When the President of the United States, the Secretary of War, the
Military Commission, the Judge-Advocates, and the Executioner-General had
buried the woman against whose life the whole military power of the
Government, fresh from its triumph over a gigantic rebellion, had been
levelled;--buried her broken body deep beneath the soil of the
prison-yard, in close contact with the bodies of confessed felons;
flattened the earth over her grave, replaced the pavement of stone, locked
the door of entrance to the charnel-house and placed the key in the
keeping of the stern Secretary;--they may have imagined that the iniquity
of the whole proceeding was hidden forever.
But, _horribile dictu!_ the ghost of Mary E. Surratt would not down. It
troubled the breast of the witness Weichman. It haunted the precincts of
the Bureau of Military Justice. It pursued Bingham into the House of
Representatives. It blanched the laurels of the great War Minister.
Politics, history and the very vicissitudes of human events seemed
subservient to the vindication of this humble victim.
Hardly had the delivery of the prisons of Washington, which followed the
close of the trial, taken place, before the man who, as he himself swore,
always had been treated as a son by the woman he betrayed, began to make
advances to her sorrowing friends. He pretended to make confession of his
perjury. He told a friend that his testimony would have been very much
more favorable had it not been dictated to him by the officers who had him
in charge; that the meeting of Lloyd and Mrs. Surratt was accidental, as
she and he (Weichman) had already started for home before Lloyd returned,
and only turned back because the buggy was discovered to be broken. The
traitor soon discovered that he made no headway by such disclosures, but
only met with a sterner repulse and a deeper loathing. His troubled soul
then turned to another quarter. It has been stated that his testimony on
the trial was somewhat indefinite and inconclusive. Complaints had been
uttered by the officers conducting the prosecution. It was proved upon a
subsequent occasion that one of these officers had actually threatened the
witness that he would hang as an accomplice in the assassination did he
not make his evidence more satisfactory. It appeared, also, that the
Secretary of War had promised to protect and take care of him. Driven back
by Mrs. Surratt's friends from his attempt at propitiation, Weichman
resolved that he would yet earn his reward by retouching his former
testimony so as to make it more definite and telling. He saw, at last,
that to save himself from everlasting ignominy he must, as far as in him
lay, make sure of the guilt of his victim. Actuated by these or similar
motives, he, on the 11th day of August, 1865, wrote out, and swore to, a
statement in which he, by a suspicious exercise of memory, detailed
conversations with Mrs. Surratt and significant incidents, all pointing to