Assassination of Lincoln: a History of the Great Conspiracy: Trial of the Conspirators by a Military Commission, and a Review of the Trial of John H. SurrattHarris, T. M. (Thomas Mealey)
History
Assassination of Lincoln: a History of the Great Conspiracy: Trial of the Conspirators by a Military Commission, and a Review of the Trial of John H. Surratt
Harris, T. M. (Thomas Mealey)
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Assassination; Surratt, John H. (John Harrison), 1844-1916
Matthews afterwards published what he said he desired to testify
to, but was not permitted to do so by the Court. The statement that
he claimed to be of Booth in this paper, gave the lie to Atzerodt's
confession. These able lawyers knew full well that culprits,
anticipating arrest and trial, could not be permitted to manufacture
evidence in their own favor in advance. Yet they did not scruple
to use, in an indirect way, in argument before the jury, this very
testimony that had been excluded. Booth's diary, Booth's statement
for publication, Atzerodt's confession, and the lecture of John H.
Surratt, in which he makes his confession and statement of the affair,
are all of a piece, and alike unworthy of credit, because they are all
contradicted by sufficient and reliable testimony in every important
particular. The eloquence of counsel in regard to the grave of Mrs.
Surratt, who was buried in the grounds of the old arsenal, being a
nameless grave, is wasted eloquence in the mind of every loyal man and
woman in the country, as the heniousness of the crime of which she was
convicted, made it fitting that she should sleep in a nameless grave,
and that the spot of her resting-place be unknown, as an admonition to
all traitors to their country, and its free institutions of government,
and whose disloyalty fits them for the highest crimes that man can
commit, of the infamy that awaits them in the just verdict of an
outraged people. Mrs. Surratt's remains were given up to her daughter
two years later, in 1869.
We will now give a few of the opening paragraphs of Judge Pierrepont's
argument for the prosecution, in which he disposes of the outside and
irrelevant matter that had been lugged into the defense, and out of
which they had endeavored to make so much capital.
"May it please your honor, and gentlemen of the jury, I have not, in
the progress of this long and tedious cause, had the opportunity as
yet of addressing to you one word. My time has now arrived, 'Yea, all
that a man hath will he give for his life.' When the book of Job was
written, this was true, and it is just as true to-day. A man, in order
to save his life, will give his property, will give his liberty, will
sacrifice his good name, and will desert his father, his brother, his
mother and his sister. He will lift up his hand before Almighty God and
swear that he is innocent of the crime with which he is charged. He
will bring perjury upon his soul, giving all that he hath in the world,
and be ready to take the chances and jump the life to come; and so
far as counsel place themselves in the situation of their client, and
just to the degree that they absorb his feelings, his terror, and his
purposes, just so far will counsel do the same.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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