The Judges of the Secret Court

by David Stacton

  So, though he did not much like the job, he sat down and dealt with them. That was his way. Yet, if anyone had praised him for doing so, he would have been surprised. It was Junius, in that family, who had the reputation for being practical, not he. He was merely the one who earned money, and until this terrible thing, had hoped to become an artist. As he had said, “In America art degenerates below the standard even of a trade.” So it was up to him to do odd jobs for the family. To them that was all he was good for. He was their odd job man.

  “There is no solidity in Love, no truth in Friendship, no steadiness in Marital Faith,” Asia wrote him. He would not have gone quite that far, but Asia had provocation. Her nurse patriotically refused to tend her through her pregnancy. Her doctor was nervous about being seen making house visits. Clarke had denounced her, publicly and privately. Only a minor actress she scarcely knew, a woman named Effie Germon, good in comedy parts, had asked if she might be of help. As Asia said, it was enough almost to revive belief in human goodness. Almost, but of course not quite.

  Clarke and Junius Brutus had been let out of prison. Junius was tranquil enough. If the world had frozen over, Junius would have been tranquil. But Clarke was furious. The Booths were all Iagos, he told Asia, male and female. He demanded a divorce. Divorce from her was his only salvation, now. He almost hoped the child she was carrying miscarried. It was half a Booth. For that reason, if it did not miscarry now, it would be sure to do so later.

  Then he went out and left her. She could only write to Edwin. Though she had once treated him badly enough, by refusing to receive his first wife, and by denouncing her as a cheap actress, Edwin, she knew, would not hold that against her.

  Nor did he. But he remembered it. His poor dead Mary was still the only woman he cared about. Edwina, her daughter, was with Asia, and he did not even dare to go fetch her home until the public outcry against them all died down. Not even friends quite made up for the malice of the world. Yet at least John Wilkes could not bring any more ignominy upon them now. Like the others, he was glad Johnny was dead.

  So was Stanton.

  Stanton was setting up the trial of the conspirators; and it would have been inconvenient to have the chief conspirator there to deny what Stanton had decided was the truth of the matter. On the 28th of April, for similar reasons, he had issued an order that all prisoners were to have canvas bags fastened over their heads, for better security against conversation with them. They were to have a hole to breathe and eat through, but no holes for their eyes. Payne was to be secured to prevent self-destruction. Security was his passion, and to maintain security, one must have a plot against it. He wanted no one to deny that plot. He had the prisoners transferred to the Old Capitol Prison, from the various cells in which, until now, he had secluded them.

  A curious man, Mr. Stanton, in appearance, since he was so short, rather like a devil doll turned schoolteacher. People said he was completely disinterested, since graft meant nothing to him. Unfortunately power meant a great deal. He did not bother to go home any more at night. He slept on a cot in the War Department instead. He could not bear to be away from the source of power. He was a bully with a low pitched, silky voice. The more of a bully he became, the better modulated and the softer the voice. He was also a coward. He did not like to see his victims. Though he had set up the Old Capitol Prison as an oubliette, he never went there. The lowest he descended into his own sewers, was to have his informers brought upstairs to see him.

  The best of these was Mrs. Surratt’s lodger, Weichmann. He did not stoop to giving Weichmann instructions as to what to say, for he had a horror of known perjury. But he made it plain to the poor, snivelling, self-seeking creature what would happen to him if he didn’t say the right things. Weichmann would do as he was told. As for suborning him, there was nothing wrong with that. That was an act in the public interest. It would promote security. So Stanton, one of the new men, those selfless figures who want nothing for themselves but the prerogatives of their office, in which, soft shelled themselves and weak, they lurk like cuttlefish, ready to grasp anything that comes by to nourish their enormous self-importance.

  He was not concerned with good and evil. He was concerned with maintaining order in the State; that was his duty, and no one could maintain that so well as he. Thus he was glad Booth was dead. There was no telling what these spies and conspirators might know, and there were some things Stanton did not wish to have known. At times it had been necessary for him to intrigue against and to deceive Lincoln, just as he would have to do against Johnson, for the good of the State and of the War Department. Now the man was dead and deified already, anything blurted out about that would do no good, only harm. Besides, he was a coward.

  His power sprang from that system of arbitrary arrest which resulted from the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. To such powers as he derived from that illegality, he had added his own secret service and complete control over public communications. As he had once told the British Ambassador, he could arrest anyone, and no power on earth, except that of the President, could release them. Could the Queen of England, he had asked the Ambassador, do so much?

  Not that he did not have a sense of humour. Three times a week he did his own marketing. It was one of his few pleasures to bumble through the produce stalls, with a servant behind him to carry the basket. When a Confederate sympathizer tried to cheat him on lettuces, he playfully threatened the man with the Old Capitol Prison. Old Madison, his Negro, did the same. That made vegetables much cheaper and shopping much faster. The Old Capitol Prison settled everything.

  Perhaps every good man has a bad man to do his dirty work, for since corruption is the price of order, how should a good man keep himself unsullied, otherwise? Every Lincoln has a Stanton. But Lincoln had been shrewd enough to control the man. Now Lincoln was gone. Stanton missed the tug of war between them, but apart from that these days he scarcely gave Lincoln a thought. He had no time. He was too busy with the coming trial. He was anxious about procedure. He even accepted advice, a thing he seldom did, though with a petulant expression. His great soft womanly eyes, behind his spectacles, were full of reproach when he was contradicted, but still, he did listen.

  He was always reluctant to let go anybody who had fallen into his prisons, but on advice, he let some of them go. Dr. Stewart was exonerated by Booth’s note; Mrs. Quesenberry was a harmless old woman, and if prosecuted, would attract too much sympathy from the press. Mr. Cox’s nigger girl swore herself blue that Mr. Booth had not been there. How otherwise could she swear, for she did not want Massa Cox strung up; but there was no way of shaking her story. The actors had to be let go. There was no point in keeping Ford, the owner of the theatre, on display. But he did not like it. He had too few people left to accuse. And now Baker said he had made a deal with that silly young Confederate cavalry man, Jett. He would have to be let off, too. And there had to be a trial. He was left only with Mrs. Surratt, Dr. Mudd, Payne, Atzerodt, Herold, Arnold, Spangler, and O’Laughlin.

  Mrs. Surratt did not bother him. That John Surratt, her son, could not be rounded up was infuriating. The woman had a neck. She could hang as well as anybody else. Weichmann said she was guilty. That shrinking fool could now go out and say so in court. Stanton would let the daughter and Miss Fitzpatrick off. That was clemency enough.

  He turned his attention to the choice of a military commission to try them. To prove that the murder was the result not of his own carelessness, but of the immensity of the plot, he threw everything into the proceedings, and he would need men who could stomach what they were fed. That the trial would be held before a military court, not a civil, and that therefore, there would be no jury, would be some help, but he chose his men carefully. He had not been a public prosecutor in his youth for nothing. When he had finished his list of the judges he was satisfied. Soldiers will do as they are told, and as for the civilian members, Burnett and Bingham, they had too wobbly a record to show mercy to others now. The way to show innocence i
n this world, is to prove someone else guilty, and they had their orders and would obey them. General Wallace, of course, was honest, but he was also a pious fool, he gave the panel of judges a certain distinction, and could be led by them. As for the others, Holt, the leader, was in his pocket, and the rest were straw men. Stanton was ready. It would be an excellent show, but since he knew how it would end, he was now free to turn, with a little relaxed smile, to more important matters.

  XXXIV

  In Springfield, the funeral train had arrived a little late, at nine o’clock in the morning. Even in death, there were so many demands upon the President’s time, all that long journey of seventeen hundred miles.

  The procession at Springfield was unostentatious, for Springfield was where he had come from, but it was splendid enough, for Springfield was also the place where they had known him, and where the Todds lived, a place of a certain clapboard and wooden column elegance, despite its mud.

  Over his catafalque, in the State House, were lettered his own words, spoken at Philadelphia in 1861. “Sooner than surrender these principles, I would be assassinated on the spot.” No doubt they expressed what the New York World meant, when speaking, the day of his death, of the quaint and uncouth nature of his rhetoric. He should, of course, have said “rather”. But he had not, and now he was dead.

  The lying in state was the same as elsewhere, and yet not quite the same. The crowds filed by, saw that face which, ravaged by the demands made upon him in life, was no less ravaged by being exposed to his admirers so often in death. Minute guns sounded, as though to bring rain. There was a choir and a band, a rendition of “Peace, Troubled Soul”, and the coffin was closed for the last time. The party then processed to Oak Ridge Cemetery, where, as at the cities on his route, the Last Inaugural was read, with malice towards none.

  The grave was temporary.

  The malice was to come.

  Part Three

  XXXV

  Edwin said nothing. He wanted to see no one. But as usual he did his best. Though he had sworn never to enter Washington City again, he went down to consult with Defence Counsel. He was only too eager to help those poor people his brother had led astray. The Defence wished him to say that Wilkes had such power over the minds of others that he had rendered the defendants temporarily insane. Edwin did not believe that, but he agreed to say so, if it would help. Unfortunately a good man is not the same thing as a good witness. The Defence decided not to call him.

  That was a relief to Edwin. He could not have borne to see any more accusing eyes. One look at the trial room, empty and waiting, and he had guessed what would happen to these misfortunate people. He went back to New York and Mary Ann. All Mary Ann could talk about was Wilkes. Did she not realize that John Wilkes had caused all this?

  No, she did not.

  The best he could do was to send a cheque to Mr. Garrett, for the furniture stored in his barn and for the barn itself. His only solace was Edwina. With Sleeper Clarke out of prison and back home torturing Asia, it had been necessary to get Edwina out of Philadelphia. Now she was with him. When he went into the nursery, to tuck her in at night, he would say: “Edwina is Papa’s baby. Edwina is his darling.” She was like a Reynolds portrait: innocent, but artful. She would reach up her chubby little arms, put them around his neck, pull him off balance, and say sleepily: “Papa is my baby.”

  Perhaps he was, at that. But he was no one else’s. He scarcely dared to leave the house. The streets were too ugly. And yet what did it mean? He was a Shakespearian tragedian. He knew better than to ask such a question. It didn’t mean anything. It had just happened.

  It was still happening. It would always go on happening. He could never forget it.

  For though he did not attend the trial, and refused to discuss it, he read about it in the newspapers, all the newspapers, and when the Government brought out Pitman’s unbiased, if censured, transcript of the proceedings, he bought a copy and read that, and understood it, perhaps, too well.

  It was something he never recovered from, that trial. Being an actor, he knew every audience for the latent mob it was, a democracy is only an audience which has surged up on the stage, and as for Stanton, as for politicians, who are only puppet masters after all, though they can move their own men, they can do nothing to stop the fury of the mob, once they have aroused it, and would not if they could, for they need the diversion of that public clamour and that audience, for that is what allows them profitably to pull the strings.

  But we may all of us at any moment be lifted up by those strings. That was the terror of it. Mrs. Surratt might as well have been Mary Ann; Payne, his brother Junius, and all of them himself. Anyone might be caught at any time, and caught or not, be guilty. Yet it was those poor people down in Washington who had to bear the brunt of that guilt. Wilkes had seen to that. Even if innocent, even if spared mere human malice, they were still caught up in the inexorable malice of events. It was inevitable. He recognized that. It was less a process than a parable. He could only watch. He had plenty of time to do that, for, as Sleeper Clarke had said so bitterly, he had not been touched. On the contrary: every moment of the process, as he followed it, tore everything he lived for into shreds.

  XXXVI

  The trial began on May 10th, which was John Wilkes’s birthday, though only Mary Ann, Asia, and Edwin remembered that. It had a curious atmosphere of rehearsal, that courtroom, on the first day. There were pauses.

  Yet it was some release to the prisoners, just to come into that courtroom to be condemned. The seven men entered first. Even among the condemned there are social distinctions. Six of the men wore what was called a stiff shackle, two handcuffs connected by an iron bar, so that they had to hold their hands out stiffly before them, or up, in the attitude of begging dogs. Dr. Mudd, however, had been allowed links to connect his handcuffs, so that he could chink his hands restlessly in his lap. All seven men clanked their leg chains as they sat down. The iron had developed the acrid, burnt rubber smell of sweaty metal. To a man, they blinked and shut their eyes.

  That was because for two weeks they had sat in solitary confinement, with those canvas bags over their heads. The bags had been removed only for their appearance in court, and would be clapped back over their heads, like candle snuffers, when they were returned to their cells. For two weeks they had seen nothing but the dim glow of daylight through the close weave of the canvas. Now they could see what that light contained. They could see their accusers.

  The court reporters and spectators were disappointed. Two weeks seemed to have changed the men’s appearance very little.

  The prisoners sat down to the right of the door. Among them only Dr. Mudd looked worth hanging and only Payne uncowed. That puzzled baby face had a certain physical dignity. He had been given a new black jumper. It spread tight across his enormous chest, and only the stretch of the cloth, as he breathed, showed whether or not he was moved by what he saw and heard.

  His appearance was inconvenient. He towered over the others. He, at least, had tried to kill a man. He was a giant. No one was averse to seeing a giant in chains, yet in some manner he dominated that room. Try as you would, your eyes came back to him whenever the prosecution had scored a point against the defence. And despite their elaborate and well pressed uniforms, he made the judges seem somehow puny. But mostly he dominated that room because he was uncowed. The court could not get around the impression that he was in some way scornfully amused by all this pretence of legality, and they did not like that. There is little satisfaction to be gotten from the hanging of a public statue. They would rather have smashed it instead. But that they were forbidden to do. There was the press to be thought of. Besides, how could he seem so amused? He had been examined by War Department doctors. They said he had not the intelligence to betray such an attitude.

  The press was staring at the one remaining empty chair, the one to the left of the door into the prisoners’ dock. That was Mrs. Surratt’s chair.

  The door opened an
d she entered.

  There was no one who did not look up. About her already there was the air of a martyr. That she should be on trial at all disturbed everyone but Stanton, who had never seen her. Something in a country should be sacrosanct, and so far, in this country, it had been their mothers and the more innocent of their womenfolk. She made them uneasy. She also cheated them by entering veiled. She had been spared the canvas cap, for women, too, as well as gentlemen, have their prerogatives. She had also been spared handcuffs. Day after day she was to sit there, behind her veil. She raised it only once, in order to be identified. Her face at that moment had had no expression, but veiled, she unnerved them. They tried not to look at her.

  For her, too, to be released from solitary confinement and so see people again, if only from a distance, while they condemned her, was a sort of freedom. She sat there in a ramrod posture. They would not even let her see a priest. She had no one to advise her. Dignity she associated with immobility, and with not being stared at. Hence the veil. Besides, behind the veil she could allow herself to show her fear. She did not understand. What had exposed her to this horrible thing?

  For it had been horrible.

  It was true she was not entirely innocent. She knew that John, her son, had been up to something. He had, and she knew that, too, though she had never quizzed him, been a runner for the Confederates. But that was just the high spirits of youth, and there had been no harm in it. At least she had been aware of none.

  She had not seen her fellow conspirators before. From where she sat, she could see only their profiles. But she recognized three of them. John had brought Payne, under another name, she realized now, which made her angry, Atzerodt, and Herold to the house; and Mr. Booth had been there, of course. To bring such people to the house had been very wicked of John. She looked down at her crocheted black mittens.