the petition had not been attached to it when before

him, and that he had neither seen nor read it?

And if he had been guilty of so foolhardy a course of action, now was the

time for the Judge-Advocate to fortify the declaration which he had

inspired Mr. Pierrepont to make, by appealing to these members of the

Cabinet to confront their shameless chief with their united testimony, and

forever silence the "atrocious accusation."

From his course of proceeding at a later day, it is not probable that he

made any such attempt. At all events, he got no help from Seward, from

McCulloch or from Welles. Nay, he got no help to sustain his history of

the record, even from Stanton. If help came from that quarter at all, it

was to shield him from the awakened wrath of the hood-winked Executive, by

drawing the fire upon the head of his department.

But what the Judge-Advocate-General did do, in view of the crisis, is

sufficiently apparent. He took immediate measures to retract all that

portion of Mr. Pierrepont's declaration of Saturday, which expressed or

implied any knowledge on the part of the Cabinet of the disputed paper.

The counsel for the United States had continued his speech to the jury all

day Monday, apparently unconscious of the tempestuous effect of his

statement of Saturday, and of the predicament in which it had involved his

informant. In the evening, he must have had a "confidential interview"

with Judge Holt. For, on rising to resume his speech on Tuesday morning,

the 6th of August, from no apparent logical cause arising from the course

of his argument, he saw fit to recur to the now absent record, and to

interpolate the following perfectly insulated and seemingly superfluous

piece of information:

"You will recollect, gentlemen, when a call was made several days ago

by Mr. Merrick * * asking that we should produce the record of the

Conspiracy Trial, that I brought the original record here and handed

it to counsel. I then stated that as a part of that record was a

suggestion made by a part of the Court that tried the conspirators,

that, if the President thought it consistent with his public duty,

they would suggest, in consideration of the sex and age of one of

those condemned, that a change might be made in her sentence to

imprisonment for life. I stated that I had been informed that when

that record was before the President, and when he signed the warrant

of execution, that recommendation was then before him. I want no

misunderstanding about that, and I do not intend there shall be any.

That is a part of the original record which I here produced in Court.

It is in the hand-writing of one of the members of that Court, to wit,

General Ekin. The original of that is now in his possession and in the

hand-writing of Hon. John A. Bingham. When the counsel called for that

record, I sent the afternoon of that day to the

Judge-Advocate-General, in whose possession these records are. He

brought it to me with his own hand, and told me with his own voice, in

the presence of three other gentlemen, that that identical paper, then

a part of the record, was before the President when he signed the

warrant of execution, and that he had a conversation with the

President at that time on the subject. That is my authority.

Subsequently to this, having presented it here, the

Judge-Advocate-General called to receive it back, and reiterated in

the presence of other gentlemen the same thing. That is my knowledge

and that is my authority."

Here we have, then, the final statement of his side of the case, made by

Judge Holt, through the mouth of counsel, revised and corrected under the

stress of the occurrences at the White House and the negatory attitude of

the members of the Cabinet present on the spot. Stripped of the allegation

that the record was laid before the Cabinet and voted upon by every

member of the Cabinet, its affirmations, carefully confined to "the

confidential interview" between the President and the Judge-Advocate, go

no farther than that "the identical paper" was "before the President,"

when he signed the death warrant, and they had a conversation "on the

subject."

"He wants no misunderstanding" and does "not intend there shall be any."

The counsel in great detail relates how he came by his facts. "That is my

knowledge and that is my authority." Of course it is open to everybody to

believe, if he choose, that the talk of the Cabinet meeting and of the

unanimous vote of its members against the petition, was a mere rhetorical

exaggeration of a simple narrative of Holt relating the incidents of an

interview between the President and himself, struck off by Judge

Pierrepont in the full fervor of his eloquence; but, nevertheless, it

remains true that the Judge-Advocate, until the catastrophe befell, was

satisfied it should stand, rhetoric and all; because he "reiterated the

same thing" on Saturday, _after_ the counsel had concluded his statement,

and on Monday the counsel continued his address all day without being

advised of the necessity for any retraction.

Be this as it may, there is now, at the last, no appeal by the

Judge-Advocate to the members of the Cabinet, all of whom were living, as

witnesses to the President's knowledge of the petition of mercy. He

abandons hope of corroboration from members of the Cabinet, and he takes

his stand upon the single categorical affirmation, that the "identical

paper" formed part of the record when the record was before the President

in 1865.

And, singular as it may appear, this is the very thing that the President

does not categorically deny; he only infers the contrary from the

appearance of the record in 1867.

The single categorical negation of the President is that he neither saw

nor read the recommendation. And, singular as it may appear, this the

Judge-Advocate does not categorically affirm; he leaves it to be inferred

from his averment of the presence of the paper and a conversation on the

subject.

In short, the statements of the two disputants are not contradictory. Both

may be true. And, when we recollect the feeble state of health of the

President at the time of the "confidential interview" and his mood of mind

towards the distasteful task forced upon him in a season of nervous

debility; when we recollect the mode and manner the Judge-Advocate adopted

of writing out the death warrant; it will seem extremely probable that

both statements _are_ true. The President made no "careful scrutiny" of

the record in 1865, or he would not have needed to do so in 1867. The

Judge-Advocate, inspired by his master, would not be too officious in

pointing out to the listless and uninquiring Executive the superfluous

little paper. He might do his whole duty, by conversing on the subject of

the commutation of the sentence of the one woman condemned, and, then, by

so placing the roll of papers for the President's signature to the death

warrant as to bring the modest "suggestion" of the five officers "_right

before his eyes_," though upside down. If the sick President did not

carefully scrutinize the papers, was that the Judge-Advocate's fault? Nay,

in writing out the death warrant in the inspired way he did, this zealous

patriot may have felt even a pious glow, in thus lending himself as an

instrument to ward off a frustration of Divine justice. Alas! one may

easily lose one's self in endeavoring to trace out the abnormal vagaries

of the "truly loyal" mind, at that period of hysterical patriotism.

* * * * *

After these incidents on the Surratt trial, and at the White House, there

could be no more mystery about the recommendation to mercy. It was

historically certain that such a document, or rather a "suggestion," did

in fact emanate from the Commission, and was at some time affixed to the

record. Left out of Pitman's official compilation, nevertheless it was

there. The only question about it which could any longer agitate the

people was, had it been suppressed? And this, unfortunately, was now

narrowed down to a mere question of veracity between the President and his

subordinate officer, as to what occurred at the Confidential Interview;

and which, moreover, threatened to resolve itself into a maze of special

pleading about the lack of attention, on the part of the Executive, and

the duty of thorough explanation, on the part of the Judge-Advocate, in

the delicate task of approving the judgment of a Military Commission.

Whether this unsatisfactory and ticklish state of the issue was the cause

or not, nothing was done in consequence of these revelations of the

Surratt trial. The President, indeed, plunged as he was in the struggle to

get rid of Stanton, which finally led to his impeachment, and remembering

his own remissness in not scrutinizing the papers before he signed the

death-warrant, could have had but little inclination to provoke another

conflict, on such precarious grounds, by attempting the removal of the

incriminated subordinate of his rebellious Secretary. He kept possession

of the record, however, long enough to subject it to a thorough inspection

by himself and his advisers, for (as appears from the letter of the chief

clerk already quoted) it was not returned to the Judge-Advocate-General's

office until December, 1867.

The Judge-Advocate, on his part, remained likewise passive and displayed

no eagerness for a vindication by a court of inquiry.

He pleads in 1873, as excuse for his non-action, that "it would have been

the very madness of folly" for him "to expose his reputation to the perils

of a judicial proceeding in which his enemy and slanderer would play the

quadruple role of organizer of the court, accuser, witness and final

judge." Forgetting the "history" he had told Mr. Pierrepont, and then

withdrawn, in 1867, he actually claims that he "was not aware that any

member of Mr. Johnson's Cabinet knew of his having seen and considered the

recommendation," and that he "was kept in profound ignorance of" "this

important information" "_through the instrumentality of Mr. Stanton_"!

But, were it credible that the Judge-Advocate "supposed," as he says,

"that this information was confined to" the President and himself, (not

even his master, Stanton, knowing anything of the petition), even in that

case the "perils" of an investigation, which he affects to dread, were all

on the side of his adversary. The necessity for the President of the

United States, himself, to come forward as the one sole witness to his own

accusation--especially when the charge involved an admission of his own

delinquency, and was to be met by the loud and defiant denial of his

arraigned subordinate--was enough, of itself, to deter the Chief

Magistrate of a great nation from descending into so humiliating a combat.

But, to lay no stress upon this consideration, it must be manifest to any

one acquainted with the state of public feeling at the time, that the

single, uncorroborated testimony of the maligned, distrusted Andrew

Johnson, branded as a traitor by the triumphant republican party, on the

eve of impeachment, a hostile army under his nominal command, Stanton

harnessed on his back, unfriendly private secretaries pervading his

apartments, and detectives in his bed-chamber; in support of such a

"disloyal" charge, disclosing, as it was sure to be asserted, a latent

remorse for the righteous fate of the she-assassin; would have been hailed

in all military circles with derision. The popular, the eminently loyal,

the politically sound Judge-Advocate, backed by Stanton, Bingham and

Burnett, by his Bureau and his Court, by General Grant and the Army, had

certainly nothing to fear.

But, though this hero of so many courts-martial appears to have had no

mind for a dose of his own favorite remedy, he began, in his

characteristic secret way, to collect testimony corroborative of his

version of the confidential interview. He writes no letter to a single

Cabinet officer. But, immediately after the close of the John H. Surratt

trial (August 24, 1867), he writes to General Ekin reminding him of an

interview, soon after the execution, in which he (Holt) mentioned that the

President had seen the petition; and he obtains from that officer the

information he sought. In January, 1868, he quietly procures from two

clerks in his office, letters testifying to the condition of the record

when it arrived from the Commission, when the Judge-Advocate took it to

carry to the President, and when he brought it back. It is needless to say

that, though these clerks state that the page, on which the petition was

written, and the page, on which the latter portion of the death-warrant

was written, are "directly face to face to each other;" they do not notice

that, when the death-warrant was signed, the page, on which the petition

was written, must have been, either under the other pages of the record,

or upside down.

In this same month, the resolution of the Senate refusing to concur in the

suspension of Stanton was adopted (January 13th, 1868). General Grant, the

Secretary of War _ad interim_, in violation of his promise to the

President, as alleged by the latter, thereupon surrendered the office to

the favorite War-Minister, who thus forced himself back among the

confidential advisers of the President.

On the 21st of February, the President, with one last desperate stroke,

removed him from office; and on the 24th, Andrew Johnson was impeached for

this "high crime."

In the midst of his troubles, the President finds time to pardon Dr. Mudd

(Feb. 8th), who soon returns to his family and friends.

The impeachment trial ends May 26th, the President escaping conviction by

but one vote; and Stanton at last lets go his hold on the War office.

In December, 1868, the Judge-Advocate is privately seeking testimony from

the Rev. J. George Butler, of Washington, the minister who attended

Atzerodt in his last moments, whose letter of the 15th is most

satisfactory on Johnson's belief in the guilt of Mrs. Surratt, but most

unsatisfactory in regard to the petition of mercy.

On the 1st of March, 1869, among the last acts of his stormy

administration, the President undid, as far as he could then undo, the

work of the Military Commission by setting Arnold and Spangler free;

O'Laughlin having died from the effects of the climate. Had the five

officers of the Military Commission been permitted to exercise their power

of mitigating the sentence of Mrs. Surratt, as they did in the cases of

these men, or had the Executive granted their prayer for clemency; the

President might have signalized the close of his term by a still more

memorable pardon, and the mother, rescued from death by mercy, would have

joined the son, rescued from death by justice.

During the four years of the first administration of President Grant,

while Andrew Johnson was fighting his way back to his old place, among the

people of Tennessee, the story of the suppressed recommendation ever and

anon circulated anew with unquenchable vitality. The reappearance of Mudd,

Spangler and Arnold, as free men; the "doubtful" death of Stanton, "with

such maimed rites" of burial, as might "betoken

The corse, they follow, did with desperate hand

Fordo its own life;"

every incident connected in any way with the tragedy of the woman's trial

and death, and every prominent event in the career of the men who had

surrounded the illstarred successor of the murdered Lincoln in the awful

hour of his accession, revived the irrepressible question; and the friends

of Mrs. Surratt's memory, and the friends of Johnson, alike, each by their

own separate methods, on every such opportunity, appealed and re-appealed

to the public, asserting again and again the suppression of the plea for

mercy, propagating what General Holt brands as "the atrocious accusation,"

or, as he elsewhere characterizes their actions, "for long years wantonly

and wickedly assailing" the ex-Judge-Advocate. And yet, during all these

years, the baited hero is silent. He lies low. As far as appears, he makes

no further efforts to secure testimony. His friend and old associate,

Bingham, is by his side, yet he makes no appeal to him. He keeps close by

him the letters he has already secured to substantiate his own version of

the confidential interview. But he seeks for no Cabinet testimony. His

stern master in the War Department, after the acquittal of the President,

lays down his sceptre, and then, though the deadliest enemy of Johnson, is

allowed to die in silence. Seward lives on and is asked to give no help.

The ex-Judge-Advocate still lies low.

At length came the appointed time.

William H. Seward died on the 12th day of October, 1872.

On the 11th day of February, 1873, Gen. Holt makes his appeal for

testimony from the officers of Johnson's first Cabinet, by letter to John

A. Bingham, requesting him to furnish his recollections of the late

Stanton and the late Seward. On March 30th, 1873, he writes to James

Speed, Ex-Attorney-General, inclosing a copy of Bingham's reply. On May

21st, 1873, he writes to James Harlan, Ex-Secretary of the Interior,

inclosing a copy of Bingham's reply. In July, 1873, he writes to General

Mussey, once Johnson's private secretary; and, in August, armed with the

answers of these correspondents and with the letters he had gathered in

1867 and 1868, and unprovoked by any revivification of the old charge, he

rushes into the columns of the Washington Chronicle with his formidable

"Vindication."

CHAPTER IV.

THE TRIAL OF JOSEPH HOLT.

On the threshold of his Vindication, Gen. Holt revives the discredited and

apparently forgotten declaration made by Mr. Pierrepont on the trial of

John H. Surratt, and stakes his whole case upon the establishment of the

truth of the allegation that the petition for commutation, attached as it

was to the record of the findings and sentences of the Military

Commission, was the subject of consideration at a meeting of the Cabinet

of President Johnson, and its prayer rejected with the concurrence of the

members present at such meeting.

So long as the contention is limited to what took place during that

momentous hour between the President and himself, "alone," with the light

thrown upon it by the record including the endorsed death-warrant and the

affixed paper, he exhibits a certain lack of confidence in the strength of

his defense. For, although he prints the "circumstantial evidence," as he

calls it, to sustain his own version of the "confidential interview"

(consisting of the two letters from his former clerk, heretofore alluded

to, and the letter from Gen. Mussey saying that the "acting President"

told him of the recommendation "about that time"), he confesses it was not

until he recently had secured certain testimony that the petition had been

considered by officers of the Cabinet, that he at length felt his case

strong enough to warrant a public challenge of his adversary, and himself

justified in submitting it to the public.

In short, we have a sort of reversal of the position of six years before.

_Then_, after having at first put forward the assertion that the petition

was considered by the Cabinet, the Judge-Advocate summarily suppresses

that branch of his case, and puts into the foreground the explicit

asseveration of the identical paper being "right before the President's

eyes" when he signed the death-warrant. "He wants no misunderstanding

about that." _Now_, while he keeps in mind, it is true, this version of

the confidential interview, he relegates it to the rear, and constitutes

the Cabinet consideration the very citadel of his cause.

As to what takes place at a meeting of the Cabinet, its members of course

are the first, if not the only, witnesses. And it is a matter of surprise

that General Holt, so far as is apparent, never, in all these past years,

applied to any one of them to substantiate so essential a part of his

vindication. He states that he has always been satisfied that the matter

must have been considered in the Cabinet, and adds that "from the

confidential character of Cabinet deliberations" he has "thus far been

denied access to this source of information." But he does not say when,

or to whom, he applied for such "access," or how he had been "denied." It

is certain, from what he says elsewhere, that he never applied to Stanton

or to Seward; he admits in a subsequent communication that he never

applied to McCulloch, Welles or Dennison; and, from the tenor of their

letters now in reply to his, it appears he never applied before to Harlan

or to Speed. And these are all the members of the Cabinet of President

Johnson in July, 1865. Moreover, he does not, even now, in 1873, make

application in the first instance to an ex-Cabinet officer. His first

application is made to John A. Bingham, his old colleague in the

prosecution of Mrs. Surratt, for Cabinet information in the shape of

conversations with the two ministers, who, after so many years of

unsolicited silence in life, are now silent, beyond the reach of

solicitation, in death. And it is not until he has secured the desired

information, which he would have us believe was entirely unexpected, that

he is stirred up to the necessity of a public vindication of his

character; and then he selects the two of the surviving ministers of the

Cabinet, known to be hostile to the ex-President, as the objects of

solicitation, sending them, as a spur to their recollections, the letter

containing the reminiscences of his serviceable ally. But, by some

fatality, the industrious inquirer takes nothing by his somewhat

complicated manoeuvre. The letters he produces from Cabinet officers

afford him no assistance. Judge Harlan can recall only an informal

discussion by three or four members of the Cabinet (Seward, Stanton,

himself and probably Speed) of the question of the commutation of the

sentence of Mrs. Surratt because of her sex; which, she being the one

woman under condemnation, would surely arise in a tribunal of gentlemen,

whether there was a recommendation or not, as in fact it did even among

the stern soldiers of the Military Commission. But the writer, who, as

Senator from the State of Iowa, had voted for the conviction of President

Johnson, makes the positive declaration, that "no part of the record of

the trial, the decision of the court, or the recommendation of clemency

was at that time or ever at any time read in my (his) presence." He

remembers, with undoubting distinctness, inquiring at the time whether the

Attorney-General had examined the record, and was told that the whole case

had been carefully examined by the Attorney-General and the Secretary of

War; and he states that the question was never submitted to the Cabinet

for a formal vote.

This letter is most significant, both for what it says and for what it

refrains from saying. Its positive statement annihilates the story of a

"full Cabinet" when "the vote of every member" was adverse, and indeed of

any Cabinet meeting whatever, where the paper was present and

considered--such a story as Judge Pierrepont first gathered from the

"voice" of Holt; and the absence of all affirmation that the writer had

either seen or heard of the recommendation, while he expressly states that

it was never read in his presence (considering the occasion and object of

the letter and the bias of the ex-Senator), warrants the conclusion that

such a document was not mentioned at the informal Cabinet consultation he

describes.

In any view, the letter furnishes no support to Holt's contention. The

writer expressly negatives the presence of the record and the paper, and

he does not affirm that such a petition was alluded to, in terms, in the

discussion in the presence of the President; which he surely would have

done, in aid of his sorely tried friend, if such had been the fact.

The Judge-Advocate fares even worse at the hands of the

Ex-Attorney-General. Here is a man who knew, if any other member of the

Cabinet except Stanton knew, whether the paper in question ever came up

for discussion before the President in his Cabinet. He goes so far as to

say that, after the findings and before the execution, he saw the paper

attached to the record "in the President's office;" a statement which

reminds us of another of the same elusive and evasive character, (that the

paper was "_before the President_"), and, like that, affirms nothing one

way or the other as to the consciousness of the President of its presence.

And then he proceeds as follows:

"I do not feel at liberty to speak of what was said at Cabinet meetings.

In this I know I differ from other gentlemen" (presumably an allusion to

the Seward and Stanton of Bingham's letter), "but feel constrained to

follow my own sense of propriety."

His friend's necessity would have been met by something less than a

repetition of what was _said_ at Cabinet meetings. He had only to tell

whether he saw a certain paper (not in the President's office), but at a

meeting of the President and his advisers, or knew of the recognition

there of its mere existence;--a revelation which would not have violated

the most punctilious sense of official propriety; and he feels constrained

to withhold the least ray of light upon so simple a question.

The witness "declines to answer."

Ten years after the present controversy, Judge Holt, feeling acutely this

weak point in his vindication, again appeals to Speed, in the most moving

tones, to break his unaccountable silence and rescue his friend's gray

head from "the atrocious accusation," "known to him to be false in its

every intendment," with which that perfidious monster, dead now eight

years, and, (as Holt significantly quotes), "gone to his own place,"

sought "to blacken the reputation of a subordinate officer holding a

confidential interview with him."

And, strange to say, Speed first neglects even to reply to Holt's repeated

communications for six months, and then just opens his lips to whisper, "I

cannot say more than I have said." He had offered in private (if we may

credit Holt) to write a letter to his aggrieved friend, giving him the

desired information, "but not to be used until after Holt's death;" a

proposition quite naturally discouraged by Holt, who made this sensible

reply: "that a letter thus strangely withheld from the public would not,

when it appeared, be credited."

But, when repeatedly implored to spread "the desired information" before

the public, he again declines to answer. James Speed would not tell the

truth, when by telling the truth he might relieve his old friend in "the

closing hours of his life" from a most damnable calumny, because,

forsooth, "of his sense of propriety." He could not violate the secrecy of

a Cabinet meeting, held nearly twenty years before; a secrecy which he had

good reason to believe had already been broken, in the professed interest

of truth, by three of his own colleagues, and, in the alleged interest of

a most foul falsehood, by the President himself.

Before the Judge finally gives up his old associate as hopeless, he

craftily points out to him a way by which the ex-Cabinet officer may give

his testimony without violating the most punctilious sense of propriety,

not only, but without departing one iota from the literal truth. Since his

first letter, General Holt informs him: "I have learned that although you

gained the information while a member of the Cabinet, it was not strictly

in your capacity as such, but that at the moment I laid before the

President the record of the trial, with the recommendation for clemency

on behalf of Mrs. Surratt, you chanced to be so situated as to be assured

by the evidence of your own senses that such petition of recommendation

was by me presented to the President, and was the subject of conversation

between him and myself." Does this mean that Speed was an unseen spectator

of the confidential interview, and witnessed the writing of the

death-warrant? At all events, for some reason, the ex-Attorney-General was

afraid to accept this opportunity to equivocate.

Holt may well wonder at Speed's obstinate silence. He exclaims: "It is a

mystery to me." It will be a mystery to every one, provided the black

charge was false. But, on the hypothesis that the charge was true, that

the paper was suppressed, either actually or virtually, there is no

mystery.

Had Speed known that the paper was, not only "_before_" the President, but

considered by him, either in or out of the Cabinet, it is beyond the limit

of human credulity to believe, for a moment, that, with all possible

motives to lead him to succor his friend, and with none to lead him to

shield the character of his dead political foe, he would not have uttered

the one decisive word in the controversy. And he comes as near doing so as

he dares, evidently. He shows, in 1873, a yearning to help his old

friend--a yearning so strong that we may be sure it was not the frivolous

pretext of "official propriety" which constrained him, then, much less in

1883.

If he, too, as Holt said of Stanton, feared the resentment of the

dethroned Johnson in life, he certainly could not have feared the

resentment of Johnson's ghost after death.

He must be numbered among those who,

"With arms encumbered thus, or this head-shake,

Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,

As, _'Well, well, we know;' or 'We could, an' if we would;' or

'If we list to speak;' or 'There be, an' if they might;'_"

"ambiguously give out" to know what they are sworn "never to speak of." If

there was any oath-guarding "fellow in the cellarage," rest assured it was

not the pale wraith of the hood-winked Johnson, but the blood-boltered

spectre of his once wide-ruling Minister of War.

* * * * *

Amid such a dearth of direct explicit testimony of members of the Cabinet

about a disputed Cabinet incident, it is curious and interesting to watch

the assiduous ex-Judge-Advocate, with the most ingenious and industrious

sophistry, attempt to extract corroboration from the statements of the two

ex-Cabinet officers, whom he has induced to speak, where in truth no

corroboration can be found.

After all his efforts, he is forced at last to fall back upon the single

testimony of the one man without whose encouraging information he frankly

informs us he would not have dared to come before the people, and upon

whom he brings himself to believe he might safely rest his defense. That

man is John A. Bingham, now, as once before, Special Assistant

Judge-Advocate to Joseph Holt.

During the eight years which had elapsed since their crowning achievement

of hanging a woman for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, these two men had

lived, for a considerable portion of the time, in the same city. They were

together in the contest over reconstruction and impeachment, standing in

the front rank of the enemies of Johnson. They were both at the Capital

during the trial of John H. Surratt, when the ghastly reminiscences of the

trial of the mother along with seven chained men must have drawn the two

military prosecutors into a most sympathetic union.

And yet when, in February, 1873, Joseph Holt sits down in Washington to

write his letter of inquiry to John A. Bingham, then in the same city, he

would have us believe that he had never before poured into the bosom of

his old colleague his own sufferings over the frightful calumny so long

poisoning the very air he breathed, never before told him his

embarrassment over the difficulty to elicit evidence from Cabinet

officials, never before besought his friend for his own powerful testimony

on the side of his persecuted fellow-official.

He writes to his former assistant, as though the information were now

communicated for the first time, that the President and he were alone

when the record was presented and the death-warrant signed; that he had

always been satisfied the petition was considered in a Cabinet meeting,

but has hitherto been unable to obtain any evidence upon that point; and

then, in an artless, ingenuous manner, as if putting the question for the

first time, asks his correspondent whether or not he had had a

conversation with William H. Seward, Secretary of State under President

Johnson, in reference to the petition, and "if so, state as nearly as you

may be able to do all he said on the subject;" with a like request as to

Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War.

With a diviner's skill he selects the two members of the Cabinet who are

then dead; and, not to disappoint him, Bingham, in a letter from

Washington six days later, informs him that he has struck the two-fold

mark. With the same apparent artlessness which characterizes the letter of

inquiry, this useful advocate now, as if for the first time, discloses to

his long-tried colleague, that he did indeed have a conversation with each

of the eminent men he had hit upon, who are now, alas! dead.

Judge Bingham is a most willing witness. He relates with great

circumstantiality that "after the Military Commission had tried and

sentenced the parties" he "prepared the form of the petition to the

President." He then gives the form thus prepared as he now recollects it

(in which there are two significant mistakes); he states that he wrote it

with his own hands, that General Ekin copied it, and the five signed the

copy; as if all this particularity had any relevance to the question at

issue, as if the point in dispute was the existence of the paper, and not

its suppression at a critical moment after it was written. He affects to

believe it necessary to state to his old colleague, that he "deemed it his

duty to call the attention of Secretary Stanton to the petition, and did

call his attention to it before the final action of the President;"--as if

it were among the possibilities, that the head of the War Department could

in any case have overlooked so important a paper, much less that the

imperious Chief of this very prosecution could have been kept in

ignorance, one hour, of what was done by his tools.

The Special Assistant, however, at last comes to the point:

"After the execution, the statement to which you refer was made that

President Johnson had not seen the petition for the commutation of the

death sentence upon Mrs. Surratt. I afterwards called at your office,

and, without notice to you of my purpose, asked for the record in the

case of the assassins. It was opened and shown me, and there was then

attached to it the petition, copied and signed as hereinbefore

stated."

Oh, what an artless pair of correspondents! The former Special Assistant

tells the former Judge-Advocate how he played the detective on him to his

friend's justification; "_without notice of my purpose_"!

"Soon thereafter I called upon Secretaries Stanton and Seward, and

asked if this petition had been presented to the President before the

death-sentence was by him approved, and was answered by each of those

gentlemen that the petition was presented to the President, and was

duly considered by him and his advisers, before the death-sentence

upon Mrs. Surratt was approved, and that the President and the Cabinet

upon such consideration were a unit in denying the prayer of the

petition; Mr. Stanton and Mr. Seward stating that they were present."

In weighing the credibility of this statement, so conclusive if true, two

considerations should be borne in mind.

1. That we have here, not the testimony of either Seward or Stanton, but

the testimony of a man who, if the paper was in fact suppressed, must have

been a participant in the foul deed. For no one will believe, for a

moment, that Joseph Holt would have dared to perpetrate, if he could, or

could have perpetrated, if he dared, so unspeakable a wickedness, without

the knowledge and cooeperation of his fiery leader in the conduct of the

trial.

2. If this decisive information was in the possession of Judge Bingham at

so early a date as "soon after the execution," why had he not communicated

it to his distressed partner while Stanton and Seward lived? He had taken

pains to obtain it to meet the ugly stories that were even then

circulating against the Judge-Advocate. He knew it at the time of the

struggle at close quarters over the petition during the Surratt trial, and

he must have been cognizant of the fact, that for the lack of it, that

officer had been forced to withdraw the allegation of a full Cabinet

consideration of the petition, which he had at first prompted the counsel

of the United States boldly and publicly to make.

After the trial the reports grew louder and louder, until it was

everywhere said that Andrew Johnson habitually declared that he had never

seen the paper. Holt ran hither and thither collecting testimony from all

available quarters. Hear Holt himself: "Every time the buzz of this

slanderous rumor reached him (Bingham) during the last eight years--which

was doubtless often--his awakened memory must have reminded him that he

held in his keeping proof that this rumor was false." Why did not his

former assistant even relieve his tremendous anxiety by telling him that

he had evidence which would blow the calumny into the air? General Holt,

in a letter in reply to Bingham's, dated at Washington the next day, which

he also prints in his Vindication, says:

"It would have been fortunate indeed, could I have had this testimony in

my possession years ago."

He calls its concealment "a sad, sad mockery." Yes; and why was Judge

Bingham willing to perpetrate such a "mockery," and continue the "mockery"

until Stanton's death, and then until Seward's death, which occurred only

a few months before he at last enlightens his colleague? Can the most

credulous of men believe that, during all these years, he was guilty of

such cruelty as not even to whisper such welcome intelligence into the

ears of his sorely distressed brother officer?

And what shall we say of William H. Seward?

If that great man told Judge Bingham in 1865 what the Judge, after Seward

was dead, first says he did, why had William H. Seward kept silent so many

years, and at last died and made no sign? He must have heard the charge,

so infamous if false, and, if Judge Bingham be believed, he must have

known it to be false.

He must have heard the statement of Judge Pierrepont in open court in

1867. He must have known of the President's sending for the record and of

the explosion thereupon in the Department of War. Why did he not at that

crisis come forward with the proof of which the Judge-Advocate was so

dreadfully in need?

The Secretary of State could not have intrenched himself behind the

inviolability of proceedings of Cabinet meetings, as did the

over-scrupulous Attorney-General, because, according to Judge Bingham, he

himself had betrayed the secret long before.

And why did not Judge Bingham force him to speak, or else make public his

interview with him, while Seward was alive and could either affirm or

contradict it?

No, these two eminent lawyers, yoked together as the common mark of what

they call a "most atrocious slander," originating with a President of the

United States, bruited about everywhere both in official and private

circles, wait eight long years, and until after the death of the head of

that President's Cabinet, from whose lips one of them at least had heard

at its very inception a solemn refutation of the black lie, before they

venture to proclaim it to the world.

Mr. Bingham admits in his letter that, in 1865, "he desired to make" the

facts he had ascertained "public." Why did he not "make public" what

Seward had told him, while Seward was living?

He furnishes no answer to this question, and until he does, his testimony

on the matter is tainted with a most reasonable suspicion.

And, besides, what we know of the situation of the Secretary of State at

the time of the execution of Mrs. Surratt, of his subsequent career, and

of his lofty character as a man, is sufficient to stamp the account of

Judge Bingham as incredible.

William H. Seward, one of the most distinguished statesmen of the era of

the civil war, one of the most illustrious founders of the republican

party, and one of the most trusted advisers of Abraham Lincoln, remained

in the Cabinet of Andrew Johnson until the close of his administration. He

united in the pardon of Mudd, Spangler and Arnold. He stood by the

President fearlessly in the dark days of the impeachment, and when the

President had become the target of the daily curses of thousands of

Seward's former political friends. Had he known that the accusation

against General Holt was false, and at the same time heard the daily

reiteration of its truth from the lips of his Chief, he would not have

remained an hour in the Cabinet of such a monumental slanderer. So far

from allowing the ceremonial restraints of Cabinet rules to make him a

silent accomplice in a foul falsehood, he would have proclaimed the truth,

if necessary, even from the steps of the Capitol.

Mr. Seward, at the time of the execution of Mrs. Surratt, could have but

barely recovered from the broken jaw and broken arm from which he was

suffering, when he bore the savage assault of Payne, and from the grievous

wounds which that mad ruffian inflicted. One of his sons was still

incapacitated because of injuries from the same hand, and his wife died

June 21st, 1865. It is not at all probable that, in such dolorous

circumstances, he would be required to give close attention to a subject

entirely outside of the duties of his department, and in which his

personal feelings as a sufferer were so deeply involved. He said himself

under oath to a Congressional Committee: "Having been myself a sufferer in

that business, the subject would be a delicate one for me to pursue

without seeming to be over-zealous or demonstrative."

In spite of the eight-years-embalmed testimony of a hundred Binghams, we

would not believe that the uncomplaining victim of Payne voted to deny the

Petition of Mercy.

While no attempt is made to explain the silence of Seward during his

lifetime, or the silence of Judge Bingham himself regarding the

information he got from Seward, this willing witness does give a most

singular and perplexing explanation of his long silence regarding the

information he got from Stanton.

He says: (in the same letter) "Having ascertained the fact as stated, I

then desired to make the same public, and so expressed myself to Mr.

Stanton, who advised me not to do so, but to rely upon the final judgment

of the people."

General Holt, in a subsequent article, states that Stanton "enjoined upon

the Judge silence in reference to the communication."

We are called upon to believe that the Secretary of War, at the very first

interview with Judge Bingham, when, upon the theory of the truth of the

information, there could have been no conceivable motive for its

concealment, advised his inquiring friend to suppress a fact essential to

the refutation of a despicable slander, blotting the fair name of a

brother officer. Not only this; but that the Secretary continued the

injunction of silence during all the years the terrible charge was being

bandied about on the lips of men to the daily torment of the poor man so

cruelly assailed. As General Holt says: "It was a deliberate and merciless

sacrifice of me, so far as he could accomplish it."

And he "enforced" the "silence" up to the day of his death.

But we ask what reason had the "Great War Minister" "to perpetrate so

pitiless an outrage?" Why, in the days of the trial of John H. Surratt,

why, in the days of his stern enmity towards the President, when his

removal furnished the main ground of impeachment, did he not once speak

out for his slandered servant, or even unlock the sealed lips of the

obedient Bingham and suffer him to tell the truth?

General Holt, in 1883, on affirming in the text of his article that

"Messrs. Seward and Stanton declared the truth to Judge Bingham," adds the

following explanatory note:

"This praise was certainly due to Mr. Seward, but not, in strictness, to

Mr. Stanton, since on making the communication to Judge Bingham, he

endeavored and successfully, to prevent him from giving it publicity.

"The fear of Andrew Johnson's resentment, added to a determination on his

part to leave my reputation--then under fire from his silence--to its

fate, sufficiently explain his otherwise inexplicable conduct."

But does it? Is this in truth a sufficient explanation?

Stanton, the stern War Minister, fear the resentment of Andrew Johnson!

When was he taken with it? When he bearded the President in his Cabinet?

When he defied him in the War Department, and scattered his missive of

removal to the winds? Or did he wait to begin to fear him until the

President retired to private life, just escaping conviction by

impeachment, and shorn of all popularity North or South? The preposterous

nature of the cause assigned casts suspicion upon the assignor himself.

As to the second cause, we are at a loss to conceive why Mr. Stanton

should harbor such motiveless malignity against the reputation of his

former colleague, then his pliant subordinate, and always his friend. We

need, in this regard, an explanation of the explanation. If it be true, it

settles the character of Stanton for all time.

But, it appears, in the words of General Holt, that "while he (Stanton)

lived, this enforced silence was scrupulously obeyed." Again we ask why?

Why should Bingham have obeyed the "advice," even if given by Stanton so

long before? Why should the associate of Holt, in the prosecution and

execution of Mrs. Surratt, have ministered to the malignity of Stanton,

scrupulously obeyed his base injunction, and never even told his beloved

fellow-laborer on the field of courts-martial, that he possessed such

secret sacred testimonials in his favor?

The General gives us no explanation of this "inexplicable conduct."

Surely, the undaunted Bingham--who, as manager on the impeachment trial,

so clawed the character of the arraigned President, could have had no

"fear of the resentment of Andrew Johnson." And, unless the masterful

Stanton held some secret back to feather his "advice," or lend weight to

his injunction of silence, we see no reason why the fear of Stanton should

have closed the lips of the voluble Special Judge-Advocate. He surely

could not have joined in the fine irony of the Secretary, that it would

be better for their mutual friend, although "under fire," "to rely on the

judgment of the people."

But another, and a final, explanation is necessary. The Great War Minister

died in December, 1869. Holt more than hints that "Providence" shortened

his life so that he should no longer "perpetrate so pitiless an outrage"

as keeping Bingham's mouth shut.

Why, then, do we hear nothing from Judge Bingham for three years more? In

the words of Holt, "after the Secretary had, amid the world's funeral

pomp, gone down into his sepulchre, the truth came up out of the grave to

which he had consigned it," and was "resurrected and openly announced by

Judge Bingham." But why was the resurrection delayed until February, 1873?

He does not tell us. Why should "the buzz of this slanderous rumor" (to

use Holt's own words), "sadly recall to him that, though holding that

proof, he was not yet privileged to divulge it?" There is no answer to

this; none. The "scrupulosity" of Bingham did not end with the

providential taking off of Stanton, but prolonged its reverential

obedience to the advice of the dead, until his great colleague also was

summoned from the scene.

Such resurrected truth, like the suggested letter of Speed to be used only

after poor Holt's death, seems doubly obnoxious to the latter's own

common sense remark: "thus strangely withheld from the public, it would

not, when it appeared, be credited."

* * * * *

On the whole, it is exceedingly doubtful whether Judge Bingham's testimony

does not do more harm than good to General Holt's case. It is the

testimony of an accomplice, if the charge it is meant to refute is true.

Its subject-matter is hearsay, withheld, so long as the direct evidence

was attainable, for no good reason, or for a reason assigned which will

not stand a moment's examination.

This interchange of letters between two associates in infamy, if infamy

there were, the one applying for, and the other disclosing ostensibly for

the first time, at so late a day, decisive information, which, in the

ordinary course of things, the one must have asked for or the other

revealed, and both talked over from the beginning, wears upon the face all

the features of a collusive correspondence.

No one acquainted with the facts can be induced to credit what both these

men state upon the threshold of their correspondence, and upon the truth

of which their credibility is staked for all time, that, if two such

conversations with Judge Bingham actually took place, this co-victim of a

common charge would ever have withheld all knowledge of such important

testimony from his brother in affliction for eight years, and until the

lips of his two eminent interlocutors, whose confirmation would have at

once and for ever crushed the calumny, were closed in death.

And, with this incontrovertible assertion, we dismiss John A. Bingham to

keep company with Richard Montgomery and Sanford Conover, two witnesses

who were once the subjects of his own fervid eulogy.

Another aspect of the case must for a moment detain us.

Under the admitted fact that the President approved the death-sentence on

Wednesday, July 5th, it is by no means clear how we are to find room for

this supposed Cabinet meeting.

The natural construction of Bingham's letter would lead us to believe that

the Cabinet meeting, which the two Secretaries are said to have described,

was a regular consultation between "the President and his advisers," held

_before_ the "confidential interview" at which the President "approved the

death-sentence;" and that the entire Cabinet voted on the question raised

by the petition, because it was "a unit in denying the prayer." This is

but another version of the "full Cabinet" of Judge Pierrepont's first

statement, and forcibly suggests that the two have an identical origin--at

first withdrawn under compulsion while Seward lived, at last brought

forward again after his death.

And every one, on such construction, would expect to hear the voices of

McCulloch, Welles and Dennison, still living in 1873, and accessible to

the ex-Judge-Advocate.

He states in his "Refutation," that he "had satisfactory reasons for

believing that they were not there;" but he could not have gathered those

reasons from Judge Bingham or his letter, which really is only consistent

with the presence of some, if not all, of the three; and it is naturally

to be inferred he got them from the ex-members themselves in letters

repudiating all knowledge of the petition;--letters he takes care not to

publish.

Again: the Cabinet meeting described in Judge Bingham's letter cannot be

made to square with the meeting described in the letter of Judge Harlan.

The former was a regular Cabinet meeting, the latter was an informal

discussion by a few members of the Cabinet. At the one, the petition was

"duly considered," at the other, neither record nor petition was present.

At the one, "a formal vote" was taken upon the "question as to Mrs.

Surratt's case;" at the latter, her case "was never submitted to a formal

vote."

But--not to dwell further on dispensable points--it is enough to say that

_any_ Cabinet meeting whatever, for the consideration of the petition,

held _before_ the President's approval of the death-sentence, is, on the

admitted facts of the case, an impossibility.

Indeed Holt himself, when driven to the question, does not claim that

there was. The record was in the custody of the Judge-Advocate from the

30th of June until that officer carried it to the President on the 5th of

July, and during that interval the President was sick-a-bed. It was

General Holt, as he himself states, who first "drew his attention to the

recommendation," and "the President then and there read it in my (his)

presence." And this was at the confidential interview on Wednesday, July

5th. There could have been no meeting of the President and his Cabinet at

which the record and petition were present and discussed, "before the

approval of the death-sentence;" which confessedly was done at the

confidential interview.

When this impossibility was pointed out by Andrew Johnson, General Holt,

in his "refutation," with great show of indignation, denounces such an

argument as "intensely disingenuous." While conceding at once that from

the adjournment of the Commission to the 5th of July, the President "had

been sick in bed, and had, of course, had no opportunity of conferring

with any members of his Cabinet;" he proceeds to show what his idea of

intense ingenuousness is, by claiming that what "Messrs. Seward and

Stanton" (of Bingham's letter) "clearly meant was, that before the

President had _finally_ and _definitely_ approved the sentences in

question," the recommendation to mercy "had been considered by him and his

advisers in Cabinet meeting;" and therefore such a meeting might have been

held _after_ the signature to the death-warrant, say on Wednesday

afternoon (5th), or on Thursday, the 6th. And he, now, once again, as in

the days of the Surratt trial, abandons all idea of a "full" or regular

Cabinet meeting, and endeavors, with the most transparent sophistry, to

identify the informal discussion of Judge Harlan's letter with the Cabinet

Council of Judge Bingham. But alas! for the ingenuous General!

Circumstances are too strong for him. For there is no more room for a

Cabinet meeting, formal or informal, to do what Judge Bingham's informants

are said to relate--_i. e._ consider, and then vote upon the

petition--_after_ the confidential interview than _before_.

It is agreed on all hands that the President approved of the

death-sentence on Wednesday, at the confidential interview between Holt

and himself, and, at that very time, and by the same warrant, appointed

Friday the 7th, for the executions. The whole matter was begun and ended

in an hour.

There was neither opportunity, nor, if there had been, use, to hold a

Cabinet consultation upon the question of commutation after that.

The President had reviewed the record, and, without consultation with any

human being but Holt, put his name to the death-warrant. Why consult his

confidential advisers after he had decided the whole matter? Holt himself

says that, at this private interview, it was not he, but Andrew Johnson,

who had fully made up his mind that Mrs. Surratt must be put to death;

that the President needed no urging or advice on that subject; that he

inveighed against the women of the South with a ferocity which reminds us

of the loyal Bingham himself. Holt says that the President himself,

without a suggestion from him, was "prompt and decided" "as to _when_ the

execution should take place," "and in the same spirit too, in which he

subsequently suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus, he fixed the Friday

following." Why call in his "advisers" after he had, with the approval of

his judgment and his conscience, put his hand to the work of blood!

Besides, if he needed such a supererogatory endorsement of his "advisers,"

there was no time to get it.

The record with the death-warrant went direct to the Adjutant-General's

office that very Wednesday. Holt cannot remember whether he took it or

not, nor can the Adjutant-General remember when or how he received it. But

this is of no consequence. The order for the execution was drawn on that

day, the necessary copies made that day; it was promulgated on the morning

of Thursday the 6th, and on that day at _noon_, the warrant for her death,

within twenty-four hours, was read to the fainting woman in her cell. All

day long, on the 6th, the White House was besieged by her friends, her

priests and her daughter, to obtain a reprieve. The guardians of the

President had no time to hold Cabinet consultations over foregone dooms of

death. They were too busy intercepting verbal prayers for mercy, holding

shut the doors of the President's private room, sending away all

petitioners, for a few more hours' life, to the merciful Judge-Advocate,

making sure that there should be four pine coffins and four newly dug

graves, and that the Habeas Corpus should not leave one empty. Hold a

Cabinet meeting after the President had signed the bloody warrant, and

Stanton had once clutched it! Reopen the perilous question to hear Welles

and Dennison, and McCulloch and Seward, to say nothing of Harlan and Speed

And Stanton, discuss a petition addressed to the President who had already

denied it! "Five members of our court have been suborned by their feelings

to swerve from their duty. We run no more risks of soft-hearted gallantry

this time amid the members of the Cabinet. Let the funeral games begin."

The ex-Judge-Advocate insists that the signature to the death-warrant was

a matter of very little moment. The President could withdraw it at any

time. But would he have us believe that, after the President had

dispatched such a fatal missive to the officer whose sole duty, with

regard to it, consisted in the promulgation of an order for its execution

within twenty-four hours, such action was simply provisional and,

according to usage, still subject to rescission by a Cabinet vote?

Desperate, indeed, must be the necessities of a defence, which drive the

defendant on the forlorn hope of identifying a Cabinet meeting, voting as

a unit to deny a petition for clemency, "_before the death-warrant was

approved_," with a Cabinet discussion of the petition, _after_ the

death-warrant, fixing the execution on the next day but one, had been

signed by the President, (who is represented as urgent and eager at the

moment of his signature to exact in the shortest time the extremest

penalty); on the ground that the latter was held _before_ the theoretical

_animus revocandi_ of the Executive had become technically inoperative

with the last sigh of the condemned.

* * * * *

It has been suggested by one of his subordinate officers that the

Secretary of War having seen the petition as soon as the record came to

his department, it is inconceivable that, at some moment between the 30th

and the 7th, the matter should not have been discussed by him with the

President.

Of course, there can be no doubt that Stanton knew all about the

recommendation. But, (and this obvious answer seems to have altogether

escaped the attention of his friend), if the paper was in fact suppressed,

it was suppressed with Stanton's own knowledge. Indeed, his must have been

the master-hand. He it was who kept the late Vice-President up to the mark

of severity as long as the bloody humor lasted.

He was the sovereign, and Bingham and Holt but his vassals. Everybody will

give them the credit of not having dared to dream of suppression without

the electrifying nod of their imperious lord.

And, from the long silence of one, if not both, of his slaves, it would

appear, that he not only directed the suppression of the paper, but was

too proud to deny, or suffer his minions to deny, it to his dying day.

CHAPTER V.

ANDREW JOHNSON SIGNS ANOTHER DEATH-WARRANT.

Let us turn from the case made by General Holt, which on a cursory

inspection seems so strong, but the seeming strength of which, on a closer

scrutiny, dissipates itself among such perplexing questions, and lands us

at last in the "enjoined silence" of Stanton, to the first public,

authoritative charge made by the ex-President.

It appeared, November 12th, 1873, in the same newspaper which had

published General Holt's Vindication, to which it was a reply. For it must

be remembered that it was Joseph Holt, for eight years the accused, and

not Andrew Johnson, for eight years the accuser, at the bar of rumor, who

first threw down his gage in the public arena, defying his secret

antagonist to come forth.

The gallant knight chose his own good time; and, at last, surrounded with

sponsors, both clerical and martial, with banners flying and a most

sonorous peal of trumpets, he burst into the lists, as though he would

fain hope by noise and show to over-awe his dreaded adversary into

submissive silence.

His thunders availed nothing. His glove had no sooner reached the ground

than it was taken up.

Let us hear the plain, straightforward statement of Andrew Johnson. There

are no mysteries to unravel, no explanations to explain.

"The findings and sentences of the court were submitted on the 5th of

July (he and I being alone), were then and there approved by the

Executive, and taken by the Judge-Advocate-General to the War

Department, where on the same afternoon the order to carry them into

effect was issued. Mr. Speed, doubtless, saw the record, but it must

have been in the Department of War, and not in the Executive office."

After thus quietly disposing of Mr. Speed's evidence, he proceeds:--

"The record of the court was submitted to me by Judge Holt in the

afternoon of the 5th day of July, 1865. Instead of entering the

Executive Mansion in the usual way, he gained admission by the private

or family entrance to the Executive office. The examination of the

papers took place in the library, and he and I alone were present. The

sentences of the court in the cases of Herold, Atzerodt and Payne,

were considered in the order named, and then the sentence in the case

of Mrs. Surratt. In acting upon her case no recommendation for a

commutation of her punishment was mentioned or submitted to me."

He then states that the question of sex was discussed alone; Holt

insisting upon carrying out the sentence without discriminating as to sex;

that a woman unsexed was worse than a man; that too many females had

abetted traitors during the war, and that there was a necessity an example

should be made.

"He was not only in favor of the approval of the sentence but its

execution on the earliest practicable day.

"Upon the termination of our consultation, Judge Holt wrote the order

approving the sentences of the Court. I affixed my name to it, and,

rolling up the papers, he took his leave, carrying the record with

him, and departing as he had come through the family or private

entrance."

And there we must leave him.

True, he rejoined, in December, in another very long article, contributed

to the same newspaper, in which he endeavored to break the force of

several points made in Johnson's answer, and dwelt with much insistence on

the abstention of the President from making any open charge against him,

and on his adversary's present silence with regard to General Mussey's

letter. But there is nothing new in the way of testimony, except two

sympathizing letters from Generals Ekin and Hunter, respectively; the

former of which might be construed by the uncharitable as evidence that

General Holt, at the time of the execution, was already forestalling

anticipated accusation by defending himself in private to his friends; the

latter is a tribute from the grim President of the Military Commission to

the Judge-Advocate's _tenderness_ to the prisoners before that body, of

which the printed record of the trial affords such striking illustrations.

This lengthy "Refutation," as it was entitled, upon the whole added

little, if any, strength to the "Vindication." His accuser, on his side,

resting content with his one single explicit public utterance, paid no

attention to it.

And when, at the present hour, we calmly survey the relative standing, the

position, the character and career of the two combatants, the

circumstances surrounding the momentous confidential interview, the silent

testimony of the record with the significant twist of the death-warrant,

the nature of the accusation, the mysteries enveloping the belated

defense, the probable motives actuating each, the thirst for blood which

for a time maddened the leading spirits of the War Department, the

passivity of Johnson for the few weeks after his sudden and sombre

inauguration, and for the same period the wild and reckless predominance

of Stanton;--what valid reason exists why we should discredit, or even

suspect for a moment, the veracity of the ex-President? Andrew Johnson

looms up in history a very different figure from the one discerned by his

enemies, both North and South, amid the passions of his epoch. He was no

inebriate, as he was stigmatized because of the unfortunate incident at

his inauguration as Vice-President. He was no weak, frightened tool, as he

appeared to be at the bloody crisis of his accession to the Presidency. He

was no apostate from his section, as he was cursed by the South for being

at the breaking out of the war. He was no traitor to the North, as he was

denounced by the impeachers for the mere endeavor to carry out the

reconstruction policy of his lamented predecessor. He was not the

garrulous fool, he was called in ridicule when he "swung around the

circle." He is now recognized, when his career is reviewed as a whole, as

a man temperate in his habits, firm, self-willed and honest; as a

statesman, intelligent though uncultured, sometimes profound and always

sincere; and as a union-loving, non-sectional, earnest patriot. His

impeachment is looked back upon by the whole country with shame. His

impeachers are already, themselves, both impeached and convicted at the

bar of history.

In sober truth, so unique and perfect a triumph never capped and completed

the career of Roman warrior or modern ruler of men, as when, but little

more than a year after his reply to General Holt, the ex-President--once

again the chosen representative of that State whose rebellious people he

had coerced with an iron hand as military governor during the Civil

War--took his seat in that body, before which he had been arraigned on the

impeachment of the House of Representatives and had escaped conviction by

but a single vote.

With the words of Holt's denunciation still fresh in their remembrance,

the citizens of Washington loaded the desk of the retributive Senator with

flowers; and, when he advanced, amidst so many colleagues who had

condemned him as judges, to take the oath of office, and again when, a few

days later, his voice, which had before been heard pleading for the

imperiled Union, was from the same place once more heard pleading for the

imperiled Constitution, the crowded galleries and corridors gave him a

conquering hero's welcome.

When in the following summer he died, his body was followed to its grave

in the mountains by what it is hardly an exaggeration to call the whole

people of his State. When Congress reassembled, the Senate and the House

clothed themselves with crape. One of his former judges, who had voted him

guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors (Morton, of Indiana), thus spoke of

him in the Senate:

"In every position in life he showed himself to be a man of ability and

courage, and I believe it proper to say of Andrew Johnson that his honesty

has never been suspected; that the smell of corruption was never upon his

garments."

The same Senator related that when Johnson, as the newly appointed

Military Governor, arrived at Nashville "he was threatened with

assassination on the streets and in the public assemblies, but he went on

the streets; he defied those dangers; he went into public assemblies, and

on one occasion went into a public meeting, drew his pistol, laid it on

the desk before him, and said: 'I have been told that I should be

assassinated if I came here. If that is to be done then it is the first

business in order, and let that be attended to.' No attempt having been

made he said: 'I conclude the danger has passed by;' and then proceeded to

make his speech."

Again the Senator said: "After I had voted for his impeachment, and met

him accidentally, he wore the same kindly smile as before, and offered me

his hand. I thought that showed nobility of soul. There were not many men

who could have done that."

The man, of whom two such incidents could be truthfully related, could

never have invented so foul a charge against an innocent subordinate.

A Senator from a neighboring State, (McCreery), on the same mournful

occasion said of him:

"When he went to Greeneville he was a stranger, and a tailor's "kit,"

his thimbles and his needles, were probably the sum-total of his

earthly possessions; at his death, the hills and the valleys and the

mountains and the rivers, sent forth their thousands to testify to the

general grief at the irreparable loss.

"I honor him for that manly courage which sustained him on every

occasion, and which never quailed in presence of opposition, no matter

how imposing. I honor him for that independence of soul which had no

scorn for the lowly, and no cringing adulation for the exalted. I

honor him for that sterling integrity which was beyond the reach of

temptation, and which, at the close of his public service, left no

blot, no stain upon his escutcheon. I honor him for that magnanimity

which after the war cloud had passed, and the elements had settled,

would have brought every citizen under the radiant arch of the bow of

peace and pardon."

Another Senator (Paddock, of Nebraska) gave utterance to the following

unchallenged statement:

"I believe, sir, notwithstanding the fact that a painful chapter

relating to the official acts of Andrew Johnson was made in this very

chamber, that no Senator here present will refuse to-day to join me

in the declaration that he was essentially an honest man; aye, sir, a

patriot in the fullest sense of the term."

Yet another (Bogy, of Missouri), said:

"His last election to a seat on this floor as Senator was the work of

his own hands, brought about by his own indomitable will and pluck,

the reward of a long and terrible contest, continuing for seven years,

unsuccessful for a time, and appearing to all the world besides

himself as utterly hopeless; nevertheless, finally he was triumphant.

From what I have learned from those who are familiar with this, his

last contest, he exhibited more openly his true and peculiar nature,

than at any other period of his life--which was to fight with all his

might and all his ability, asking no quarter and granting none; and

although like bloody Richard now and then unhorsed, still to fight and

never surrender, until victory perched upon his banner."

Senator Bayard said: "Friend or foe alike must admit his steady, unshaken

love of country; his constant industry; his simple integrity and honesty;

his courage of conviction, that never faltered."

* * * * *

Truly, the solemn word of a man, of whom such things can be said, is no

light thing,--to be thrust aside by windy abuse or vociferous denial.

Now, what conceivable motive had such a man, seated in the chair of the

Chief Magistracy of this republic, surrounded by Cabinet officers who had

been the advisers of his predecessor, to invent, in the first place, so

horrible a story as that a friendly subordinate officer had deliberately,

in a case of life and death, suppressed so vital a document? For it is

contradictory of historical fact, that he never openly made the charge

until the year 1873.

This may be true of the period from about the time of the execution up to

the disclosures of the John H. Surratt trial in 1867. But our review of

the incidents of that trial, which General Holt in his refutation seemed

to have totally forgotten, proves, beyond the possibility of controversy,

that the President then first thought himself driven to inspect the record

to ascertain the existence of such a paper, and then first, after the

discovery that there was in fact a recommendation, at once, and at all

times afterwards, openly asserted that he had not seen it or read it.

Every one around him knew that he so said. Stanton, his great enemy,

Seward, his great friend, knew it. Bingham, at the very beginning when

Stanton forbade him to refute it; Bingham, when Butler pierced his shield

in the House of Representatives, and Bingham, when at the bar of the

Senate as manager of the impeachment he belabored his old-time

Commander-in-Chief, knew it; Holt, when he delivered his contradiction

through Judge Pierrepont to the Surratt jury, and when he felt the shadows

darkening over his head because of the "inexplicable conduct" of the great

War Minister in "perpetuating the pitiless outrage," knew it, and

recognized the President of the United States as the responsible author of

the tremendous accusation.

If Holt is to be credited, the President must have known that four at

least of his confidential advisers stood ready to shatter the baseless

calumny. What conceivable motive, we ask again, to invent such a story--so

easy of refutation, so ruinous to himself, if refuted?

The necessity to make some reply to this pressing question seems to have

driven both General Holt himself and his defenders into the maintenance of

the most absurd, antagonistic and untenable positions.

Holt's theory on this subject in his "Refutation" is even ingenious in its

absurdity. He would have us believe that when Johnson originally

fabricated the calumny, "he had not yet broken with the Republican party,

and was, doubtless, in his heart at least, a candidate for reelection," of

course by that party. If this is true, then the "fabrication" was made

before the fall of 1865, for by that time the President was in full swing

of opposition to the men who had elected him Vice-President. During this

brief transitory period, according to Holt, Johnson discovered that the

hostility of the Catholics (especially, as may be inferred, those of the

Republican party), on account of his signature to the death-warrant of

Mrs. Surratt, would blast this otherwise felicitous prospect. Accordingly,

to abate this uncomfortable hostility, this Republican candidate concocted

the vile slander and set it secretly and anonymously circulating among his

friends and followers;--even his greed for reelection being not strong

enough to give full effect to his cowardly policy by openly clearing his

own skirts. Could the fatuity of folly farther go? The dream of Andrew

Johnson as a Republican candidate for President had ceased to be possible

even before the execution of Mrs. Surratt. The Catholics who could be

conciliated by any such story might be numbered on Johnson's fingers. And

the undisguised signature to the death-warrant could be obliterated by no

plea of abatement which the petitioner dared not avow.

On the other hand, the other suggestion put forward, if not by Holt

himself; by several of his defenders, viz.: that the President propagated

the lie "to curry favor with the South in the hope to be elected to the

Presidency," has the one merit of being in direct antagonism to the

foregoing theory, but nevertheless is yet more flimsy and preposterous. At

the time he invented the story, if invention it was, (as Holt appears to

have perceived), the road to the Presidency was to curry favor with the

North and not with the down-trodden South. And after Johnson had escaped

conviction and removal by but one vote, and had retired from office

execrated by the North and distrusted even yet by the South, the chance of

the Presidency for such a character as he was popularly considered

then--especially by truckling to the discredited South--could only look

fair in the imagination of a lunatic.

No Southern man has seriously thought of being, or has been seriously

thought of as, a candidate for President of either political party since

the termination of the war, let alone the one Southerner reputed to have

been false alternately to both parties and both sections.

Besides, Andrew Johnson never apologized for his appointment of the

Military Commission, for his approval of its judgment, or for his

signature to the death-warrant. He pardoned Dr. Mudd on the very eve of

the Impeachment Trial. And he pardoned the two remaining prisoners just

before he went out of office. And he may, therefore, be held to have thus

signified his reawakened reverence for constitutional rights as expounded

in the Milligan decision.

But in no other way did he ever acknowledge that in taking the life of

Mary E. Surratt he had done wrong. On the contrary, he defended his action

in his answer of 1873, and he justified his denial of the habeas corpus,

which the ex-Judge-Advocate had the exquisite affrontery to cast up

against him. That a President in his situation could cherish

aspirations--or hope--of reelection, based on such a phantom foundation as

the whining plea that he would have commuted the unlawful sentence of a

woman, hung by his command, to imprisonment for life, had he been

permitted to see the petition of five of her judges;--such an imputation

can only be made by men mad enough to believe him to have been the

accomplice of Booth and Atzerodt.

Finally, let us sternly put the question:--What right has Holt to ask us,

on the word of himself and his associates, to reject the testimony of

Andrew Johnson, who at the best was their accomplice or their tool? He,

and his associates, demanded the life of Atzerodt for barely imagining the

death of so precious a Vice-President. He, and his associates, hounded the

woman to the scaffold, welcoming with delight the stories of spies,

informers, personal enemies, false friends, against her, and meeting with

contumely and violence the least scrap of testimony in her favor. He

suppressed the "Diary." Why may he not have been bad enough to suppress

the recommendation? Two of the same band of woman-stranglers kept back

from the President the petition for mercy, which wailed out from the lips

of the stricken daughter. Why should he not have kept back the timorous

suggestion of five officers, who were so soft-hearted as to "discriminate"

as to sex? His fate will be--and therein equal and exact justice will be

done him--to go down through the ages, stealing away, in the dusk of the

evening, from the private entrance of the White House, bearing the fatal

missive--the last feeble hope of the trembling widow crushed in his

furtive hand.

CHAPTER VI.

CONCLUSION.

That the petition for commutation was a device of the Triumvirate of

prosecutors to secure the coveted death-sentence, employed in reliance

upon the temporary ascendency of the chief of the three over the

beleaguered President, and upon the momentary pliability, heedlessness,

or, it may be, semi-stupefaction of the successor of the murdered Lincoln,

to smother the offensive prayer:--such an hypothesis alone seems adequate

in any degree to reconcile the apparent contradictions, clear up the

perplexities and solve the mysteries, which hang around this dark affair.

It furnishes the only rational answer to the else insoluble question, how

it happened that a court, a majority of whose members had the inclination

and the power to lower the punishment of the solitary woman before them to

life-long imprisonment, as the court did with the three men who were tried

with her and convicted of the same crime, did nevertheless, by at least a

two-thirds vote, condemn her to die by the rope.

It lights up the else inscrutable prohibition by Stanton of a public

exculpation of his subordinate officer, softened by the sardonic

admonition "to rely" for justification "on the final judgment of the

people." A source of glorification, rather, it should be, that no maudlin

pity for a woman had been suffered to intercept the death-stroke of a

righteous vengeance.

It accounts for the "scrupulous obedience" of Bingham, not only until

Stanton's death, but three years after, until Seward, too, had gone.

Stanton knew the petition had been suppressed or made invisible; Seward,

that the petition never had been before the Cabinet.

It throws a glimmer, faint it is true, on the shameful attitude of Speed,

eight years after the death of Johnson--still shutting his ears to the

repeated appeals of his agonized friend, and still falling back on his

propriety. According to Judge Harlan, the whole record had been examined

by the Attorney-General, as well as the Secretary of War. Speed, too,

under the spell of Stanton, may have fingered the obnoxious paper, which

might nip the bloody consummate flower of his "_common law of war_."

It furnishes the only plausible reason why such an historic document did

not appear in the published official record of the proceedings of the

Military Commission, in November, 1865, or in the reports of the

Judge-Advocate, first, to the President, and, second, to the Congress.

It illumines with a baleful light the atmosphere of sinister secrecy, in

which this adjunct to the record, for no lawful reason, has been

enshrouded; the mysterious incidents at the Surratt trial, such as the

tardy and reluctant production, the faltering and imperfect exhibition,

and the hasty withdrawal of the "roll of papers;" the two statements of

Mr. Pierrepont; the shrinking of the "full Cabinet meeting" into a

"confidential interview," until after Seward's death; and the singularly

equivocal language that the petition was "_before the President_" when he

signed the warrant.

And, finally, when it is considered that the suppression of the paper was

not the overt act of any one man, but the result of a strictly formal

presentation of the record on the part of the Judge-Advocate, aided, it

may be, by a timely sleight-of-hand in writing the order of approval, and

of a blind carelessness on the part of the President in the examination of

the papers; this hypothesis goes far to explain the reluctance of General

Holt to rest his defense on his own evidence of the confidential

interview, his eager grasping after Cabinet corroboration, and the

abstention of both Judge-Advocate and President from taking official

action upon the charge, the one for vindication, the other for punishment.

* * * * *

And so the history of this murder of a woman by the forms of military rule

slowly unrolls itself, to disclose, as its appropriate finis, the writer

of the death-warrant struggling in the meshes of his own fraud.

The draughtsman of the unaddressed petition for commutation, after waiting

eight years for death to clear the way, comes to the help of his old

colleague, only to be caught in the same net.

The entangled twain call up the sullen shade of their departed master, and

force him to father the trick he fain would have scorned.

These three are the men who, when the summary methods of martial law would

else have failed to crush out entirely the life of their victim, contrived

to attain their bloody end by cool and deliberate chicanery.

The other actors on the scene may plead the madness of the time. For these

three no such plea is open. They superadded to the common madness of the

time the particular malice of the felon. Upon their three heads should

descend the full weight of criminal turpitude involved in this most

unnatural execution.

They sat upon the thrones of power. They dragged a woman from her humble

roof and thrust her into a dungeon. They chose nine soldiers to try her

for the murder of their Commander-in-Chief. They chained her to the bar

along with seven men. They baited her for weeks with their Montgomerys and

Conovers, their Weichmans and Lloyds, the spawn of their bureau, dragooned

by terror or suborned by hope. They shouted into the ears of the court

appeal on appeal for her head. And, when at last five of their chosen sons

sickened at the task, and shrank from shedding a woman's blood, they

procured the death-sentence by a trick. They forged the death-warrant by

another. They turned thimble-riggers under the very shadow of the gallows.

They cheated their own court. They cheated their own President. They

cheated the very executioner. They sneaked a woman into the arms of death

by sleight-of-hand. They played their confidence game with the King of

Terrors. They managed to hide the cheat from the country until they

quarreled with their new Commander-in-Chief. Then ensued an interval of

ambiguous mutterings, dark equivocations, private accusation, private

defenses. From one side: "I never saw the paper." From the other: "It was

right before his eyes."

The twin ex-Judge-Advocates, at length, brace each other up to the

sticking-point and venture on an appeal to the public. The ex-President,

thus driven at bay, fulminates the secret infamy in all its foul extent to

the whole world. Thereupon, Great Nemesis finds her opportunity, and makes

these once high-placed, invulnerable woman-slayers the sport of her mighty

hands.

Every one, as if coerced by some magic power, comes at last to act as

though he were afraid of the other, and, willing or unwilling, contrives

to show how profoundly base the others are.

Stanton slinks mysteriously into the shadow of death, refusing to cut his

co-conspirator down from the gibbet where the dreaded Johnson has swung

him. Bingham, standing like an Indian with a single female scalp bleeding

from his girdle, presses his finger to his lips until Stanton and Seward

die. Speed, with the obnoxious petition pressed again and again to his

nostrils, feebly yet persistently refuses to open his mouth.

Holt pictures the dead Johnson exulting even in Hell over the silence of

his old Attorney-General; blasts the character of Stanton by ascribing his

injunction of silence to a motive the most diabolic; and, unconscious

seemingly that he does it, at the same time ruins the credit of Bingham by

extolling his "scrupulous obedience" to such an infernal command.

Johnson unwittingly proclaims the pardon of the slain woman in his anxiety

to show that he signed her death-warrant through ignorance, forced upon

him by the ineffable depravity of the men in whom he was compelled to

trust.

This controversy over the petition of clemency was the only thing needed

to round out and decorate the entire, complete and perfect iniquity of the

whole drama. It is immaterial and indifferent to history where the truth

lies between these combatants in so unsavory a strife. Each one tears off

the burning brand of shame, not to extinguish it, but to pass it on to his

colleague. If we credit Holt, it is difficult to conceive the malignity

of soul of Andrew Johnson, who could invent so foul a charge, the meanness

of spirit of Edwin M. Stanton, who, knowing its blackness, could forbid

the promulgation of the truth, the cowardly silence of John A. Bingham,

whose lips the death of the dreaded Stanton alone could unclose. If we

credit Johnson, then in all the crowded catalogue of inquisitors,

persecutors, cruel or pettifogging prosecuting officers, devil's advocates

and murderous Septembrisers, there is not one who would not spurn with

profane emphasis association with Holt or Bingham or Stanton.

As the choicest specimen in this shower of accusations and

counter-accusations, listen to the tender-hearted ex-Judge-Advocate of

1873--once the stony head of the death-dealing Bureau--rebuking Andrew

Johnson for his cold-blooded cruelty! "I would have shuddered to propose

the brief period of two days within which the sentences should be

executed, for with all the mountain of guilt weighing on the heads of

those convicted culprits I still recognized them as human beings, with

souls to be saved or lost, and could not have thought for a moment of

hurrying them into the eternal world, as cattle are driven to the

slaughter-pen, without a care for their future."

Listen again to the former expounder of the "common law of war" before the

Military Commission, as he arraigns the ex-President for his disregard of

the writ of habeas corpus: "The object of which was, and the effect of

which would have been, had it been obeyed, to delay the execution of Mrs.

Surratt at least until the questions of law raised had been decided by the

civil courts of the District; yet this writ was, by the express order of

the President, rendered inoperative. And so, under this Presidential

mandate, the execution proceeded. * * * But for his direct intervention

and defiant action on the writ, whatever might have been the final result,

it is perfectly apparent her life would not then have been taken."

Once more. Hear J. Holt, the Recorder of the Commission! "As Chief

Magistrate he was, under the Constitution," (HEAR HIM!) "the depositary of

the nation's clemency and mercy to the condemned, and a pressing

responsibility rested upon him as such _to hear the victims of the law

before he struck them down_." (The italics are his who wrote out the

death-warrant.) "Did he do this? On the contrary, * * he gave * * a

peremptory order to admit nobody seeking to make an appeal in behalf of

the prisoners, saying that he would 'see no one on this business.'

"He closed his door, his ears, and his heart against every appeal for

mercy in her behalf, and hurried this hapless woman almost unshrived to

the gallows."

What a picture is this!

The minion of Stanton, the colleague of Bingham, the tutor of Weichman,

the tutor of Lloyd, the procurer of the death-warrant, weeping over the

empty grave in the Arsenal, which, after his master's relentless watch was

over, had at length given up its dead!

Here we are forced to stop. After such an exhibition, we can linger no

longer over this miserable scramble to shirk responsibility. Its only

consequence of historic importance, after all, is the light it casts upon

the memory of the sacrificial victim. Out of the cloud of mutual

vituperation, which covers the men who, among them, somehow, compassed her

slaughter, her innocence rises clearer and clearer, like the images of

retribution from the foul fumes of the witches' cauldron.

Her vindication must be held to be final, complete and unassailable, when

John A. Bingham is anxious to acquaint the country that he drafted a

petition to save her life; when J. Holt pretends to weep for her; when

Andrew Johnson is forced, by the inexorable pressure of events, to confess

that when he signed her death-warrant he knew not what he did.

* * * * *

As we let fall the curtain at the close of this dark and shameful tragedy,

let us endeavor to anticipate the verdict of history.

The execution of Mary E. Surratt is the foulest blot on the history of the

United States of America.

It was a violation of the most sacred provisions of that Constitution,

whose enforcement was the vaunted purpose of the War.

It was a violation of the fundamental forms and principles of criminal

jurisprudence, centuries older than the Constitution.

It was a violation of that even-handed justice, which is said to rule in

the armies of Heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.

It was a violation of those chivalrous impulses which spring unbidden to

the manly breast in the presence of woman.

It was a violation of the benign precepts of Jesus, which enjoin

tenderness to the fatherless and the widow.

It was a violation of the magnanimity of the brave soldier, which scorns

to wound the weak, the fallen and the helpless.

It was a violation of even the common instincts of fairness, which

subsist, as a matter of course, between man and man.

It was unconstitutional. It was illegal. It was unjust. It was inhumane.

It was unholy. It was pusillanimous. It was mean. And it was each and all

of these in the highest or lowest degree. It resembles the acts of

savages, and not the deeds of civilized men.

The annals of modern times will be searched in vain to furnish its

parallel. Execrations rise to our lips, as we read, in the pages of

Macaulay, of the hanging of Alice Lisle, and the burning of Elizabeth

Gaunt. But Alice Lisle and Elizabeth Gaunt were indicted by grand juries,

tried by petit juries, found guilty, and sentenced, in strict accordance

with criminal procedure. The forms of law, which the bigoted James, and

even the infamous Jeffrey, were careful to observe, were swept aside by

Holt and Bingham and Stanton, with a sneer.

We turn aside with sickening horror from the recital of the murderous

orgies of the Terrorists of the French Revolution--shedding the blood of

the young, the tender, the beautiful, the brave. But the Terrorists of

France could plead the excuse, that they were driven to madness by the

thought, that the invading hosts, encompassing the new-born Republic, were

drawing nearer and nearer, every hour, with vengeance and

counter-revolution perched upon their banners; and a merciful destiny

granted them the grace to expiate their bloody deeds on the same scaffold

as their victims.

But, in the case of Mary E. Surratt, not a single redeeming feature

relieves

"The deep damnation of her taking off."

Alas! Alas! Right in the centre of the glory which beams from the triumph

of the Union and Emancipation, there hangs a dark figure--casting an

eclipsing shadow--ever widening--ever deepening--in the eyes of all the

coming generations of the just.

Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.

In the original text, the list on pages 72-73 skips from 2 to 7.