Here we have a man on trial for participation in the murder of a President; yet, in his indictment, he is only charged with the murder of one Abraham Lincoln. His fellow conspirators had been convicted of murdering Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, and Commander-in-Chief of the armies and navy of the United States, and of attempting to kill William H. Seward, Secretary of State of the United States, and lying in wait to kill Andrew Johnson, Vice-President of the United States, and Ulysses S. Grant, commander in the field of the armies of the United States, for the purpose of overthrowing the government of the United States in aid of the existing rebellion. Under this charge they had been condemned and some of them executed. This was the result of a military trial in time of war. This trial had been denounced by every rebel sympathizer in the land. Great lawyers and statesmen had argued with vehemence that these assassins had been tried by an unconstitutional tribunal. The dead President had been denounced as a tyrant, and usurper of authority; one who had trampled under foot the Constitution he had sworn to protect and defend by proclaiming martial law, and suspending the writ of _habeas corpus_; and even in prosecuting a war to compel rebellious States to submit to the lawful authority of the government, and now they would tie up the hands of the government by insisting that it could only try these traitorous assassins, constitutionally, before a civil court. The country stood divided on this contention, just as it did on the issues of the war, and partisan feeling ran as high in this discussion as it did on the right of secession or the right of the government to compel submission to its authority. The sophistry of this reasoning, when applied to a time of war, was made apparent by the results of this trial of John H. Surratt before a civil court, in time of peace. No government could protect itself under such a construction of the Constitution, because no government could ever convict a traitorous assassin before a jury made up of its enemies as well as its friends.