Not many days elapsed before the government had in custody seven men, Herold, Spangler, Payne, O'Laughlin, Arnold, Atzerodt, and Mudd, and one woman, Mary E. Surratt, all charged with being concerned in the conspiracy. But though they had been so happily caught, there was much difficulty in determining just how to deal with them. Such was the force of secession feeling in the District of Columbia that no jury there could be expected to find them guilty, unless the panel should be packed in a manner which would be equally against honesty and good policy. After some deliberation, therefore, the government decided to have recourse to a military commission, provided this were possible under the law, and the attorney-general, under guise of advising the administration, understood distinctly that he must find that it was possible. Accordingly he wrote a long, sophistical, absurd opinion, in which he mixed up the law of nations and the "laws of war," and emerged out of the fog very accurately at the precise point at which he was expected to arrive. Not that fault should be found with him for performing this feat; it was simply one of many instances, furnished by the war, of the homage which necessity pays to law and which law repays to necessity. That which must be done must also be stoutly and ingeniously declared to be legal. It was intolerable that the men should escape, yet their condemnation must be accomplished in a respectable way. So the Military Commission was promptly convened, heard the evidence which could be got together at such short notice, and found all the accused guilty, as undoubtedly they were. The men were a miserable parcel of fellows, belonging in that class of the community called "roughs," except only Mudd, who was a country doctor. Mrs. Surratt was a fit companion for such company. Herold, Atzerodt and Payne were hanged on July 7; O'Laughlin, Spangler, Arnold, and Mudd were sent to the Dry Tortugas, there to be kept at hard labor in the military prison for life, save Spangler, whose term was six years. Mrs. Surratt was also found guilty and condemned to be hanged. Five members of the commission signed a petition to President Johnson to commute this sentence, but he refused, and on July 7 she also met the fate which no one could deny that she deserved. John H. Surratt escaped for the time, but was apprehended and tried in the District of Columbia, in 1867; he had then the advantage of process under the regular criminal law, and the result was that on September 22, 1868, a _nolle prosequi_ was entered, and he was set free, to swell the multitude of villains whose impunity reflects no great credit upon our system of dealing with crime.