Toward the conclusion of his July 5 interview with Johnson at the White House, Holt wrote an order approving the sentences imposed by the court and naming July 7 as the day for the execution of the four death sentences. Johnson affixed his name to it. Holt gathered up all the papers and went directly to the War Department. “I happened to be with Mr. Stanton as Judge Holt came in,” Burnett recalled years later. “After greetings the latter remarked, ‘I have just come from a conference with the President over the proceedings of the military commission.’ ‘Well,’ said Mr. Stanton, ‘what has he done?’ ‘He has approved the findings and sentence of the Court,’ replied Judge Holt. ‘What did he say about the recommendation of mercy of Mrs. Surratt?’ next inquired Mr. Stanton. ‘He said,’ answered Judge Holt, ‘that she must be punished with the rest; that no reasons were given for his interposition by those asking for clemency, in her case, except age and sex. He said her sex furnished no good ground for his interfering; that women and men should learn that if women committed crimes they would be punished; that if they entered into conspiracies to assassinate, they must suffer the penalty; that were this not so, hereafter conspirators and assassins would use women as their instruments; it would be mercy to womankind to let Mrs. Surratt suffer the penalty of her crime.’ ”
Similar testimony is offered by Clampitt, who went with Mrs. Surratt’s daughter on July 6 to Holt to ask him to plead with the President for mercy to the mother. Holt met them at the White House and told them that Johnson “is immovable.” The President, according to Holt, had reviewed the trial proceedings and findings “and has no reason to change the date of the execution, and you might as well attempt to overthrow this building as to alter his decision.”14
If Burnett’s and Clampitt’s recollections of these conversations are substantially correct, then Holt was giving every impression that Johnson had seen the petition for clemency. Stanton would have had no reason to question the inference that Holt had shown it to the President. No direct evidence incriminating Stanton in Holt’s dissimulation has ever come to light, and Holt alone may have been blameworthy.
On the other hand, Holt would have been a bold man indeed to deceive Stanton in a matter of such importance. Nor does it seem likely that the petition could have been omitted from Pitman’s published record of the trial without Stanton’s knowledge and consent. And complicity in the one implies complicity in the other.
Yet Welles, who made a profession of dredging up facts and fancies critical of Stanton, confessed in 1870 that “my impression is and always has been that Holt was the companion and coadjutor of Stanton, yet I have no positive proof of the fact, and I should not, therefore, feel justified in [so] placing him before the public.” David Miller DeWitt, whose study of the conspiracy trial has been amplified but never superseded, believed that Stanton first connived with Holt, Bingham, and Burnett to secure the death sentence and then helped see to it that Johnson never learned of the petition for clemency. But no one knows what took place in the secret session of the military commission, and DeWitt’s conclusion rests on conjecture. Guy W. Moore, who had access to documents that were unavailable to DeWitt, could find nothing, except by unverifiable inference, connecting Stanton with the decision arrived at by the court.
The only attempt by Stanton to bring the facts out into the open was made more than a year later when he asked the cabinet to approve Holt’s request for a court of inquiry to deal with the widespread rumors concerning the Surratt mercy petition. But President Johnson refused the request.
Shortly before Stanton died he evoked a promise from Bingham to keep forever secret what both men knew of the Surratt case. Years later, Bingham confessed to Holt only that Stanton’s “advice” was “to await the final judgment of the people.” The nature of their information, then, is still secret. But it appears from the fragmentary evidence that Stanton died convinced that Mrs. Surratt had been guilty, and he had no remorse over her punishment. Coming to believe that Holt had used him as well as the President for the fulfillment of his own sense of mission, Stanton refused to reveal publicly what he felt was the truth. If this surmise is accurate, then Stanton’s reticence saved, rather than injured, Holt’s reputation.15
The news reached the public on July 6 that Mrs. Surratt was to die the next day. Friends and sympathizers began last-minute efforts to save her from the gallows. Father Walter, pastor of St. Patrick’s Church, who had declared his belief in Mrs. Surratt’s innocence, secured a pass from the War Department to visit her. That afternoon, General Hardie went to the priest and informed him that the pass given to him was invalid because Stanton had not signed it, and added: “I want you to make me a promise to say nothing of Mrs. Surratt’s innocence, and I will give you the necessary pass.” Father Walter declared indignantly that he would proclaim his belief as he chose to, even if Stanton would have him hanged for it. But as Hardie prepared to leave, the priest said: “I cannot suffer Mrs. Surratt to die without administering the sacrament.” He agreed to keep silent, whereupon Hardie presented him with a pass already signed by Stanton.
When the incident came to light a few days later, it caused a stir in the press, and the onus immediately fastened upon Stanton. Hardie hastened to explain that he had gone to the priest in a “friendly and kindly” spirit to request that he desist from talking about the matter because of turbulent public sentiment. His visit had been unofficial and not suggested by or known to Stanton. Walter had become so denunciatory, said Hardie, that he had thought of obtaining another priest for Mrs. Surratt, but when the father calmed down, he had decided to give him the pass. Stanton had “made no condition” as to its issuance, Hardie insisted.
It became known still later, however, that as a precautionary measure General Hancock had been sent to call on Walter’s superior in Baltimore, who had admonished Walter to “observe silence.” Under this injunction, Father Walter attended Mrs. Surratt until she went to the scaffold. In later years, he always insisted that she had been innocent of the crime.16
In a last desperate effort to save Mrs. Surratt, her counsel appealed to Stanton’s friend Judge Andrew Wylie, of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, for a writ of habeas corpus. He issued it on the morning of the day set for the execution. But President Johnson sent an order to Hancock suspending the privilege of the writ. The hammering continued on the scaffolds.
That same morning General Hartranft informed the President by letter that the assassin Payne had made a statement to him absolving Mrs. Surratt of complicity in both the assassination and the abduction plot. A certain John S. Brophy brought a letter to Holt in which he stated that he had heard Weichmann admit to giving false evidence and that Weichmann would make a written confession if assured that it would be handed to Johnson personally and remain a secret. An endorsement on Brophy’s letter affirms that it was presented to the President. If so, he paid no heed to it, or to Hartranft.
Outside the President’s office Mrs. Surratt’s daughter went into hysterics on being denied access to him; Johnson had ordered all suppliants referred to Holt. Behind the closed door Johnson, in a consultation with Stanton, Harlan, and one or two other members of his cabinet, was talking informally of the advisability of commuting Mrs. Surratt’s sentence. According to Harlan’s recollection, Stanton argued against mercy in terms so much like Johnson’s statement of July 5, as reported by Burnett, that either Stanton and Johnson had identical ideas, which may have been the case, or Harlan was putting his memory of Johnson’s words into Stanton’s mouth.17
Shortly after one o’clock on the afternoon of July 7, the condemned prisoners were hanged. The next day Anna Surratt petitioned Stanton for her mother’s body, but, still feeling that the total responsibility for the conspirators was Holt’s, Stanton referred the petition to him, and he refused to grant it.
Johnson had at first directed that the other convicted prisoners be committed to the Albany Penitentiary. But Stanton, aware that efforts were under way to have federal judges review the
legality of the culprits’ military trial, persuaded the President to send the prisoners outside the jurisdiction of all civil courts. Stanton felt no mercy at all for these men; they had helped to kill Lincoln and should pay the price. On this recommendation Johnson ordered them to the sun-baked Dry Tortugas, off the Florida coast.18 For this concern over jurisdiction, which for Stanton was part of larger problems involving the Army’s ability to function in what he still felt was an emergency situation, he was to receive public condemnation.
Stanton also became the target for popular censure for his closing of Ford’s Theater. Determined that nothing connected with Lincoln’s murder should serve to glorify that deed or become a shoddy commercial exploitation, Stanton, soon after the assassination, had posted guards at the theater. He planned to confiscate it to prevent it from ever again being used for public entertainment. Bates thought that this was another example of Stanton’s tyranny, and many others agreed with him. But the President and McCulloch, Welles, and Harlan in the cabinet concurred with Stanton on the necessity for the move, all fearing that riots and violence must ensue if it reopened as a theater. And army spokesmen afforded Stanton some comforting support. The Army and Navy Journal editorialized that if Ford “did not know enough, of himself, to close its career as a playhouse, it is fortunate that there is a man in Washington competent and spirited enough to give the instruction.”19
1 Guy W. Moore, The Case of Mrs. Surratt (Norman, 1954), 18–24; Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, 178; Hill to Stanton, April 16, 1865, Stanton MSS; DeWitt, Assassination, 73.
2 DeWitt, Assassination, 67–8, 86–7; Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, 198; O.R., XLVI, pt. 3, 963; Baker, History of the United States Secret Service (Philadelphia, 1867), 540–2. Impeachment of the President, House Rep. 7, 40th Cong., 2d sess., 409 (cited hereafter as Impeachment Report), contains Stanton’s testimony explaining to the House Judiciary Committee the reasons for the “mystery” surrounding Booth’s burial—to prevent a hagiography from growing. Stanton later pardoned Corbett for his act; Byron B. Johnson, Abraham Lincoln and Boston Corbett (Waltham, Mass., 1914), 36–8.
3 The reward for W. C. Cleary was $10,000; O.R., XLVII, pt. 3, 301; XLIX, pt. 2, 566–7; ser. 2, VIII, 549, 552; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 299–300; Seymour J. Frank, “The Conspiracy to Implicate the Confederate Leaders in Lincoln’s Assassination,” MVHR, XL, 631. Allen, op. cit., 136, suggests that Johnson more than Holt or Stanton inspired the second proclamation as well as the initiative for the military trial of the assassins; confirmed in Dana to James S. Pike, May 10, 1865, CFL.
4 Mrs. Campbell to Stanton, May 28, 1865, Hitchcock Papers, LC; same to M. Blair, July 17, 28, 1865, Blair Family Papers, LC; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 306, 331–2; O.R., ser. 2, VIII, 550–4, 559–62, 576–7, 703.
5 Brady to Stanton, May 14, 1865, Stanton MSS; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 303–5; Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, 468; Henry L. Burnett, “Some Incidents in the Trial of President Lincoln’s Assassins,” in James G. Wilson and Titus M. Coan (eds.), Personal Recollections of the War of the Rebellion (New York, 1891), 189.
6 Stanton to Pierrepont on the suit, in O.R., XLVI, pt. 3, 1141–2, 1149; R. Marsh to Stanton, June 2, 1865, Stanton MSS, on Bates. Bates’s argument reprinted in Washington National Intelligencer, Jan. 3, 1867; and see Bates, Diary, 481–3; Speed, Opinion on the Constitutional Power of the Military to Try the Assassins of the President (Washington, 1865). Note that Montgomery Blair accepted the legality of the commission; see Barlow to him, Aug. 21, 1865, Letterbook XI, 955, Barlow Papers, HL.
7 William Walsh to Holt, April 21, 1865, Holt Papers, LC; May 8–10, 1865, Comstock ms diary, LC; Burnett, “The Controversy Between President Johnson and Judge Holt,” in Wilson and Coan, op. cit., 203; Stanton to Hancock, June 19, 20, 1865, Stanton MSS; Moore, op. cit., 24–6; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 303–5.
8 O.R., XLVII, pt. 3, 534, 541; Pitman, op. cit., 46–7; Stanton to Seward, June 1, 1865, Seward Papers, UR.
9 Thompson to Black, July 6, 1865, Black Papers, LC; Frank, “The Conspiracy to Implicate the Confederate Leaders in Lincoln’s Assassination,” loc. cit., 633–9.
10 We have not tried to retell the story of the trial, but rather to trace Stanton’s role in these events. Pitman, op. cit., 292–6; Benjamin, “Recollections of Secretary Stanton,” loc. cit., 766.
11 Clampitt, “The Trial of Mrs. Surratt,” NAR, CXXXI, 233–4; Ford, “Behind the Curtain of a Conspiracy,” ibid., CXLVIII, 484–5; Trial of John H. Surratt in the Criminal Court for the District of Columbia (Washington, 1867), I, 290, 444–5; Moore, op. cit., 79–89.
12 Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, 136–7; Moore op. cit., 94; Mary W. Porter, The Surgeon in Charge (Concord, N.H., 1949), 17.
13 Welles to Johnson, Nov. 5, 1873, Johnson Papers, LC; Holt, Rejoinder to Ex-President Johnson’s Reply to His Vindication of 26th August Last (Washington, 1873), 10–11; Speed to Lieber, July 5, 1865, HL, on Stanton’s illness. The assertion in Roscoe, op. cit., 487, that Stanton instigated a deception on Johnson is not sustained by evidence.
14 Pitman to T. Ewing, Jr., July 11, 1865, Ewing Papers, LC; reminiscence of Col. W. M. Nixon, May 17, 1929, George Fort Milton Papers, LC, on 1873 suicide claim. Other data in Burnett, “The Controversy Between President Johnson and Judge Holt,” in Wilson and Coan, op. cit., 220–1; Clampitt, “Trial of Mrs. Surratt,” loc. cit., 240; R. A. Watts, “The Trial and Execution of the Lincoln Conspirators,” MHM, VI, 105–6; and Roger J. Bartman, O.F.M., The Contribution of Joseph Holt to the Political Life of the United States (Ph.D. thesis, Fordham University, 1958), 255–96.
15 Welles to Johnson, Jan. 14, 1870, Johnson Papers, LC; DeWitt, op. cit., 233–4, 255; Moore, op. cit., 105, 113–18; Holt to Bingham, Feb. 18, 1873, owned by Milton Ronsheim; Browning, Diary, II, 95–6; Burnett, “Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Assassins,” in James H. Kennedy (ed.), History of the Ohio Society of New York, 1885–1905 (New York, 1906), 614.
16 O.R., ser. 2, VIII, 696–700; Clampitt, “Trial of Mrs. Surratt,” loc. cit., 240; New York Tribune, July 17, 21, 1865; Moore, op. cit., 65–9.
17 Clampitt, “Trial of Mrs. Surratt,” loc. cit., 235, 240; DeWitt, op. cit., 139, 286–7; Moore, op. cit., 62–4; Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, 472–3; Pitman, op. cit., 250.
18 Morse, Welles Diary, II, 334; O.R., ser. 2, VIII, 700; New York Tribune, July 17, 1865; Anna Surratt to Stanton, July 8, 1865, Stanton MSS.
19 Ford and the Henry Winter Davis family worked out a lease arrangement by which the government paid $1500 a month to keep the theater closed, and later Congress provided $100,000 compensation; Davis to Stanton, July 19, 1865, Stanton MSS; Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 318, RG 107, NA; ANJ (July 29, 1865), 777; Bates, Diary, 491; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 331–2; Browning, Diary, II, 37–8.
CHAPTER XXI
DISCORD
NOW THAT Lincoln’s assassins had been brought to justice, Stanton again contemplated resigning from the cabinet. But a sense of duty not yet completed compelled him to accede to the new President’s request and hang on for the present. There was still a great deal to be done in connection with the vast military machine he had helped to create.
An immediate question was the speed with which it should be pruned of its volunteers. The impatient Republic demanded that all its citizen-soldiers be allowed to return home, but too many uncertainties faced Stanton concerning the nature and extent of the Army’s responsibilities during the coming months. With Congress not in session, it would be impossible to raise new regular regiments at once. Therefore, he decided, a portion of the highly trained volunteers, especially the officers, must stay in service.
During the spring months of 1865, Stanton returned a large share of the wartime enlisted volunteers to civilian life. Substantial demobilization was achieved so smoothly that it surprised many contemporaries. When Lieber inscribed a copy of his book Civil Liberty to Stanton, he noted that the returning veterans, “inste
ad of threatening liberty,” were strengthening it by contributing their skills and energies to the spectacular growth of the nation. A military class had not developed out of the war, as Lieber had feared it might, and it was to Stanton’s credit that civilian authority had retained its control over the wartime military galaxy.
Stanton now had to reorganize the Army; from the single wartime task of crushing the rebellion, it had to turn to the varied needs of peace. One part of the Army would have to deal with training and ceremonial chores in the North. A second, larger portion of the troops must grapple with the western Indians, grown obstreperous as a result of the wartime efforts by the Union and the Confederacy to recruit them and now armed with surplus weapons.
Mexican affairs were another concern. Napoleon III of France, taking advantage of the Civil War, had placed a royal puppet on the throne of an unwilling Mexico. One Sunday afternoon soon after Lee had surrendered, Stanton, his tongue loosened after some wine, denounced Napoleon for his imperialism “and fairly made the air blue and sulphurous with his fearful oaths,” one of his listeners recalled. Stanton was going to send Sheridan to the Texas border with an impressive force, and was ready if necessary to order him south and “drive those—–Frenchmen into the sea and drown them like a lot of blind pups!”
With these thoughts in mind, Stanton closely observed the regular officers who came through his office seeking reassignments in the spring of 1865. Young, spectacular George Armstrong Custer, proudly wearing his two stars, remembered that when he went to pay his respects to Stanton, a fellow townsman, the Secretary asked him to stand at attention. Then Stanton walked, with head bowed, in a circuit of the room, peering over his glasses at the youthful general, who was soon on his way westward to help subdue Kirby Smith’s last rebel forces and under Sheridan’s command to impress the French in Mexico.1
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