The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt Part 6

He then cited the case of Governor Wall, hung in London in 1802 for murder--a soldier, under his government in the island of Goree, having been whipped to death by sentence of a regimental court-martial, twenty years before.

"In that instance want of jurisdiction in the court-martial was held to be fatal to its judgment as a defense for the death that ensued under it. In this, if the Commission has no jurisdiction, its judgment for the same reason will be of no avail, either to Judges, Secretary of War, or President, if either shall be called to a responsibility for what may be done under it."

The learned counsel then added:

"The opinion I have endeavored to maintain is believed to be the almost unanimous opinion of the profession and certainly is of every judge or court who has expressed any."

And he cited the then recent charge of Judge Bond to the grand jury at Baltimore, in which the Judge declared in reference to such military commissions as the present, that,

"Such persons exercising such unlawful jurisdiction are liable to indictment by you as well as responsible in civil actions to the parties."

And he quoted to the Court that portion of the charge of Judge Rufus W.

Peckham to a grand jury in New York City, delivered during the progress of this very trial, wherein the right of a military commission to try was denied:

"A great crime has lately been committed that has shocked the civilized world. Every right-minded man desires the punishment of the criminals, but he desires that punishment to be administered according to law, and through the judicial tribunals of the country. No star-chamber court, no secret inquisition, in this nineteenth century, can ever be made acceptable to the American mind.

"Grave doubts, to say the least, exist in the minds of intelligent men, as to the const.i.tutional right of the Military Commission at Was.h.i.+ngton to sit in judgment upon the prisoners now on trial for their lives before that tribunal. Thoughtful men feel aggrieved that such a commission should be established in this free country, when the war is over, and when the common law courts are open and accessible to administer justice according to law, without fear or favor. * * *

"The unanimity with which the leading press of our land has condemned this mode of trial ought to be gratifying to every patriot."

On the twenty-third, General Ewing, too, a.s.sailed the jurisdiction of the Court in a short but powerful speech from which are taken the following extracts:

"The jurisdiction of the Commission has to be sought _dehors_ the Const.i.tution, and against its express prohibition. It is, therefore, at least of doubtful validity. If that jurisdiction do not exist; if the doubt be resolved against it by our judicial tribunals, when the law shall again speak, the form of trial by this unauthorized Commission cannot be pleaded in justification of the seizure of property or the arrest of persons, much less the infliction of the death penalty. In that event, however fully the recorded evidence may sustain your findings, however moderate may seem your sentences, however favorable to the accused your rulings on the evidence, your sentence will be held in law no better than the rulings of Judge Lynch's courts in the administration of lynch law.

"Our judicial tribunals, at some future day * * * will be again in the full exercise of their const.i.tutional powers, and may think, as a large proportion of the legal profession think now, that your jurisdiction in these cases is an unwarranted a.s.sumption; and they may treat the judgment which you p.r.o.nounce and the sentence you cause to be executed, as your own unauthorized acts.

"Conviction may be easier and more certain in this Military Commission, than in our const.i.tutional courts. Inexperienced as most of you are in judicial investigation, you can admit evidence which the courts would reject, and reject what they would admit, and you may convict and sentence on evidence which those courts would hold to be wholly insufficient. Means, too, may be resorted to by detectives, acting under promise or hope of reward, and operating on the fears or the cupidity of witnesses, to obtain and introduce evidence, which cannot be detected and exposed in this military trial, but could be readily in the free, but guarded, course of investigation before our regular judicial tribunals. The Judge-Advocate, with whom chiefly rests the fate of these citizens, is learned in the law, but from his position he can not be an impartial judge, unless he be more than a man. He is the prosecutor in the most extended sense of the word. As in duty bound, before this court was called, he received the reports of detectives, pre-examined the witnesses, prepared and officially signed the charges, and, as princ.i.p.al counsel for the Government, controlled on the trial the presentation, admission and rejection of evidence. In our courts of law, a lawyer who has heard his client's story, if transferred from the bar to the bench, may not sit in the trial of the cause, lest the ermine be sullied through the partiality of counsel. This is no mere theoretical objection--for the union of prosecutor and judge works practical injustice to the accused. The Judge-Advocate controls the admission and rejection of evidence--knows what will aid and what will injure the case of the prosecution, and inclines favorably to the one and unfavorably to the other. The defense is met with a bias of feeling and opinion on the part of the judge who controls the proceedings of the Court, and on whom, in great measure, the fate of the accused depends, which morals and law alike reject."

Whatsoever else may be pleaded in excuse or palliation of the acts of the Commission, it can never be said that its members were driven on by an overpowering sense of their duty as soldiers, in blind ignorance of the Const.i.tution and the law. Each and every officer was made fully aware of his awful responsibility and apprised of the precarious footing of his authority.

CHAPTER V.

CHARGE OF JUDGE BINGHAM.

From the sixteenth to the twenty-seventh of June the time was consumed by the summing up of the several counsel for the prisoners on the facts disclosed by the evidence; and on the last mentioned day and the succeeding one, Special Judge-Advocate Bingham delivered his address in answer to all the foregoing pleas, both as to the jurisdiction of the Court and also as to the merits of the case.

This long, carefully prepared and yet impa.s.sioned speech may be fairly considered as embodying the very proof-charge of the prosecution. Indeed, under the rules of military procedure, it occupies the place and performs the functions of the judge's charge in the common-law courts. As such, it deserves a closer a.n.a.lysis and a more extended examination than can be given to it here. The briefest and most cursory review, however, will suffice to show its tone and temper.

After a solemn a.s.severation of his desire to be just to the accused, and a warning to the Court that "a wrongful and illegal conviction or a wrongful and illegal acquittal * * * would impair somewhat the security of every man's life and shake the stability of the Republic," the learned advocate specifically declares, that the charge "is not simply the crime of murdering a human being" but a "combination of atrocities," committed as charged upon the record, "in pursuance of a treasonable conspiracy entered into by the accused with one John Wilkes Booth, and John H. Surratt, upon the instigation of Jefferson Davis, Jacob Thompson, George N. Sanders and others, with intent thereby to aid the existing rebellion and subvert the const.i.tution and laws of the United States."

A denunciation of the Rebellion as "itself simply a criminal conspiracy and a gigantic a.s.sa.s.sination"; the following glowing period--"Now that their battalions of treason are broken and flying before the victorious legions of the republic, the chief traitors in this great crime against your government secretly conspire with their hired confederates to achieve by a.s.sa.s.sination what they in vain attempt by wager of battle";--and the unequivocal announcement that "it is for this secret conspiracy in the interest of the rebellion, formed at the instigation of the chief in that rebellion, and in pursuance of which the acts charged and specified are alleged to have been done, and with the intent laid, that the accused are upon trial": finish the exordium.

The speaker then tackles the question of jurisdiction, which, he remarks by the way, "as the Court has already overruled the plea," he would pa.s.s over in silence, "but for the fact that a grave and elaborate argument has been made by the counsel for the accused, not only to show want of jurisdiction, but to arraign the President of the United States before the country and the world as a usurper of power over the lives and the liberties of the prisoners."

He dexterously evades the force of the argument that the civil courts of the District were open when the crime was committed, by a.s.serting that "they were only open * * * and are only open at this hour by force of the bayonet;" and he claims that the President acting by a military force had as much right to try the co-conspirators of Booth, as to pursue, capture and kill the chief criminal himself; which, if true, leads us into the maintenance of the monstrous doctrine that the President by a summary order might have strung up the culprits without the interposition of any court. He then enters upon an argument to show that the Commission, from the very nature of its organization, cannot decide that it is no Court, and he ridicules the idea that these nine subordinate military officers could question the authority of their Commander-in-Chief.

In this connection, he gently rebukes Mr. Ewing for his bold statement to the Commission: "You, gentlemen, are no court under the Const.i.tution!"

reminding him that "not many months since he was a general in the service of the country and as such in his department in the West proclaimed and enforced martial law;" and asks him whether he is "quite sure he will not have to answer for more of these alleged violations of the rights of citizens than any of the members of the Court?"

He professes his high regard for General Ewing as a military commander who has made a "liberal exercise of this power," and facetiously wishes "to know whether he proposes, by his proclamation of the personal responsibility awaiting all such usurptions," that he himself shall be "drawn and quartered."

After disposing of General Ewing in this gingerly manner, he compensates himself for the slight restraint by pouring the vials of his unstinted wrath upon Reverdy Johnson; representing him as "denouncing the murdered President and his successor," as making "a political harangue, a partisan speech against his government and country, thereby swelling the cry of the armed legions of sedition and rebellion that but yesterday shook the heavens." He characterizes one of the most temperate and dignified of arguments as "a plea in behalf of an expiring and shattered rebellion,"

and "a fit subject for public condemnation."

He calls upon the people to note,

"That while the learned gentleman [Mr. Johnson], as a volunteer, without pay, thus condemns as a usurpation the means employed so effectually to suppress this gigantic insurrection, the New York News, whose proprietor, Benjamin Wood, is shown by the testimony upon your record to have received from the agents of the rebellion $25,000, rushes into the lists to champion the cause of the rebellion, its aiders and abettors, by following to the letter his colleague [Mr.

Johnson], and with greater plainness of speech, and a fervor intensified doubtless by the $25,000 received, and the hope of more, denounces the Court as a usurpation and threatens the members with the consequences."

And he interrupts his tirade against one of the greatest men this country has produced to burst forth into the following grandiloquent apostrophe:

"Youngest born of the Nations! Is she not immortal by all the dread memories of the past--by that sublime and voluntary sacrifice of the present, in which the bravest and n.o.blest of her sons have laid down their lives that she might live, giving their serene brows to the dust of the grave, and lifting their hands for the last time amidst the consuming fires of battle!"

After a brief defense of the secret sessions of the Commission, the learned advocate enters upon his circ.u.mstantial reply to the argument of Mr. Johnson, into which it is not worth while to follow him, as the main points of his contention have been rendered obsolete by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Suffice it to say, he holds that the President of the United States has the power, of his own motion, to declare martial law in time of war, over the whole United States, whether the States are within the theatre of the war or not; and that President Lincoln exercised this power by his proclamation of September, 1862, by virtue of which martial law prevailed over the whole North, including, of course, the District of Columbia, on the day of the a.s.sa.s.sination; and, farther, that certain subsequent acts of Congress, though not in express terms yet by fair implication, had ratified the proclamation.

He contends, in consequence, that "nothing can be clearer than that citizen and soldier alike, in time of civil or foreign war, are triable by military tribunals for all offences of which they may be guilty, in the interest of, or in concert with the enemy;" and that "these provisions, therefore, of your Const.i.tution for indictment and trial by jury in civil courts of _all crimes_ are * * * silent and inoperative in time of war when the public safety requires it."

Listen to this judicial expounder of const.i.tutional law!

"Here is a conspiracy organized and prosecuted by armed traitors and hired a.s.sa.s.sins, receiving the moral support of thousands in every State and district, who p.r.o.nounced the war for the Union a failure, and your now murdered but immortal Commander-in-Chief a tyrant.

"It is in evidence that Davis, Thompson, and others * * * agreed and conspired with others to poison the fountains of water which supply your commercial metropolis, and thereby murder its inhabitants; to secretly deposit in the habitation of the people and in the s.h.i.+ps in your harbor inflammable materials, and thereby destroy them by fire; to murder by the slow and consuming torture of famine your soldiers, captives in their hands; to import pestilence in infected clothes to be distributed in your capital and camps, and thereby murder the surviving heroes and defenders of the Republic.

"I claim that the Const.i.tution itself * * * by express terms, has declared whatever is necessary to make the prosecution of the war successful, may be done, and ought to be done, and is therefore const.i.tutionally lawful.

"Who will dare to say that in the time of civil war no person shall be deprived of life, liberty and property, without due process of law?

This is a provision of your Const.i.tution, than which there is none more just and sacred in it; it is, however, only the law of peace, not of war.

"In time of war the civil tribunals of justice are wholly or partially silent, as the public safety may require; * * * the limitations and provisions of the Const.i.tution in favor of life, liberty and property are therefore wholly or partially suspended."

He makes allusion to the recent re-election of President Lincoln, as ratifying any doubtful exercise of power by him:

"The voice of the people, thus solemnly proclaimed, by the omnipotence of the ballot * * * ought to be accepted, and will be accepted, I trust, by all just men, as the voice of G.o.d."

He concludes his plea in favor of the jurisdiction of the Commission, by declaring that for what he had uttered in its favor "he will neither ask pardon nor offer apology," and by quoting Lord Brougham's speech in defence of a bill before the House of Lords empowering the Viceroy of Ireland to apprehend and detain all Irishmen _suspect_ of conspiracy.

The Special Judge-Advocate then proceeds to sum up the evidence, in doing which he leaves nothing to the free agency of the Court. He, first, by a review of the testimony of the Montgomeries and Conovers, proves to his own and, presumably, to the Court's satisfaction, that "Davis, Thompson, Cleary, Tucker, Clay, Young, Harper, Booth and John H. Surratt did combine and conspire together in Canada to kill and murder Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Wm. H. Seward and Ulysses S. Grant."

"Surely no word further need be spoken to show that John Wilkes Booth was in this conspiracy; that John H. Surratt was in this conspiracy; and that Jefferson Davis, and his several agents named, in Canada, were in this conspiracy.