But when the negro, in the dusk of the morning, looked after them as he receded, he saw that both horses' heads were turned once more toward Coxe's, and it was this man, doubtless, who harbored the fugitives from Sunday to Thursday, aided, possibly, by such neighbors as the Wilsons and Adamses.
At the point where Booth crossed the Potomac the shores are very shallow, and one must wade out some distance to where a boat will float. A white man came up here with a canoe on Friday, and tied it by a stone anchor. Between seven and eight o'clock it disappeared, and in the afternoon some men at work in Virginia, saw Booth and Harold land, tie the boat's rope to a stone, and fling it ashore, and strike at once across a ploughed field for King George Court House. Many folks entertained them without doubt, but we positively hear of them next at Port Royal Ferry, and then at Garrett's farm.
I close this article with a list of all who were at Garrett's farm on the death of Booth.
1. E. J. Conger, \ Detectives. 2. Lieut. Baker, / 3. Surgeon from Port Royal, 4. Four Garrett daughters. 5. Harold, Booth's accomplice,
Soldiers.—Company H, Sixteenth New-York Volunteer Cavalry, LieutenantEd. P. Doherty commanding: Corporals A. Neugarten, J. Waly, M. Hornsby:Privates J. Mellington, D. Darker, E. Parelays, W. Mockgart;Corporals—Zimmer (Co. C), M. Taenaek; Privates H. Pardman, J. Meiyers,W. Burnn, F. Meekdank, G. Haich, J. Raien, J. Kelly, J. Samger (Co. M),G. Zeichton,—Steinbury, L. Sweech (Co. A), A. Sweech (Co. H), F.Diacts; Sergeant Wandell; Corporals Lannekey, Winacky; Sergeant Corbett(Co. L).
Sergeant Corbett, who shot Booth, was the only man of the command belonging to the same company with Lieutenant Doherty, Commandant.
Washington, May 2—P. M.
The police resources of the country have been fairly tested during the past two weeks. Under the circumstances, the shrewdness and energy of both municipal and national detectives have been proven good. The latter body has had a too partial share of the applause thus far, while the great efforts of our New-York and other officers have been overlooked. In the crowning success of Doherty, Conger, and Baker on the Virginia side of the water we have forgotten the as vigorous and better sustained pursuit on the Maryland side.
Yet the Secretary of War has thanked all concerned, especially referring to many excellent leaders in the long hunt through Charles and St. Mary's counties. Here the military and civil forces together amounted to quite a small army, and constituted by far the largest police organization ever known on this side of the Atlantic.
I think the adventures and expedients of these public servants worthy of a column. It would be out of all proportion to pass them by when we devote a dozen lines to every petty larceny and shoplifting.
On the Friday night of the murder the departments were absolutely paralyzed. The murderers had three good hours for escape; they had evaded the pursuit of lightning by snapping the telegraph wires, and rumor filled the town with so many reports that the first valuable hours, which should have been used to follow hard after them, were consumed in feverish efforts to know the real extent of the assassination.
Immediately afterwards, however, or on Saturday morning early, the provost and special police force got on the scent, and military in squads were dispatched close upon their heels.
Three grand pursuits wore organized: one reaching up the north bank of the Potomac toward Chain bridge, to prevent escape by that direction into Virginia, where Mosby, it was suspected, waited to hail the murderers;
A second starting from Richmond, Va., northward, forming a broad advancing picket or skirmish line between the Blue Ridge and the broad sea-running streams;
A third to scour the peninsula towards Point Lookout.
The latter region became the only one well examined; the northern expedition failed until advised from below to capture Atzerott, and failed, to capture Payne. Yet there were cogent probabilities that the assassin had taken this route; far Mosby would have given them the right hand of fellowship.
When that guerrilla heard of Booth's feat, said Captain Jett, he exclaimed:
"Now, by——! I could take that man in my arms."
Washington, as a precautionary measure, was doubly picketed at once; the authorities in all northern towns advised of the personnel of the murderer, and requests made of the detective chiefs in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New-York, to forward to Washington without delay their best decoys.
A court of inquiry was organized on the moment, and early in the week succeeding rewards were offered. An individual, and not the government, offered the first rewards.
There were two men without whom the hunt would have gone astray many times.
John S. Young, chief of the New-York detective force, a powerful and resolute man, whose great weight and strength are matched by boundless energy, and both subordinate to a head as clear as the keen and searching warrant of his eye. This man has been in familiar converse with every rebel agent in the Canadas, and is feared by them as they fear the fates of Beall and Kennedy. Without being a sensationist, he has probably rendered the cleverest services of the war to the general government. They sent for him immediately after the tragedy, and he stopped on the way for his old police companion, Marshal Murray. The latter's face and figure are familiar to all who know New-York; he resembles an admiral on his quarter-deck; he is a detective of fair and excellent repute, and has a somewhat novel pride in what he calls "the most beautiful gallows in the United States."
These officials were ordered to visit Colonel Ingraham's office and examine the little evidence on hand. They and their tried officers formed a junction on Sunday afternoon with the large detective force of Provost-Marshal Major O'Bierne. The latter commands the District of Columbia civil and military police. He is a New-Yorker and has been shot through the body in the field.
The detective force of Young and Murray consisted of Officers Radford,Kelso, Elder, and Hoey, of New-York; Deputy-Marshal Newcome, formerly ofTHE WORLD'S city staff; Officers Joseph Pierson and West, of Baltimore.
Major O'Bierne's immediate aids were Detectives John Lee, Lloyd,Gavigan, Coddingham, and Williams.
A detachment of the Philadelphia detective police, force—Officers Taggert, George Smith, and Carlin, reporting to Colonel Baker—went in the direction of the North Pole; everybody is on theque vivefor them.
To the provost-marshal of Baltimore, MacPhail, who knew the tone and bearing of the country throughout, was joined the zealous co-operation of Officer Lloyd, of Major O'Bierne's staff, who had a personal feeling against the secessionists of lower Maryland; they had once driven him away for his loyalty, and had reserved their hospitality for assassins.
Lieutenant Commander Gushing, I am informed, also rendered important services to the government in connection with the police operations. Volunteer detectives, such as Ex-Marshal Lewis and Angelis, were plentiful; it is probable that in the pitch of the excitement five hundred detective officers were in and around Washington city. At the same time the secret police of Richmond abandoned their ordinary business, and devoted themselves solely to this overshadowing offense.
No citizen, in these terrible days, knows what eyes were upon him as he talked and walked, nor how his stature and guise were keenly scanned by folks who passed him absent-faced, yet with his mental portrait carefully turned over, the while some invisible hand clutched a revolver, and held a life or death challenge upon his lips.
The military forces were commanded by Colonel Welles, of the Twenty sixth Michigan regiment, whose activity and zeal were amply sustained by Colonel Clendenning, of the Eighth Illinois cavalry, probably the finest body of horse in the service.
The first party to take the South Maryland road was dispatched by Major O'Bierne, and commanded by Lieutenant Lovett, of the Veteran Reserves. It consisted of twenty-five cavalry men, with detectives Cottingham, Lloyd, and Gavigan; these latter, with the lieutenant, kept well in advance. They made inquiries of a soothing and cautious character, but saw nothing suspicious until they arrived at Piscataway, where an unknown man, some distance ahead, observed them, and took to the woods. This was on Sunday night, forty hours after the murder.
Guided by Officer Lloyd, the little band dashed on, arriving at Bryantown on Tuesday. Here they arrested John Lloyd, of the hotel at Surrattsville, of whom they had previously inquired for the murderers, and he had said positively that he neither knew them nor had seen anybody whatever on the night of the crime. He was returning in a wagon, with his wife, whom he had ordered, the day before, to go on a visit to Allen's Fresh, The Monday afterward he started to bring her back. This woman, frightened at the arrest, acknowledged at once that in her husband's conduct there was some inexplicable mystery. He was taciturn and defiant as before, until confronted by some of his old Union neighbors.
The few Unionists of Prince George's and Charles counties, long persecuted and intimidated, now came forward and gave important testimony.
Among these was one Roby, a very fat and very zealous old gentleman, whose professions were as ample as his perspiration. He told the officers of the secret meetings for conspiracy's, sake at Lloyd's Hotel, and although a very John Gilpin on horseback, rode here and there to his great loss of wind and repose, fastening fire-coals upon the guilty or suspected.
Lloyd was turned over to Mr. Cottingham, who had established a jail at Robytown; that night his house was searched, and Booth's carbine found hidden in the wall. Three days afterward, Lloyd himself confessed—and his neck is quite nervous at this writing.
This little party, under the untiring Lovett, examined all the farm-houses below Washington resorting to many shrewd expedients, and taking note of the great swamps to the east of Port Tobacco; they reached Newport at last and fastened tacit guilt upon many residents.
Beyond Bryantown they overhauled the residence of Doctor Mudd and found Booth's boot. This was before Lloyd confessed, and was the first positive trace the officers had that they were really close upon the assassins.
I do not recall anything more wild and startling than this vague and dangerous exploration of a dimly known, hostile, and ignorant country. To these few detectives we owe much of the subsequent successful prosecution of the pursuit. They were the Hebrew spies.
By this time the country was filling up with soldiers, but previously a second memorable detective party went out under the personal command of Major O'Bierne. It consisted, besides that officer, of Lee, D'Angellia, Callahan, Hoey, Bostwick, Hanover, Bevins, and McHenry, and embarked at Washington on a steam-tug for Chappell's Point. Here a military station had long been established for the prevention of blockade and mail-running across the Potomao. It was commanded by Lieutenant Laverty, and garrisoned by sixty-five men. On Tuesday night, Major O'Bierne's party reached this place, and soon afterwards, a telegraph station was established here by an invaluable man to the expedition, Captain Beckwith, General Grant's chief cypher operator, who tapped the Point Lookout wire, and placed the War Department within a moment's reach of the theater of events.
Major O'Bierne's party started at once over the worst road in the world for Port Tobacco.
If any place in the world is utterly given over to depravity, it is Port Tobacco. From this town, by a sinuous creek, there is flat boat navigation to the Potomac, and across that river to Mattox's creek. Before the war Port Tobacco was the seat of a tobacco aristocracy and a haunt of negro traders. It passed very naturally into a rebel post for blockade-runners and a rebel post-office general. Gambling, corner fighting, and shooting matches were its lyceum education. Violence and ignorance had every suffrage in the town. Its people were smugglers, to all intents, and there was neither Bible nor geography to the whole region adjacent. Assassination was never very unpopular at Port Tobacco, and when its victim was a northern president it became quite heroic. A month before the murder a provost-marshal near by was slain in his bed-chamber. For such a town and district the detective police were the only effective missionaries. The hotel here is called the Brawner House; it has a bar in the nethermost cellar, and its patrons, carousing in that imperfect light, look like the denizens of some burglar's crib, talking robbery between their cups; its dining-room is dark and tumble-down, and thecuisinebears traces of Caffir origin; a barbecue is nothing to a dinner there. The Court House of Port Tobacco is the most superflous house in the place, except the church. It stands in the center of the town in a square, and the dwellings lie about it closely, as if to throttle justice. Five hundred people exist in Port Tobacco; life there reminds me, in connection with the slimy river and the adjacent swamps, of the great reptile period of the world, when iguanadons and pterodactyls and pleosauri ate each other.
Into this abstract of Gomorrah the few detectives went like angels who visited Lot. They pretended to be enquiring for friends, or to have business designs, and the first people they heard of were Harold and Atzerott. The latter had visited Port Tobacco three weeks before the murder, and intimated at that time his design of fleeing the country. But everybody denied having seen him subsequent to the crime.
Atzerott had been in town just prior to the crime. He had been living with a widow woman named Mrs. Wheeler, by whom he had several children, and she was immediately called upon by Major O'Bierne. He did not tell her what Atzerott had done, but vaguely hinted that he had committed some terrible crime, and that since he had done her wrong, she could vindicate both herself and justice by telling his whereabouts. The woman admitted that Atzerott had been her bane, but she loved him, and refused to betray him.
His trunk was found in her garret, and in it the key to his paint shop in Port Tobacco. The latter was fruitlessly searched, but the probable whereabouts of Atzerott in Mongomery county obtained, and Major O'Bierne telegraphing there immediately, the desperate fellow was found and locked up. A man named Crangle who had succeeded Atzerott in Mrs. Wheeler's pliable affections, was arrested at once and put in jail. A number of disloyal people were indicated or "spotted" as in no wise angry at the President's taking off, and for all such a provost prison was established.
[Illustration: Maryland.]
A few miles from Port Tobacco dwelt a solitary woman, who, when questioned, said that for many nights she had heard, after she had retired to bed, a man enter her cellar and lie there all night, departing before dawn. Major O'Bierne and the detectives ordered her to place a lamp in her window the next night she heard him enter, and at dark they established a cordon of armed officers around the place. At midnight punctually she exhibited the light, when the officers broke into the house and thoroughly searched it, without result. Yet the woman positively asserted that she had heard the man enter.
It was afterward found that she was of diseased mind.
By this time the military had come up in considerable numbers, and MajorO'Bierne was enabled to confer with Major Wait, of the Eighth Illinois.
The major had pushed on Monday night to Leonardstown, and pretty well overhauled that locality.
It was at this time that preparations were made to hunt the swamps around Chapmantown, Beantown, and Allen's Fresh. Booth had been entirely lost since his departure from Mudd's house, and it was believed that he had either pushed on for the Potomac or taken to the swamps. The officers sagaciously determined to follow him to the one and to explore the other.
The swamps tributary to the various branches of the Wicomico river, of which the chief feeder is Allen's creek, bear various names, such as Jordan's swamp, Atchall's swamp, and Scrub swamp. There are dense growths of dogwood, gum, and beech, planted in sluices of water and bog; and their width varies from a half mile to four miles, while their length is upwards of sixteen miles. Frequent deep ponds dot this wilderness place, with here and there a stretch of dry soil, but no human being inhabits the malarious extent; even a hunted murderer would shrink from hiding there. Serpents and slimy lizards are the only denizens; sometimes the coon takes refuge in this desert from the hounds, and in the soil mud a thousand odorous muskrats delve, with now and then a tremorous otter. But not even the hunted negro dares to fathom the treacherous clay, nor make himself a fellow of the slimy reptiles which reign absolute in this terrible solitude. Here the soldiers prepared to seek for the President's assassin, and no search of the kind has ever been so thorough and patient. The Shawnee, in his strong hold of despair in the heart of Okeefeuokee, would scarcely have changed homes with Wilkes Booth and David Harold, hiding in this inhuman country.
The military forces deputed to pursue the fugitives were seven hundred men of the Eighth Illinois cavalry, six hundred men of the Twenty-second Colored troops, and one hundred men of the Sixteenth New York. These swept the swamps by detachments, the mass of them dismounted, with cavalry at the belts of clearing, interspersed with detectives at frequent intervals in the rear. They first formed a strong picket cordon entirely around the swamps, and then, drawn up in two orders of battle, advanced boldly into the bogs by two lines of march. One party swept the swamps longitudinally, the other pushed straight across their smallest diameter.
A similar march has not been made during the war; the soldiers were only a few paces apart, and in steady order they took the ground as it came, now plunging to their arm-pits in foul sluices of gangrened water, now hopelessly submerged in slime, now attacked by Regions of wood ticks, now tempting some unfaithful log or greenishly solid morass, and plunging to the tip of the skull in poison stagnation; the tree boughs rent their uniforms; they came out upon dry land, many of them without a rag of garment scratched, and gashed, and spent, repugnant to themselves, and disgusting to those who saw them; but not one trace of Booth or Harold was any where found. Wherever they might be, the swamps did not contain them.
While all this was going on, a force started from Point Lookout, and swept the narrow necks of Saint Mary's quite up to Medley's Neck. To complete the search in this part of the country, Colonel Wells and Major O'Bierne started with a force of cavalry and infantry for Chappel Point; they took the entire peninsula as before, and marched in close skirmish line across it, but without finding anything of note. The matter of inclosing a house was by cavalry advances, which held all the avenues till mounted detectives came up. Many strange and ludicrous adventures occured on each of these expeditions. While the forces were going up Cobb's neck, there was a counter force coming down from Allen's Fresh.
Major O'Bierne started for Leonardstown with his detective force, and played off Laverty as Booth, and Hoey as Harold. These two advanced to farm-houses and gave their assumed names, asking at the same time for assistance and shelter. They were generally avoided, except by one man named Claggert, who told them they might hide in the woods behind his house. When Claggert was arrested, however he stated that he meant to hide them only to give them up. While on this adventure, a man who had heard of the reward came very near shooting Laverty. The ruse now became hazardous and the detectives resumed their real characters.
I have not time to go into the detail of this long and excellent hunt. My letter of yesterday described how the detectives of Mr. Young and Marshal Murray examined the negro Swan, and traced Booth to the house of Sam Coxe, the richest rebel in Charles county. There is a gap in the evidence between the arrival of Booth at this place and his crossing the Potomac above Swan Point, in a stolen or purposely-provided canoe. But as Coxe's house is only ten miles from the river, it is possible that he made the passage of the intermediate country undiscovered.
One Mills, a rebel mail-carrier, also arrested, saw Booth and Harold lurking along the river bank on Friday; he referred Major O'Bierne to one Claggert, a rebel, as having seen them also; but Claggert held his tongue, and went to jail. On Saturday night, Major O'Bierne, thus assured, also crossed the Potomac with his detectives to Boon's farm, where the fugitives had landed. While collecting information here a gunboat swung up the stream, and threatened to fire on the party.
It was now night, and all the party worn to the ground with long travel and want of sleep. Lieutenant Laverty's men went a short distance down the country and gave up, but Major O'Bierne, with a single man, pushed all night to King George's court-house, and next day, Sunday, re-embarked for Chappell's Point. Hence he telegraphed his information, and asked permission to pursue, promising to catch the assassins before they reached Port Royal.
This the department refused. Colonel Baker's men were delegated to make the pursuit with the able Lieutenant Doherty, and. O'Bierne, who was the most active and successful spirit in the chase, returned to Washington, cheerful and contented.
At Mrs. Burratt's Washington house, at the Pennsylvania Hotel, Washington, and at Surrattsville, the Booth plot was almost entirely arranged. These three places will be relics of conspiracy forever.
Harold said to Lieutenant Doherty, after the latter had dragged him from the barn.
"Who's that man in there? It can't be Booth; he told me his name wasLoyd."
He further said that he had begged food for Booth from house to house while the latter hid in the woods.
The confederate captain, Willie Jett, who had given Booth a lift behindhis saddle from Port Royal to Garrett's farm, was then courting a MissGoldmann at Bowling Green; his traveling companions were LieutenantsRuggles and Burbridge.
Payne, the assassin of the Sewards, was arrested by Officers, Sampson, of the sub-treasury, and Devoe, acting under General Alcott. The latter had besides, Officers Marsh and Clancy (a stenographer).
The reward for the capture of Booth will be distributed between very many men. The negro, Swan, will get as much of it, as he deserves. It amounts to about eighty thousand dollars, but the War Department may increase it at discretion. The entire rewards amount to a hundred and sixty odd thousand. Major O'Bierne should get a large part of it as well.
This story which I must close abruptly, deserves to be re-written, with all its accessory endeavours. What I have said is in skeleton merely, and far from exhaustive.
Washington, May 14.
I am sitting in the President's office. He was here very lately, but he will not return to dispossess me of this high-backed chair he filled so long, nor resume his daily work at the table where I am writing.
There are here only Major Hay and the friend who accompanies me. A bright-faced boy runs in and out, darkly attired, so that his fob-chain of gold is the only relief to his mourning garb. This is little Tad., the pet of the White House. That great death, with which the world rings, has made upon him only the light impression which all things make upon childhood. He will live to be a man pointed out everywhere, for his father's sake; and as folks look at him, the tableau of the murder will seem to encircle him.
The room is long and high, and so thickly hung with maps that the color of the wall cannot be discerned. The President's table at which I am seated, adjoins a window at the farthest corner; and to the left of my chair as I recline in it, there is a large table before an empty grate, around which there are many chairs, where the cabinet used to assemble. The carpet is trodden thin, and the brilliance of its dyes is lost. The furniture is of the formal cabinet class, stately and semi-comfortable; there are book cases sprinkled with the sparse library of a country lawyer, but lately plethoric, like the thin body which has departed in its coffin. They are taking away Mr. Lincoln's private effects, to deposit them wheresoever his family may abide, and the emptiness of the place, on this sunny Sunday, revives that feeling of desolation from which the land has scarce recovered. I rise from my seat and examine the maps; they are from the coast survey and engineer departments, and exhibit all the contested grounds of the war: there are pencil lines upon them where some one has traced the route of armies, and planned the strategic circumferences of campaigns. Was it the dead President who so followed the march of empire, and dotted the sites of shock and overthrow?
Here is the Manassas country—here the long reach of the wasted Shenandoah; here the wavy line of the James and the sinuous peninsula. The wide campagna of the gulf country sways in the Potomac breeze that filters in at the window, and the Mississippi climbs up the wall, with blotches of blue and red to show where blood gushed at the bursting of deadly bombs. So, in the half-gloomy, half-grand apartment, roamed the tall and wrinkled figure whom the country had summoned from his plain home into mighty history, with the geography of the republic drawn into a narrow compass so that he might lay his great brown hand upon it everywhere. And walking to and fro, to and fro, to measure the destinies of arms, he often stopped, with his thoughtful eyes upon the carpet, to ask if his life were real and if he were the arbiter of so tremendous issues, or whether it was not all a fever-dream, snatched from his sofa in the routine office of the Prairie state.
There is but one picture on the marble mantel over the cold grate—JohnBright, a photograph.
I can well imagine how the mind of Mr. Lincoln often went afar to the face of Bright, who said so kindly things of him when Europe was mocking his homely guise and provincial phraseology. To Mr. Lincoln, John Bright was the standard-bearer of America and democracy in the old world. He thrilled over Bright's bold denunciations of peer and "Privilege," and stretched his long arm across the Atlantic to take that daring Quaker innovator by the hand.
I see some books on the table; perhaps they have lain there undisturbed since the reader's dimming eyes grew nerveless. A parliamentary manual, a Thesaurus, and two books of humor, "Orpheus C. Kerr," and "Artemus Ward." These last were read by Mr. Lincoln in the pauses of his hard day's labor. Their tenure here bears out the popular verdict of his partiality for a good joke; and, through the window, from the seat of Mr. Lincoln, I see across the grassy grounds of the capitol, the broken shaft of the Washington Monument, the long bridge and the fort-tipped Heights of Arlington, reaching down to the shining river side. These scenes he looked at often to catch some freshness of leaf and water, and often raised the sash to let the world rush in where only the nation abided, and hence on that awful night, he departed early, to forget this room and its close applications in theabandonof the theater.
I wonder if that were the least of Booth's crimes—to slay this public servant in the stolen hour of recreation he enjoyed but seldom. We worked his life out here, and killed him when he asked a holiday.
Outside of this room there is an office, where his secretaries sat—a room more narrow but as long—and opposite this adjacent office, a second door, directly behind Mr. Lincoln's chair leads by a private passage to his family quarters. This passage is his only monument in the building; he added nor subtracted nothing else; it tells a long story of duns and loiterers, contract-hunters and seekers for commissions, garrulous parents on paltry errands, toadies without measure and talkers without conscience. They pressed upon him through the great door opposite his window, and hat in hand, come courtsying to his chair, with an obsequious "Mr. President!"
If he dared, though the chief magistrate and commander of the army and navy, to go out of the great door, these vampires leaped upon him with their Babylonian pleas, and barred his walk to his hearthside. He could not insult them since it was not in his nature, and perhaps many of them had really urgent errands. So he called up the carpenter and ordered a strategic route cut from his office to his hearth, and perhaps told of it after with much merriment.
Here should be written the biography of his official life—in the room where have concentrated all the wires of action, and where have proceeded the resolves which vitalized in historic deeds. But only the great measures, however carried out, were conceived in this office. The little ones proceeded from other places..
Here once came Mr. Stanton, saying in his hard and positive way:
"Mr. Lincoln, I have found it expedient to disgrace and arrest GeneralStone."
"Stanton," said Mr. Lincoln, with an emotion of pain, "when you considered it necessary to imprison General Stone, I am glad you did not consult me about it."
And for lack of such consultation, General Stone, I learn, now lies a maniac in the asylum. The groundless pretext, upon which he suffered the reputation of treason, issued from the Department of War—not from this office.
But as to his biography, it is to be written by Colonel Nicolay and Major Hay. They are to go to Paris together, one as attache of legation, the other as consul, and while there, will undertake the labor. They are the only men who know his life well enough to exhaust it, having followed his official tasks as closely as they shared his social hours.
Major Hay is a gentleman of literary force. Colonel Nicolay has a fine judgment of character and public measures. Together they should satisfy both curiosity and history.
As I hear from my acquaintances here these episodes of the President's life, I recall many reminiscences of his ride from Springfield to Harrisburg, over much of which I passed. Then he left home and became an inhabitant of history. His face was solid and healthy, his step young, his speech and manner bold and kindly. I saw him at Trenton stand in the Legislature, and say, in his conversational intonation:
"We may have to put the foot down firm."
How should we have hung upon his accents then had we anticipated his virtues and his fate.
Death is requisite to make opinion grave. We looked upon Mr. Lincoln then as an amusing sensation, and there was much guffaw as he was regarded by the populace; he had not passed out of partisan ownership. Little by little, afterward, he won esteem, and often admiration, until the measure of his life was full, and the victories he had achieved made the world applaud him. Yet, at this date, the President was sadly changed. Four years of perplexity and devotion had wrinkled his face, and stooped his shoulders, and the failing eyes that glared upon the play closed as his mission was completed, and the world had been educated enough to comprehend him.
The White House has been more of a Republican mansion under his control than for many administrations. Uncouth guests came to it often, typical of the simple western civilization of which he was a graduate, and while no coarse altercation has ever ensued, the portal has swung wide for five years.
A friend, connected with a Washington newspaper, told me that he had occasion to see Mr. Lincoln one evening, and found that the latter had gone to bed. But he was told to sit down in the office, and directly the President entered. He wore only a night shirt, and his long, lank hirsute limbs, as he sat down, inclined the guest to laughter. Mr. Lincoln disposed of his request at once, and manifested a desire to talk. So he reached for the cane which my friend carried and conversed in this manner:
"I always used a cane when I was a boy. It was a freak of mine. My favorite one was a knotted beech stick, and I carved the head myself. There's a mighty amount of character in sticks. Don't you think so? You have seen these fishing poles that fit into a cane? Well, that was an old idea of mine. Dogwood clubs were favorite ones with the boys. I 'spose they use'em yet. Hickory is too heavy, unless you get it from a young sapling. Have you ever noticed how a stick in one's hand will change his appearance? Old women and witches would'nt look so without sticks. Meg Merrilies understands that."
In this way my friend, who is a clerk, in a newspaper office, heard the President talk for an hour. The undress of the man and the witness of his subject would be staples for merriment if we did not reflect that his greatness was of no conventional cast, that the playfulness of his nature and the simplicity of his illustration lightened public business but never arrested it.
Another gentleman, whom I know, visited the President in high dudgeon one night. He was a newspaper proprietor and one of his editors had been arrested.
"Mr. Lincoln," he said, "I have been off electioneering for your re-election, and in my absence you have had my editor arrested. I won't stand it, sir. I have fought better administrations than yours."
"Why, John," said the President, "I don't know much about it. I suppose your boys have been too enterprizing. The fact is, I don't interfere with the press much, but I suppose I am responsible."
"I want you to order the man's release to-night," said the applicant. "I shan't leave here till I get it. In fact, I am the man who should be arrested. Why don't you send me to Capitol Hill?"
This idea pleased the President exceedingly. He laughed the other into good humor.
"In fact," he said, "I am under restraint here, and glad of any pretext to release a journalist."
So he wrote the order, and the writer got his liberty.
It must not be inferred from this, however, that the President was a devotee to literature. He had no professional enthusiasm for it. The literary coterie of the White House got little flattery but its members were treated as agreeable citizens and not as the architects of any body's fortune.
Willis went there much for awhile, but yielded to his old habit of gossiping about the hall paper and the teapots. Emerson went there once, and was deferred to us if he were anything but a philosopher. Yet he so far grasped the character of his host as to indite that noble humanitarian eulogy upon him, delivered at Concord, and printed in the WORLD. It will not do to say definitely In this notice how several occasional writers visited the White House, heard the President's views and assented to them and afterward abused him. But these attained no remembrance nor tart reproach from that least retaliatory of men. He harbored no malice, and is said to have often placed himself on the stand-point of Davis and Lee, and accounted for their defection while he could not excuse it.
He was a good reader, and took all the leading NEW YORK dailies every day. His secretaries perused them and selected all the items which would interest the President; these were read to him and considered. He bought few new books, but seemed ever alive to works of comic value; the vein of humor in him was not boisterous in its manifestations, but touched the geniality of his nature, and he reproduced all that he absorbed, to elucidate some new issue, or turn away argument by a laugh.
As a jester, Mr. Lincoln's tendency was caricatured by the prints, but not exaggerated. He probably told as many stories as are attributed to him. Nor did he, as is averred, indulge in these jests on solemn occasions. No man felt with such personal intensity the extent of the casualties of his time, and he often gravely reasoned whether he could be in any way responsible for the bloodshed and devastation over which it was his duty to preside.
An acquaintance of mine—a private—once went to him to plead for a man's life. He had never seen the man for whom he pleaded, and had no acquaintance with the man's family. Mr. Lincoln was touched by his disinterestedness, and said to him:
"If I were anything but the President, I would be constantly working as you have done."
Whenever a doubt of one's guilt lay on his mind, the man was spared by his direct interference..
There was an entire absence in the President's character of the heroic element. He would do a great deed indeshabilleas promptly as in full dress. He never aimed to be brilliant, unconsciously understanding that a great man's brilliancy is to be measured by the "wholeness" and synthetic cast of his career rather than by any fitful ebullitions. For that reason we look in vain through his messages for "points." His point was not to turn a sentence or an epigram, but to win an effect, regardless of the route to it.
He was commonplace in his talk, and Chesterfield would have had no patience with him; his dignity of character lay in his uprightness rather than in his formal manner. Members of his government often reviewed him plainly in his presence. Yet he divined the true course, while they only argued it out.
His good feeling was not only personal, but national. He had no prejudice against any race or potentate. And his democracy was of a practical, rather than of a demonstrative, nature. He was not Marat, but Moreau—not Paine and Jefferson; but Franklin.
His domestic life was like a parlor of night-time, lit by the equal grate of his genial and uniform kindness. Young Thaddy played with him upon the carpet; Robert came home from the war and talked to his father as to a school-mate, he was to Mrs. Lincoln as chivalrous on the last day of his life as when he courted her. I have somewhere seen a picture of Henry IV. of France, riding his babies on his back: that was the President.
So dwelt the citizen who is gone—a model in character if not in ceremony, for good men to come who will take his place in the same White House, and find their generation comparing them to the man thought worthy of assassination. I am glad to sit here in his chair, where he has bent so often,—in the atmosphere of the household he purified, in the sight of the green grass and the blue river he hallowed by gazing upon, in the very centre of the nation he preserved for the people, and close the list of bloody deeds, of desperate fights of swift expiations, of renowned obsequies of which I have written, by inditing at his table the goodness of his life and the eternity of his memory.
Washington, May 26.
The most exciting trial of our times has obtained a very meager commemoration in all but its literal features. The evidence adduced in the course of it, has been too faithfully reported, through its far-fetched and monotonous irregularities, but nobody realizes the extraordinary scene from which so many columns emanate, either by aid of the reporters' scanty descriptions, or by the purblind sketches of the artists.
Now that the evidence is growing vapid, and the obstinacy of the military commission has lost its coarse zest, we may find enough readers to warrant a fuller sketch of the conspirators' prison.
About a mile below Washington, where the high Potomac Bluffs meet the marshy border of the Eastern branch, stands the United States arsenal, a series of long, mathematically uninteresting brick buildings, with a broad lawn behind them, open to the water, and level military plazas, on which are piled pyramids of shell and ball, among acres of cannon and cannon-carriages, and caissons. A high wall, reaching circularly around these buildings, shows above it, as one looks from Washington, the barred windows of an older and more gloomy structure than the rest, which forms the city front of the group of which it is the principal. This was a penitentiary, but, long ago added to the arsenal, it has been re-transformed to a court-room and jail, and in its third, or uppermost story, the Military Commission is sitting.
The main road to the arsenal is by a wide and vacant avenue, which abuts against a gate where automaton sentries walk, but the same gate can best be reached on foot by the shores of the Potomac, in the sight, of the forts, the shipping, and Alexandria.
The scene at the arsenal in time of peace is common-place enough, except that across the Eastern Branch the towers of the lunatic asylum, perched upon a height, look down baronially; but this trial of murderers has made the spot a fair.
A whole company of volunteers keeps the gate, through which are passing cabs, barouches, officers' ambulances, and a stream of folks on foot; while farther along almost a regiment crosses the drive, their huddled shelter tents extending entirely across the peninsula. These are playing cards on the ground, and tossing quoits, and sleeping on their faces, while a gunboat watches the river front, and under a circular wall a line of patrols, ten yards apart, go to and fro perpetually.
It is 10 o'clock, and the court is soon to sit. Its members ride down in superb ambulances and bring their friends along to show them the majesty of justice. A perfect park of carriages stands by the door to the left, and from these dismount major-generals' wives, in rustling silks; daughters of congressmen, attired like the lilies of the milliner; little girls who hope to be young ladies and have come with "Pa," to look at the assassins; even brides are here, in the fresh blush of their nuptials, and they consider the late spectacle of the review as good as lost, if the court-scene be not added to it. These tender creatures have a weakness for the ring of manacles, the sight of folks to be suspended in the air, the face of a woman confederate in blood.
They chat with their polite guides, many of whom are gallant captains, and go one after another up the little flight of steps which leads to the room of the officer of the day.
He passes them, if he pleases, up the crooked stairways, and when they have climbed three of these, they enter a sort of garret-room, oblong, and plastered white, and about as large as an ordinary town-house parlor.
Four doors open into it—that by which we have entered, two from the left, where the witnesses wait, and one at the end, near the left far corner, which is the outlet from the cells.
A railing, close up to the stairway door, gives a little space in the foreground for witnesses; two tables, transverse to this rail, are for the commission and the press, the first-named being to the right; between these are a raised platform and pivot arm-chair for the witness; below are the sworn phonographers and the counsel for the accused, and then another rail like that separating the crowd from the court, holds behind it the accused and their guards.
These are they who are living not by years nor by weeks, but by breaths. They are motley enough, for the most part, sitting upon a long bench with their backs against the wall,—ill-shaved, haggard, anxious, and the dungeon door at their left opens now and then to show behind it a moving bayonet. There are women within the court proper, edging upon the reporters, introduced there by a fussy usher, and through four windows filters the imperfect daylight, making all things distinguishable, yet shadowy. Thecoup d'oeilof this small and crowded scene is lively as a popular funeral.
There is the witness with raised hand, pointing toward heaven, and looking at Judge Holt. The gilt stars, bars, and orange-colored sashes of the commission; the women's brilliant silks and bonnets; the crowding spectators, with their brains in their eyes; the blue coats of the guards; the working scribes; and last of all the line of culprits, whose suspected guilt has made them worthy of all illustration.
Between the angle of the wall and the studded door, under the heavy bar of dressed stone which marks above the thickness of the gaol, sits all alone a woman's figure, clothed in solemn black. Her shadowy skirt hides her feet, so that we cannot see whether they are riveted; her sleeves of sable sweep down to her wrist, and dark gloves cover the plumpness of her hand, while a palm-leaf fan nods to and fro to assist the obscurity of her vail of crape, descending from her widow's bonnet.
A solitary woman, beginning the line of coarse indicted men, shrinking beneath the scornful eyes of her sex, and the as bold survey of men more pitiful, may well excite, despite her guilt, a moment of sympathy.
Let men remember that she is the mother of a son who has fled to save his forfeit life by deserting her to shame, and perhaps, to death. Let women, who will not mention her in mercy, learn from her end, in all succeeding wars, to make patriotism of their household duties and not incite to blood.
Mrs. Surratt is a graduate of that seminary which spits in soldiers faces, denounces brave generals upon the rostrum, and cries out for an interminable scaffold when all the bells are ringing peace.
How far her wicked love influenced her to participation in the murder rests in her own breast, and up to this time she has not differed from mothers at large—to twist her own bow-string rather than build his gibbet.
Beneath her shadowy bonnet, over her fan-tip, we see two large, sad eyes, rising and falling, and now and then when the fan sways to and fro, the hair just turning gray with trouble, and the round face growing wan and seamed with terrible reflection, are seen a moment crouching low, as if she would wish to grovel upon the floor and bury her forehead in her hands.
Yet, sometimes, across Mrs. Surratt's face a stealthiness creeps—a sort of furtive, feline flashing of the eye, like that of one which means to leap sideways. At these times her face seems to grow hard and colorless, as if that tiger expression which Pradier caught upon the face of Brinvilliers and fastened into a masque, had been repeated here. Not to grow mawkish while we must be kind, let us not forget that this woman is an old plotter. If she did not devise the assassination, she was privy to it long. She was an agent of contraband mails—a bold, crafty, assured rebel—perhaps a spy—and in the event of her condemnation, let those who would plead for her spend half their pity upon that victim whose heart was like a woman's, and whose hand was merciful as a mother's.
Before the door sits an officer, uncovered, who does not seem to labor under any particular fear, chiefly because the captives are ironed to immovability, and he stares and smiles alternately, as if he were somewhat amiable and extremely bored.
Next to the officer is a shabby-looking boy, whose seat is by the right jamb of the jail door. Of all boys just old enough to feel their oats, this boy is the most commonplace. His parents would be likely to have no sanguine hopes of his reaching the presidency; for his head indicates latent dementia, and a slice or two from it would recommend him, without exanimation, to the school for the feeble-minded. Better dressed, and washed, and shaved, he might make a tolerable adornment to a hotel door, or even reach the dignity of a bar-keeper or an usher at a theatre. But that this fellow should occupy a leaf in history and be confounded with a tragedy entering into the literature of the world, reverses manifest destiny, and leaves neither phrenology nor physiognomy a place to stand upon.
Come up! Gall, Spurzheim, and Lavater, and remark his sallow face, attenuated by base excesses! Do you know any forehead so broad which means so little? the oyster could teach this man philosophy! His chin is sharp, his eyes are blank blue, his short black hair curls over his ears, and his beard is of a prickly black, with a moustache which does not help his general contemptibleness. A dirty grayish shirt without a linen collar, is seen between the lapels of the greasy and dusty cloth coat, sloping at the shoulders; and under his worn brown trowsers, the manacle of iron makes an ugly garter to his carpet clipper.
This is David Harold, who shared the wild night-ride of Booth, and barely escaped that outlaw's death in the burning barn.
He stoops to the rail of the dock, now and then, to chat with his attorney, and a sort of blank anxiety which he wears, as his head turns here and there, shifts to a frolicking smile. But a woman of unusual attractions enters the court, and Harold is much more interested in her than in his acquittal.
Great Caesar's dust, which stopped a knot-hole, has in this play boy an inverse parallel. He was at best hostler to a murderer, and failed in that. His chief concern at present is to have somebody to talk to; and he thinks upon the whole, that if an assassination is productive of so little fun, he will have nothing to do with another one.
That Harold has slipped into history gives us as much surprise as that he has yet to suffer death gives us almost contempt for the scaffold. But if the scaffold must wait for only wise men to get upon it, it must rot. Your wise man does no murder in the first place, and if so, in the second, he dodges the penalty. In this world, Harold, idiotcy is oftener punished than guilt.
That Booth should have used Harold is very naturally accounted for.Actors live only to be admired; vanity rises to its climax in them.Booth preferred this sparrow to sing him peans rather than live by aneagle and be screamed at now and then.
At the right hand side of Harold sits a soldier in blue, who is evidently thinking about a game of quoits with his comrades in the jail yard; he wonders why lawyers are so very dry, and is surprised to find a trial for murder as tedious as a thanksgiving sermon.
But on the soldier's other hand is a figure which makes the center and cynosure of this thrilling scene. Taller by a whole head than either his companions or the sentries, Payne, the assassin, sits erect, and flings his barbarian eye to and fro, radiating the tremendous energy of his colossal physique.
He is the only man worthy to have murdered Mr. Seward. When against the delicate organization, the fine, subtle, nervous mind of the Secretary of State, this giant, knife in hand, precipitated himself, two forms of civilization met as distinctly as when the savage Gauls invaded the Roman senate.
Lawlessness and intelligence, the savage and the statesman, body and mind, fought together upon Mr. Seward's bed.
The mystery attending Payne's home and parentage still exists to make him more incomprehensible. Out of the vague, dimultima thule, like those Asiatic hordes which came from nowhere and shivered civilization, Payne suddenly appeared and fought his way to thesanctum sanctorumof law. I think his part in the assassination more remarkable than Booth's, The latter's crime was shrewdly plotted, as by one measuring intelligence with the whole government. But Payne did not think—he only struck!
With this man's face before me as I write, I am reminded of some Maori chief waging war from the lust of blood or the pride of local dominion. His complexion is bloodless, yet so healthy that a passing observer would afterward speak of it as ruddy. His face is broad, with a character nose, sensual lips, and very high cheek bones; the cranium is full and the brow speaking, while the head runs back to an abnormal apex at the tip of the cerebellum. His straight, lusterless black hair, duly parted, is at the summit so disturbed that tufts of it rise up like Red Jacket's or Tecumseh's; but the head is kept well up, and rests upon a wonderfully broad throat, muscular as one's thigh, and without any trace, as he sits, of the protuberance called Adam's apple. Withal, the eye is the man Payne's power. It is dark and speechless, and rolls here and there like that of a beast in a cage which strives in vain to understand the language of its captors. It seems to say, if anything, that, it has no sympathy with anybody approximate, and has submitted, like a lion bound, to the logic of conviction and of chains.
Payne looks at none of his fellow-prisoners: assassins caught seldom cares to recognise each other; for while there is faithfulness among thieves, there is none among murderers. His great white eyeball never roves to anybody's in the dock, nor theirs to his. He has confessed his crime and they know it; so they have no mutual hope; they listen to the evidence because it concerns them; ho looks at it only, because it cannot save him. He is entirely beardless, yet in his boyish chin more of a man physically than the rest, combined.
While I watch this man I am constantly repeating to myself that stanza of Bryant's:
"Upon the market place he stood,—A man of giant frame,Amid the gathering multitudeThat shrank to hear his name;All proud of step and firm of limb,His dark eye on the ground—And silently they gazed on him,As on a lion bound."
His dress, which we scarcely notice in the grander contrast of his pose and stature, is an old shirt of woolen blue, with a white nap at the button-holes, and upon his knees of black cloth he twirls, as if for relaxation, between his powerful manacles, a soiled white handkerchief—if from his mother, we conjecture, a gift to a bloodhound from his dam. His heavy handcuffs make his broad shoulders more narrow. Yet we can see by the outline of the sleeves what girth the muscles has, and the hand at the end of his long and bony arm is wide and huge, as if it could wield a claymore as well as a dirk. He also wears carpet slippers, but his ankles are clogged with so heavy irons that two men must carry them when he enters or leaves the dock. For this man there can be no sentiment—no more than for a bull. The flesh on his face is hard, as if cast, rather than generated, and while we see how he towers above the entire court, we watch him in wonder, as if he were some maniac denizen of a zone where men without minds grow to the stature and power of fiends.
The face of Payne is not of the traditional southern peculiarities. He resembles rather a Pennsylvania mountaineer than a Kentucky rustic.
Three weeks ago I gave, in an account of the conspiracy which many gainsayed, but which the trial has fully confirmed, a sketch of this man, to which I still adhere. He was furnished to Booth and John Surratt from Canada; sent upon special service with his life in his hands; and he faced the murder he was to commit like any prize-fighter. I pity Beall, who died intelligently for a wretched essay against civilians, that his biography and fate must be matched by this savage's!
Next to Payne, and crouching under him like a frog under a rock, is an inconsiderable soldier, who chews his cud, and would cheerfully hang his protege for the sake of being rid of him. My sympathies are entirely enlisted for this soldier; he has neither the joy of being acquitted, nor the excitement of being tried. He is quite a sizable man by himself, but Payne overhangs him, and the dullness of the trial quite stultifies him. The few points of law which are admitted here are not so evident to this soldier as the point of his bayonet. I see what ails him.
He wants to swear.
A beam running overhead divides the court lengthwise in half, and as the prisoners sit at the end of the court, the German Atzerott, or Adzerota, has a place just beneath the beam. This is very ominous for Atzerott. The filthiness of this man denies him sympathy. He is a disgusting little groveler of dry, sandy hair, oval head, ears set so close to the chin that one would think his sense of hearing limited to his jaws, and a complexion so yellow that the uncropped brownness of his beard does not materially darken it. He wears a grayish coat, low grimy shirt, and the usual carpet slippers of threadbare red over his shifting and shiftless feet. His head is bent forward, and seems to be anxiously trying to catch the tenor of the trial. Many persons outside of the court, Atzerott, are equally puzzled!
From as much examination of this man as his insignificance permits, I should call him a "gabby" fellow—loud of resolution, ignoble of effort. Over his lager no man would be braver. His face is familiar to me from a review of those detective cabinets usually called "Rogues' Galleries." As a "sneak thief" or "bagman," I should convict him by his face; the same indictment would make me acquit him instantly of assassination. In this estimate I rely upon evidence as well as upon appearance. Atzerott swaggered about Kirk wood's Hotel asking for the Vice-President's room; Payne or Booth would have done the murder silently. Nobody pities a dirty man. The same arts of dress and cleanliness which please ladies influence juries.
Next to Atzerott sits a soldier—a very jolly and smooth faced soldier—who at one time hears a witness say something laughable. The soldier immediately grins to the farthest point of his scalp. But he is chagrined to find that the joke is too trivial to admit of a laugh of duration. Very few jokes before the present court do so. But this soldier being of long charity and excellent patience, awaits the next joke like a veteran under orders, and reposes his chin upon the dock as if aware that between jokes there was ample time for a nap.
The next prisoner to the right is O'Laughlin. He is a small man, about twenty-eight years of age, attired in a fine, soiled coat, but without white linen upon either his bosom or neck, and handcuffs rest hugely upon his mediocrity. His moustache, eye-brows, and hair are regular and very black. He does not look unlike Booth, though he seems to have little bodily power, and he is very anxious, as if more earnest than any of the rest, to have a fair lease upon life. His countenance is not prepossessing, though he might be considered passably good looking in a mixed company.
Between O'Laughlin and the next prisoner, Spangler, sits a soldier in ultramarine—a discontented soldier, a moody, dissatisfied, and arbitrary soldier. His definition of military justice is like the boy's answer at school to the familiar question upon the Constitution of the United States:
"What rights do accused persons enjoy ?"
The boy wrote out, very carefully, this answer:
"Death by hanging."
The boy would have been correct had the question applied to accused persons before a court-martial.
Spangler, the scene-shifter and stage-carpenter, has the face and bearing of a day-laborer. His blue woollen shirt does not confuse him, as he is used to it. He has an oldish face, wrinkled by fearful anticipations, and his hair is thin. He is awkwardly built, and watches the trial earnestly, as if striving to catch between the links of evidence vistas of a life insured. This man has a simple and pleading face, and there is something genial in his great, incoherent countenance. He is said to have cleared the stage for Booth's escape, but this is indifferently testified to. He had often been asked by Booth to take a drink at the nearest bar. Persons who drink assure me that the greatest mark of confidence which a great man can show a lesser one is to make that tender; this, therefore, explains Booth's power over Spangler.
Spangler is the first scene-shifter who may become adramatis personę.
A soldier sits between Spangler and Doctor Mudd. The soldier would like Spangler to get up and go away, so that he could have as much of the bench as he might sleep upon. This particular soldier, I may be qualified to say, would sleep upon his post.
Doctor Mudd has a New England and not a Maryland face. He compares, to those on his left, as Hyperion to a squatter. His high, oval head is bald very far up, but not benevolently so, and it is covered with light red hair, so thin as to contrast indifferently with the denseness of his beard and goatee. His nose would be insignificant but for its sharpness, and at the nostrils it is swelling and high-spirited. His eyes impinge upon his brows, and they are shining and rather dark, while the brows themselves are so scantily clothed with hair that they seem quite naked. Mudd is neatly dressed in a green-grass duster, and white bosom and collar; if he had no other advantages over his associates these last would give it to him. He keeps his feet upon the rail before him in true republican style, and rolls a morsel of tobacco under his tongue.
The military commission works as if it were delegated not to try, but to convict, and Dr. Mudd, if he be innocent, is in only less danger than if he were guilty. He has a sort of home-bred intelligence in his face, and socially is as far above his fellows as Goliah of Gath above the rest of the Philistines.
On the right of Doctor Mudd sits a soldier, who is striving to look through his legs at the judge-advocate, as if taking a sort of secret aim at that person, with the intent to fetch him down, because he makes the trial so very dry, and the soldier so very thirsty.
The last man, who sits on the extreme right of the prisoners, is Mr. Sam. Arnold. He is, perhaps, the best looking of the prisoners, and the least implicated. He has a solid, pleasant face; has been a rebel soldier, foolishly committed himself to Booth, with perhaps no intention to do a crime, recanted in pen and ink, and was made a national character. Had he recanted by word of mouth he might have saved himself unpleasant dreams. This shows everybody the absurdity of writing what they can so easily say. The best thing Arnold ever wrote was his letter to Booth refusing to engage in murder. Yet this recantation is more in evidence against than then his original purpose.
Arnold looks out of the window, and feels easy.
The reporters who are present are generally young fellows, practical and ardent, like Woods, of Boston; Colburn, of THE WORLD; and Major Poore, who has been the chronicler of such scenes for twenty years. Ber. Pitman, one of the authors of phonetic writing, is among the official reporters, and the Murphies, who could report the lightning, if it could talk, are slashing down history as it passes in at their ears and runs out at their fingers' ends.
The counsel for the accused strike me as being commonplace lawyers. They either have no chance or no pluck to assert the dignity of their profession. Reverdy Johnson is not here. The first day disgusted him, as he is a practitioner oflaw. Yet the best word of the trial has been his:
"I, gentlemen, am a member of that body of legislators which creates courts-martial and major-generals!"
The commission has collectively an imposing appearance: the face of Judge Holt is swarthy; he questions with slow utterance, holding the witness in his cold, measuring eye. Hunter, who sits at the opposite end of the table, shuts his eyes now and then, either to sleep or think, or both, and the other generals take a note or two, and watch for occasions to distinguish themselves.
Excepting Judge Holt, the court has shown as little ability as could be expected from soldiers, placed in unenviable publicity, and upon a duty for which they are disqualified, both by education and acumen. Witness the lack of dignity in Hunter, who opened the court by a coarse allusion to "humbug chivalry;" of Lew. Wallace, whose heat and intolerance were appropriately urged in the most exceptional English; of Howe, whose tirade against the rebel General Johnson was feeble as it was ungenerous! This court was needed to show us at least the petty tyranny of martial law and the pettiness of martial jurists. The counsel for the defence have just enough show to make the unfairness of the trial partake of hypocrisy, and the wideness of the subjects discussed makes one imagine that the object of the commission is to write a cyclopedia, and not to hang or acquit six or eight miserable wretches.