SURRATT 184

The Assassination of ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND ITS EXPIATION By David Miller DEWITT The MACMILLAN COMPANY 1909
CHAPTER VIII The Trial of John H. SURRATT 184. ONE conspirator remained— a conspirator whom the course of events seemed conspiring to force upon a government anxious to get rid of him. John Harrison Surratt, it will be remembered, passed through Washington on the night of April 3rd, 1865, on his way from Richmond to Canada; reached Montreal on the sixth and, remaining there until the twelfth, took the afternoon train going south. His destination was Elmira, a town in the interior of New York state, whither, to reconnoitre the military prison there, he was sent by the Confederate general Edwin G. Lee, whom he chanced to meet in Montreal. On the thirteenth, he registered at the Brainard House under the pseudonym of “John Harrison”; the next day finished the business which brought him to the place; and, that night, at the hour when Booth and Payne set about their bloody work, three hundred miles away, retired to his bed. He woke in the morning to find the inhabitants horror-stricken at the news of the assassination of the President; and it was not until he had sent a telegram to Booth in New York to ascertain if the actor was in that city, that he learned his late colleague in the plot to capture was identified as the assassin. Unconscious as yet of his own danger, he took the train for Canandaigua, a village between fifty and sixty miles distant, arriving there the same evening; and, no train leaving until Monday, he was obliged to stay over, registering at the Webster House under the same name. Trial of John H. SURRATT 185. On Monday, seeing in a newspaper John H. Surratt mentioned as the assassin of Seward, he lost no time in crossing the border, reaching his hotel in Montreal on Tuesday afternoon, the eighteenth, remaining there only long enough to get his clothes, and vanishing beyond pursuit. While his mother was undergoing the torture of her trial, he lay concealed in the house of a friendly priest of a country parish some forty miles from Montreal; hearing no news from Washington until too late to attempt to save her life by the sacrifice of his own. After the dreadful catastrophe, he returned to the city and was hidden there until the fifteenth of September when, under the name of McCarty and in disguise, he was taken by boat to Quebec and put in charge of the surgeon of a steamer about to start for Liverpool. The reward of $25,000, still on his head, made him a valuable asset to his custodian, who, as soon as the vessel reached its destination, hastened to reveal the presence of his prize to the vice-consul of the United States. This intelligence, together with certain particulars said to have been confided to the informer by the fugitive during the voyage, was transmitted to Minister Adams at London and to Secretary Seward at Washington, to be met by these officials with the rebuff that it was not thought advisable to take any steps in the matter for the present. The surgeon, disappointed at the result of his first effort, sought out Surratt and engaged to deliver a letter to a mutual friend at Montreal, requesting a remittance of cash;— a trust which he discharged at the end of his return voyage, and, then, made a second effort to realize the fruit of his discovery by betraying the situation to the American consul at the last-named city. 186 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN That officer telegraphed the facts to Washington, suggesting that an agent be sent out with the steamer about to sail, to arrest Surratt, who, on his way to Rome, was still at Liverpool awaiting the supply of funds. Moreover, the telegram was followed by a despatch giving the particulars of the interview with the surgeon who, by this time, as he told the consul, “regarded Surratt as a desperate wretch and an enemy to society.” These repeated calls to action, to the surprise of everyone cognizant of the facts, failed to stir the managers of the Bureau— recently so remarkable for their vigilance. The secretary of war and the judge advocate put their heads together, but did nothing. Seward went so far as to request the attorney general to procure an indictment with a view to extradition, but the request was not acted upon. Nay, the only step taken was in an opposite direction— the reward for the arrest of the fugitive was publicly withdrawn, and that interesting personage traveled unhindered from Liverpool to London, from London to Paris and Paris to Rome, where, still unmolested, he passed the winter at the English college. In the early spring, under the name of — Watson, he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves and was sent on garrison duty to a post near the Neapolitan frontier, forty miles from the capital. Trial of John H. SURRATT 187. There he might have remained unknown until the expiration of his term of service, had it not been for the extraordinary coincidence that there was a Zouave in another company, close by, whose acquaintance Surratt, with his chum Wiechmann, had made three years before in a Maryland village. This recruit, Henry B. Ste. Marie by name, also hailed from America. A Canadian by birth, he had been engaged as a teacher in a Washington college on Wiechmann’s recommendation; afterwards joined the Union army; was taken a prisoner of war to Richmond, obtained his liberty and made his way oversea back to his Canadian home just in time to hear of the assassination. Alive to the prospect of gaining a share of the reward offered by the government, he proceeded to lodge with the American consul at Montreal the particulars he professed to know concerning Surratt and Wiechmann, each of whom, as he said, was as guilty as the other. Nothing resulted from his revelation of sufficient importance to detain him in his native province, for the next we hear of him he is serving in Italy as a soldier of the Pope; exceedingly anxious, however, as he expresses himself, “to revisit his native land and the gray hair of his father and mother.” In this state of mind, the appearance of his acquaintance, as a comrade in arms in a far country, seemed a veritable god-send; and as soon as he can gain leave of absence, he hastens to Rome and astounds the American minister in that city with the tidings that the survivor of the murderers of Abraham Lincoln is at present in the service of the Papal States. 188 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN At once, the minister— Rufus King sends word to his government; and, while waiting for instructions, is plied with letter upon letter from the border, in which the impatient informer urges haste, pleads his own peril from the friends of the man he is betraying, his need of money and his longing to do justice to “the ever lamented memory of President Lincoln.” The authoritative reminder that so conspicuous a state-criminal was again within reach of capture, coming at a moment when the opponents of the President had secured a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, could not be treated with the indifference manifested towards a similar announcement the previous fall. The minister at Rome was instructed to obtain from Ste. Marie a statement of Surratt’s confession to him; and after that envoy had sent one unverified which for that reason proved unsatisfactory, he at last succeeded in obtaining another, signed, sealed and sworn to before the minister himself, which concluded as follows: “This is the exact truth of what I know about Surratt. More I could not learn, being afraid to awaken his suspicions. And further I do not say.” Strange to say, when armed with the verified document they had declared indispensable, the authorities neglected to make any use of it. Stanton and Holt fell back upon the rule that the extradition of a fugitive from justice was an affair of the Department of State, and Seward was too busy in his preparations to accompany the President on his famous tour through the North and West to take up the matter. Trial of John H. SURRATT 189. But as fate would have it, on the very eve of his departure there came a despatch from King announcing that if the American government desired the surrender of the fugitive, Cardinal Antonelli intimated that the lack of an extradition treaty would not stand in the way. Even this unprecedented overture failed to have any immediate effect; and it was not until Seward’s return in October that King was instructed to put the question to the papal prime minister whether Surratt would be surrendered on presentation of an authenticated indictment. The cardinal, for his part, made no delay; not only did he answer in the affirmative but, without waiting for any formal demand, he ordered the arrest; and, in consequence, on the second day of November, 1866, “Zouave Watson” was metamorphosed from a soldier into a prisoner of state. Early next morning, as, “surrounded by six men as guards,” he was starting for “the military prison at Rome,” he “plunged down into a ravine, more than a hundred feet deep, which defended the prison” and succeeded in making his escape across the frontier. On the seventeenth, he sailed from Naples in a British steamer bound for Alexandria, which port, after stopping at Malta, he reached on the twenty-seventh, and, the American consul there having been apprized of his coming, he was finally intercepted and held to await the arrival of a United States vessel to carry him to this country.* * For these particulars, see letters and testimony transmitted to H. R. with Report of Sec. of State, Dec. 16, 1866; Ex. Doc. No. 9, 39th Cong., 2d Sess. 190 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN Thus it was that, after the lapse of more than a year since the authorities were informed of his whereabouts, this notorious accomplice of Booth was fairly thrust upon their hands; and against whom, now he was at length in their power, they seemed at a loss what Course to pursue. The leading radicals in Congress, whose fiery zeal had not yet had time to cool, could account for such lukewarmness on no other theory than that the traitor sitting in the seat of Lincoln shrank from any further search into the circumstances attending the assassination; and, accordingly, the House ordered the judiciary committee to find out the causes of such flagrant nonfeasance. And it is worthy of note that, from one point of view, the radicals were actually upon the right scent. The truth was that the administration had been purposely delinquent; not so far as the President individually was concerned, who, as the evidence subsequently showed, was not responsible for the delay; but in the persons of those very functionaries who were most active against this particular member of the band before the military commission. Realizing that the day of such subservient tribunals was over, and that their cherished hypothesis of a Great Conspiracy emanating from the Confederate government was no longer tenable, they did indeed shrink from reviewing before a jury of the District of Columbia the trial of Mrs. Surratt in the person of her son. Moreover, aside from this general consideration which partook more or less of a sentimental character, they were haunted by the uncertainty thrown on the whereabouts of Surratt on the night of the assassination by the statements of the two informers so hot in pursuit of the reward on his head. Trial of John H. SURRATT 191. McMillan the surgeon of the ship that carried the fugitive oversea, made it probable that he was in Elmira, and an investigation provoked by this statement showed that he was, as matter of fact, in that town; while Ste. Marie placed him in New York “prepared to fly when the deed was done.” * * See their testimony in Report cited above. There was no help for it, however; the unwelcome exigency had to be met. The United States steam corvette, Swatara, touched at Alexandria on the twenty-first of December, 1866, and, thence, with its one solitary iron-bound captive for cargo, ploughed its slow way through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic; passing between the capes of the Chesapeake on the eighteenth of February and, three days after, casting anchor abreast of the Washington Navy Yard. There, in sight of the prison in which his mother was tried and condemned and under which she lay buried, Surratt, by order of the Secretary of State, was delivered into the hands of the civil authorities; the War Office relinquishing without a remonstrance the charge of the prosecution. Two weeks before, the grand jury of the District had found an indictment for murder, and the district attorney at once began to prepare for a trial which bade fair to become historic. At such a juncture the Federal administration could do no less than back the district attorney; and the Bureau of Military Justice, despite its misgivings, girded up its mighty loins for the conflict. 192 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN There being no allegation in the indictment of Confederate complicity, its spies and detectives, whose hunting grounds had been in Canada and Richmond, were functus officio as witnesses; but those of them who were out of jail, and their chief, who was in jail placed their skill and experience at the service of the prosecution. Of course, such an outrage as the making evidence of the horrors of Libby and Andersonville was unthought of; but no person sworn on behalf of the government on the other trial, whose testimony had the remotest bearing on the guilt of the defendant, not only, but on the guilt of his mother, of Booth, Payne, Atzerodt and Herold, and who was within reach, escaped being summoned, subjected to discipline and put upon the stand. Additional witnesses— some drawn by the hope of reward, some caught by the craze to take part in so celebrated a cause, and many whom even the argus-eyed subpoena-servers of the Bureau had overlooked on the former occasion, were gathered in from all points of the compass. Edwards Pierrepont, a prominent member of the New York bar, distinguished for the plausibility with which he could conceal the weak spots of a popular but shaky case,* was retained for the United States; and a judge was found to preside who, as was shown by his course during the trial, was (to employ a phrase much in vogue in that day) “organized to convict.” * Subsequently attorney general under Grant and sent as minister to Great Britain. A jury regarded by the advocates of courts-martial and military commissions as an insurmountable obstruction to the course of justice in such a vicinity as the District of Columbia— was obtained, every single member, of which was agreed to by both sides; Trial of John H. SURRATT 193. the district attorney speaking of the panel “as representatives of the wealth, the intelligence and the commercial and business character of the community; gentlemen against whose character there cannot be a whisper of suspicion.” The trial opened on the tenth of June, 1867, June 10, 1867, The Trial of John H. SURRATT Page 193. John Surratt Biography. April 14, 1865, Good Friday, Our American Cousin. “A petition for Mrs. Surratt that begged for mercy by a commutation was sent to then President Andrew Johnson. Lafayette Baker delayed this petition. Johnson never saw the petition until after Mrs. Surratt, along with Paine, Atzerodt, and Herold had been hanged in the courtyard of the old Arsenal Building on July 7, 1865.” John Wilkes Booth. TaxJudas.com LandGrab.us

The Assassination of
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
AND ITS EXPIATION

By David Miller DEWITT
The MACMILLAN COMPANY 1909

CHAPTER VIII
The Trial of John H. SURRATT 184.

ONE conspirator remained— a conspirator whom the course of events seemed conspiring to force upon a government anxious to get rid of him.
John Harrison Surratt, it will be remembered, passed through Washington on the night of April 3rd, 1865, on his way from Richmond to Canada; reached Montreal on the sixth and, remaining there until the twelfth, took the afternoon train going south. His destination was Elmira, a town in the interior of New York state, whither, to reconnoitre the military prison there, he was sent by the Confederate general Edwin G. Lee, whom he chanced to meet in Montreal. On the thirteenth, he registered at the Brainard House under the pseudonym of “John Harrison”; the next day finished the business which brought him to the place; and, that night, at the hour when Booth and Payne set about their bloody work, three hundred miles away, retired to his bed. He woke in the morning to find the inhabitants horror-stricken at the news of the assassination of the President; and it was not until he had sent a telegram to Booth in New York to ascertain if the actor was in that city, that he learned his late colleague in the plot to capture was identified as the assassin. Unconscious as yet of his own danger, he took the train for Canandaigua, a village between fifty and sixty miles distant, arriving there the same evening; and, no train leaving until Monday, he was obliged to stay over, registering at the Webster House under the same name.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 185.

On Monday, seeing in a newspaper John H. Surratt mentioned as the assassin of Seward, he lost no time in crossing the border, reaching his hotel in Montreal on Tuesday afternoon, the eighteenth, remaining there only long enough to get his clothes, and vanishing beyond pursuit.
While his mother was undergoing the torture of her trial, he lay concealed in the house of a friendly priest of a country parish some forty miles from Montreal; hearing no news from Washington until too late to attempt to save her life by the sacrifice of his own. After the dreadful catastrophe, he returned to the city and was hidden there until the fifteenth of September when, under the name of McCarty and in disguise, he was taken by boat to Quebec and put in charge of the surgeon of a steamer about to start for Liverpool. The reward of $25,000, still on his head, made him a valuable asset to his custodian, who, as soon as the vessel reached its destination, hastened to reveal the presence of his prize to the vice-consul of the United States. This intelligence, together with certain particulars said to have been confided to the informer by the fugitive during the voyage, was transmitted to Minister Adams at London and to Secretary Seward at Washington, to be met by these officials with the rebuff that it was not thought advisable to take any steps in the matter for the present. The surgeon, disappointed at the result of his first effort, sought out Surratt and engaged to deliver a letter to a mutual friend at Montreal, requesting a remittance of cash;— a trust which he discharged at the end of his return voyage, and, then, made a second effort to realize the fruit of his discovery by betraying the situation to the American consul at the last-named city.

186 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

That officer telegraphed the facts to Washington, suggesting that an agent be sent out with the steamer about to sail, to arrest Surratt, who, on his way to Rome, was still at Liverpool awaiting the supply of funds. Moreover, the telegram was followed by a despatch giving the particulars of the interview with the surgeon who, by this time, as he told the consul, “regarded Surratt as a desperate wretch and an enemy to society.”
These repeated calls to action, to the surprise of everyone cognizant of the facts, failed to stir the managers of the Bureau— recently so remarkable for their vigilance. The secretary of war and the judge advocate put their heads together, but did nothing. Seward went so far as to request the attorney general to procure an indictment with a view to extradition, but the request was not acted upon. Nay, the only step taken was in an opposite direction— the reward for the arrest of the fugitive was publicly withdrawn, and that interesting personage traveled unhindered from Liverpool to London, from London to Paris and Paris to Rome, where, still unmolested, he passed the winter at the English college. In the early spring, under the name of — Watson, he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves and was sent on garrison duty to a post near the Neapolitan frontier, forty miles from the capital.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 187.

There he might have remained unknown until the expiration of his term of service, had it not been for the extraordinary coincidence that there was a Zouave in another company, close by, whose acquaintance Surratt, with his chum Wiechmann, had made three years before in a Maryland village. This recruit, Henry B. Ste. Marie by name, also hailed from America. A Canadian by birth, he had been engaged as a teacher in a Washington college on Wiechmann’s recommendation; afterwards joined the Union army; was taken a prisoner of war to Richmond, obtained his liberty and made his way oversea back to his Canadian home just in time to hear of the assassination. Alive to the prospect of gaining a share of the reward offered by the government, he proceeded to lodge with the American consul at Montreal the particulars he professed to know concerning Surratt and Wiechmann, each of whom, as he said, was as guilty as the other. Nothing resulted from his revelation of sufficient importance to detain him in his native province, for the next we hear of him he is serving in Italy as a soldier of the Pope; exceedingly anxious, however, as he expresses himself, “to revisit his native land and the gray hair of his father and mother.” In this state of mind, the appearance of his acquaintance, as a comrade in arms in a far country, seemed a veritable god-send; and as soon as he can gain leave of absence, he hastens to Rome and astounds the American minister in that city with the tidings that the survivor of the murderers of Abraham Lincoln is at present in the service of the Papal States.

188 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

At once, the minister— Rufus King sends word to his government; and, while waiting for instructions, is plied with letter upon letter from the border, in which the impatient informer urges haste, pleads his own peril from the friends of the man he is betraying, his need of money and his longing to do justice to “the ever lamented memory of President Lincoln.” The authoritative reminder that so conspicuous a state-criminal was again within reach of capture, coming at a moment when the opponents of the President had secured a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, could not be treated with the indifference manifested towards a similar announcement the previous fall. The minister at Rome was instructed to obtain from Ste. Marie a statement of Surratt’s confession to him; and after that envoy had sent one unverified which for that reason proved unsatisfactory, he at last succeeded in obtaining another, signed, sealed and sworn to before the minister himself, which concluded as follows: “This is the exact truth of what I know about Surratt. More I could not learn, being afraid to awaken his suspicions. And further I do not say.”
Strange to say, when armed with the verified document they had declared indispensable, the authorities neglected to make any use of it. Stanton and Holt fell back upon the rule that the extradition of a fugitive from justice was an affair of the Department of State, and Seward was too busy in his preparations to accompany the President on his famous tour through the North and West to take up the matter.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 189.

But as fate would have it, on the very eve of his departure there came a despatch from King announcing that if the American government desired the surrender of the fugitive, Cardinal Antonelli intimated that the lack of an extradition treaty would not stand in the way. Even this unprecedented overture failed to have any immediate effect; and it was not until Seward’s return in October that King was instructed to put the question to the papal prime minister whether Surratt would be surrendered on presentation of an authenticated indictment. The cardinal, for his part, made no delay; not only did he answer in the affirmative but, without waiting for any formal demand, he ordered the arrest; and, in consequence, on the second day of November, 1866, “Zouave Watson” was metamorphosed from a soldier into a prisoner of state. Early next morning, as, “surrounded by six men as guards,” he was starting for “the military prison at Rome,” he “plunged down into a ravine, more than a hundred feet deep, which defended the prison” and succeeded in making his escape across the frontier. On the seventeenth, he sailed from Naples in a British steamer bound for Alexandria, which port, after stopping at Malta, he reached on the twenty-seventh, and, the American consul there having been apprized of his coming, he was finally intercepted and held to await the arrival of a United States vessel to carry him to this country.*
* For these particulars, see letters and testimony transmitted to H. R. with Report of Sec. of State, Dec. 16, 1866; Ex. Doc. No. 9, 39th Cong., 2d Sess.

190 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Thus it was that, after the lapse of more than a year since the authorities were informed of his whereabouts, this notorious accomplice of Booth was fairly thrust upon their hands; and against whom, now he was at length in their power, they seemed at a loss what Course to pursue. The leading radicals in Congress, whose fiery zeal had not yet had time to cool, could account for such lukewarmness on no other theory than that the traitor sitting in the seat of Lincoln shrank from any further search into the circumstances attending the assassination; and, accordingly, the House ordered the judiciary committee to find out the causes of such flagrant nonfeasance. And it is worthy of note that, from one point of view, the radicals were actually upon the right scent. The truth was that the administration had been purposely delinquent; not so far as the President individually was concerned, who, as the evidence subsequently showed, was not responsible for the delay; but in the persons of those very functionaries who were most active against this particular member of the band before the military commission. Realizing that the day of such subservient tribunals was over, and that their cherished hypothesis of a Great Conspiracy emanating from the Confederate government was no longer tenable, they did indeed shrink from reviewing before a jury of the District of Columbia the trial of Mrs. Surratt in the person of her son. Moreover, aside from this general consideration which partook more or less of a sentimental character, they were haunted by the uncertainty thrown on the whereabouts of Surratt on the night of the assassination by the statements of the two informers so hot in pursuit of the reward on his head.

Trial of John H. SURRATT 191.

McMillan the surgeon of the ship that carried the fugitive oversea, made it probable that he was in Elmira, and an investigation provoked by this statement showed that he was, as matter of fact, in that town; while Ste. Marie placed him in New York “prepared to fly when the deed was done.” *
* See their testimony in Report cited above.

There was no help for it, however; the unwelcome exigency had to be met. The United States steam corvette, Swatara, touched at Alexandria on the twenty-first of December, 1866, and, thence, with its one solitary iron-bound captive for cargo, ploughed its slow way through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic; passing between the capes of the Chesapeake on the eighteenth of February and, three days after, casting anchor abreast of the Washington Navy Yard. There, in sight of the prison in which his mother was tried and condemned and under which she lay buried, Surratt, by order of the Secretary of State, was delivered into the hands of the civil authorities; the War Office relinquishing without a remonstrance the charge of the prosecution. Two weeks before, the grand jury of the District had found an indictment for murder, and the district attorney at once began to prepare for a trial which bade fair to become historic.
At such a juncture the Federal administration could do no less than back the district attorney; and the Bureau of Military Justice, despite its misgivings, girded up its mighty loins for the conflict.

192 ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

There being no allegation in the indictment of Confederate complicity, its spies and detectives, whose hunting grounds had been in Canada and Richmond, were functus officio as witnesses; but those of them who were out of jail, and their chief, who was in jail placed their skill and experience at the service of the prosecution. Of course, such an outrage as the making evidence of the horrors of Libby and Andersonville was unthought of; but no person sworn on behalf of the government on the other trial, whose testimony had the remotest bearing on the guilt of the defendant, not only, but on the guilt of his mother, of Booth, Payne, Atzerodt and Herold, and who was within reach, escaped being summoned, subjected to discipline and put upon the stand. Additional witnesses— some drawn by the hope of reward, some caught by the craze to take part in so celebrated a cause, and many whom even the argus-eyed subpoena-servers of the Bureau had overlooked on the former occasion, were gathered in from all points of the compass. Edwards Pierrepont, a prominent member of the New York bar, distinguished for the plausibility with which he could conceal the weak spots of a popular but shaky case,* was retained for the United States; and a judge was found to preside who, as was shown by his course during the trial, was (to employ a phrase much in vogue in that day) “organized to convict.”
* Subsequently attorney general under Grant and sent as minister to Great Britain.

A jury regarded by the advocates of courts-martial and military commissions as an insurmountable obstruction to the course of justice in such a vicinity as the District of Columbia— was obtained, every single member, of which was agreed to by both sides;

Trial of John H. SURRATT 193.

the district attorney speaking of the panel “as representatives of the wealth, the intelligence and the commercial and business character of the community; gentlemen against whose character there cannot be a whisper of suspicion.”

The trial opened on the tenth of June, 1867,

June 10, 1867, The Trial of
John H. SURRATT Page 193.

John Surratt Biography.

April 14, 1865, Good Friday,
Our American Cousin.
“A petition for Mrs. Surratt that begged for mercy by a commutation was sent to then President Andrew Johnson. Lafayette Baker delayed this petition. Johnson never saw the petition until after Mrs. Surratt, along with Paine, Atzerodt, and Herold had been hanged in the courtyard of the old Arsenal Building on July 7, 1865.”
John Wilkes Booth.

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