The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt

John Stuart Mill · en
He was seconded by a lieutenant well-fitted for such a purpose--General
Lafayette C. Baker, Chief of the Detective Force. In one of the two
minority reports presented to the House of Representatives by the
Judiciary Committee, on the Impeachment Investigation of 1867, this man
and his methods are thus delineated:

    "The first witness examined was General Lafayette C. Baker, late chief
    of the detective police, and although examined on oath, time and
    again, and on various occasions, it is doubtful whether he has in any
    one thing told the truth, even by accident. In every important
    statement he is contradicted by witnesses of unquestioned credibility.
    And there can be no doubt that to his many previous outrages,
    entitling him to an unenviable immortality, he has added that of
    wilful and deliberate perjury; and we are glad to know that no one
    member of the committee deems any statement made by him as worthy of
    the slightest credit. What a blush of shame will tinge the cheek of
    the American student in future ages, when he reads that this miserable
    wretch for years held, as it were, in the hollow of his hand, the
    liberties of the American people. That, clothed with power by a
    reckless administration, and with his hordes of unprincipled tools and
    spies permeating the land everywhere, with uncounted thousands of the
    people's money placed in his hands for his vile purposes, this
    creature not only had power to arrest without crime or writ, and
    imprison without limit, any citizen of the republic, but that he
    actually did so arrest thousands, all over the land, and filled the
    prisons of the country with the victims of his malice, or that of his
    masters."

In this man's hands Secretary Stanton placed all the resources of the War
Department, in soldiers, detectives, material and money, and commanded him
to push ahead and apprehend all persons suspected of complicity in the
assumed conspiracy, and to conduct an investigation as to the origin and
progress of the crime, upon the theory he had adopted and which, as much
as any other, Baker was perfectly willing to accept and then, by his
peculiar methods, establish. Forthwith was ushered in the grand carnival
of detectives. Far and wide they sped. They had orders from Baker to do
two things:

I.--To arrest all the "Suspect." II.--By promises, rewards, threats,
deceit, force, or any other effectual means, to extort confessions and
procure testimony to establish the conspiracy whose existence had been
postulated.