Amid such a dearth of direct explicit testimony of members of the Cabinet about a disputed Cabinet incident, it is curious and interesting to watch the assiduous ex-Judge-Advocate, with the most ingenious and industrious sophistry, attempt to extract corroboration from the statements of the two ex-Cabinet officers, whom he has induced to speak, where in truth no corroboration can be found.
After all his efforts, he is forced at last to fall back upon the single testimony of the one man without whose encouraging information he frankly informs us he would not have dared to come before the people, and upon whom he brings himself to believe he might safely rest his defense. That man is John A. Bingham, now, as once before, Special Assistant Judge-Advocate to Joseph Holt.
During the eight years which had elapsed since their crowning achievement of hanging a woman for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, these two men had lived, for a considerable portion of the time, in the same city. They were together in the contest over reconstruction and impeachment, standing in the front rank of the enemies of Johnson. They were both at the Capital during the trial of John H. Surratt, when the ghastly reminiscences of the trial of the mother along with seven chained men must have drawn the two military prosecutors into a most sympathetic union.
And yet when, in February, 1873, Joseph Holt sits down in Washington to write his letter of inquiry to John A. Bingham, then in the same city, he would have us believe that he had never before poured into the bosom of his old colleague his own sufferings over the frightful calumny so long poisoning the very air he breathed, never before told him his embarrassment over the difficulty to elicit evidence from Cabinet officials, never before besought his friend for his own powerful testimony on the side of his persecuted fellow-official.
He writes to his former assistant, as though the information were now communicated for the first time, that the President and he were alone when the record was presented and the death-warrant signed; that he had always been satisfied the petition was considered in a Cabinet meeting, but has hitherto been unable to obtain any evidence upon that point; and then, in an artless, ingenuous manner, as if putting the question for the first time, asks his correspondent whether or not he had had a conversation with William H. Seward, Secretary of State under President Johnson, in reference to the petition, and "if so, state as nearly as you may be able to do all he said on the subject;" with a like request as to Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War.
With a diviner's skill he selects the two members of the Cabinet who are then dead; and, not to disappoint him, Bingham, in a letter from Washington six days later, informs him that he has struck the two-fold mark. With the same apparent artlessness which characterizes the letter of inquiry, this useful advocate now, as if for the first time, discloses to his long-tried colleague, that he did indeed have a conversation with each of the eminent men he had hit upon, who are now, alas! dead.
Judge Bingham is a most willing witness. He relates with great circumstantiality that "after the Military Commission had tried and sentenced the parties" he "prepared the form of the petition to the President." He then gives the form thus prepared as he now recollects it (in which there are two significant mistakes); he states that he wrote it with his own hands, that General Ekin copied it, and the five signed the copy; as if all this particularity had any relevance to the question at issue, as if the point in dispute was the existence of the paper, and not its suppression at a critical moment after it was written. He affects to believe it necessary to state to his old colleague, that he "deemed it his duty to call the attention of Secretary Stanton to the petition, and did call his attention to it before the final action of the President;"--as if it were among the possibilities, that the head of the War Department could in any case have overlooked so important a paper, much less that the imperious Chief of this very prosecution could have been kept in ignorance, one hour, of what was done by his tools.
The Special Assistant, however, at last comes to the point:
"After the execution, the statement to which you refer was made that President Johnson had not seen the petition for the commutation of the death sentence upon Mrs. Surratt. I afterwards called at your office, and, without notice to you of my purpose, asked for the record in the case of the assassins. It was opened and shown me, and there was then attached to it the petition, copied and signed as hereinbefore stated."
Oh, what an artless pair of correspondents! The former Special Assistant tells the former Judge-Advocate how he played the detective on him to his friend's justification; "_without notice of my purpose_"!
"Soon thereafter I called upon Secretaries Stanton and Seward, and asked if this petition had been presented to the President before the death-sentence was by him approved, and was answered by each of those gentlemen that the petition was presented to the President, and was duly considered by him and his advisers, before the death-sentence upon Mrs. Surratt was approved, and that the President and the Cabinet upon such consideration were a unit in denying the prayer of the petition; Mr. Stanton and Mr. Seward stating that they were present."
In weighing the credibility of this statement, so conclusive if true, two considerations should be borne in mind.
1. That we have here, not the testimony of either Seward or Stanton, but the testimony of a man who, if the paper was in fact suppressed, must have been a participant in the foul deed. For no one will believe, for a moment, that Joseph Holt would have dared to perpetrate, if he could, or could have perpetrated, if he dared, so unspeakable a wickedness, without the knowledge and cooperation of his fiery leader in the conduct of the trial.
2. If this decisive information was in the possession of Judge Bingham at so early a date as "soon after the execution," why had he not communicated it to his distressed partner while Stanton and Seward lived? He had taken pains to obtain it to meet the ugly stories that were even then circulating against the Judge-Advocate. He knew it at the time of the struggle at close quarters over the petition during the Surratt trial, and he must have been cognizant of the fact, that for the lack of it, that officer had been forced to withdraw the allegation of a full Cabinet consideration of the petition, which he had at first prompted the counsel of the United States boldly and publicly to make.
After the trial the reports grew louder and louder, until it was everywhere said that Andrew Johnson habitually declared that he had never seen the paper. Holt ran hither and thither collecting testimony from all available quarters. Hear Holt himself: "Every time the buzz of this slanderous rumor reached him (Bingham) during the last eight years--which was doubtless often--his awakened memory must have reminded him that he held in his keeping proof that this rumor was false." Why did not his former assistant even relieve his tremendous anxiety by telling him that he had evidence which would blow the calumny into the air? General Holt, in a letter in reply to Bingham's, dated at Washington the next day, which he also prints in his Vindication, says:
"It would have been fortunate indeed, could I have had this testimony in my possession years ago."
He calls its concealment "a sad, sad mockery." Yes; and why was Judge Bingham willing to perpetrate such a "mockery," and continue the "mockery"
until Stanton's death, and then until Seward's death, which occurred only a few months before he at last enlightens his colleague? Can the most credulous of men believe that, during all these years, he was guilty of such cruelty as not even to whisper such welcome intelligence into the ears of his sorely distressed brother officer?
And what shall we say of William H. Seward?
If that great man told Judge Bingham in 1865 what the Judge, after Seward was dead, first says he did, why had William H. Seward kept silent so many years, and at last died and made no sign? He must have heard the charge, so infamous if false, and, if Judge Bingham be believed, he must have known it to be false.
He must have heard the statement of Judge Pierrepont in open court in 1867. He must have known of the President's sending for the record and of the explosion thereupon in the Department of War. Why did he not at that crisis come forward with the proof of which the Judge-Advocate was so dreadfully in need?
The Secretary of State could not have intrenched himself behind the inviolability of proceedings of Cabinet meetings, as did the over-scrupulous Attorney-General, because, according to Judge Bingham, he himself had betrayed the secret long before.
And why did not Judge Bingham force him to speak, or else make public his interview with him, while Seward was alive and could either affirm or contradict it?
No, these two eminent lawyers, yoked together as the common mark of what they call a "most atrocious slander," originating with a President of the United States, bruited about everywhere both in official and private circles, wait eight long years, and until after the death of the head of that President's Cabinet, from whose lips one of them at least had heard at its very inception a solemn refutation of the black lie, before they venture to proclaim it to the world.
Mr. Bingham admits in his letter that, in 1865, "he desired to make" the facts he had ascertained "public." Why did he not "make public" what Seward had told him, while Seward was living?
He furnishes no answer to this question, and until he does, his testimony on the matter is tainted with a most reasonable suspicion.
And, besides, what we know of the situation of the Secretary of State at the time of the execution of Mrs. Surratt, of his subsequent career, and of his lofty character as a man, is sufficient to stamp the account of Judge Bingham as incredible.
William H. Seward, one of the most distinguished statesmen of the era of the civil war, one of the most illustrious founders of the republican party, and one of the most trusted advisers of Abraham Lincoln, remained in the Cabinet of Andrew Johnson until the close of his administration. He united in the pardon of Mudd, Spangler and Arnold. He stood by the President fearlessly in the dark days of the impeachment, and when the President had become the target of the daily curses of thousands of Seward's former political friends. Had he known that the accusation against General Holt was false, and at the same time heard the daily reiteration of its truth from the lips of his Chief, he would not have remained an hour in the Cabinet of such a monumental slanderer. So far from allowing the ceremonial restraints of Cabinet rules to make him a silent accomplice in a foul falsehood, he would have proclaimed the truth, if necessary, even from the steps of the Capitol.
Mr. Seward, at the time of the execution of Mrs. Surratt, could have but barely recovered from the broken jaw and broken arm from which he was suffering, when he bore the savage assault of Payne, and from the grievous wounds which that mad ruffian inflicted. One of his sons was still incapacitated because of injuries from the same hand, and his wife died June 21st, 1865. It is not at all probable that, in such dolorous circumstances, he would be required to give close attention to a subject entirely outside of the duties of his department, and in which his personal feelings as a sufferer were so deeply involved. He said himself under oath to a Congressional Committee: "Having been myself a sufferer in that business, the subject would be a delicate one for me to pursue without seeming to be over-zealous or demonstrative."
In spite of the eight-years-embalmed testimony of a hundred Binghams, we would not believe that the uncomplaining victim of Payne voted to deny the Petition of Mercy.
While no attempt is made to explain the silence of Seward during his lifetime, or the silence of Judge Bingham himself regarding the information he got from Seward, this willing witness does give a most singular and perplexing explanation of his long silence regarding the information he got from Stanton.
He says: (in the same letter) "Having ascertained the fact as stated, I then desired to make the same public, and so expressed myself to Mr.
Stanton, who advised me not to do so, but to rely upon the final judgment of the people."
General Holt, in a subsequent article, states that Stanton "enjoined upon the Judge silence in reference to the communication."
We are called upon to believe that the Secretary of War, at the very first interview with Judge Bingham, when, upon the theory of the truth of the information, there could have been no conceivable motive for its concealment, advised his inquiring friend to suppress a fact essential to the refutation of a despicable slander, blotting the fair name of a brother officer. Not only this; but that the Secretary continued the injunction of silence during all the years the terrible charge was being bandied about on the lips of men to the daily torment of the poor man so cruelly assailed. As General Holt says: "It was a deliberate and merciless sacrifice of me, so far as he could accomplish it."
And he "enforced" the "silence" up to the day of his death.
But we ask what reason had the "Great War Minister" "to perpetrate so pitiless an outrage?" Why, in the days of the trial of John H. Surratt, why, in the days of his stern enmity towards the President, when his removal furnished the main ground of impeachment, did he not once speak out for his slandered servant, or even unlock the sealed lips of the obedient Bingham and suffer him to tell the truth?
General Holt, in 1883, on affirming in the text of his article that "Messrs. Seward and Stanton declared the truth to Judge Bingham," adds the following explanatory note:
"This praise was certainly due to Mr. Seward, but not, in strictness, to Mr. Stanton, since on making the communication to Judge Bingham, he endeavored and successfully, to prevent him from giving it publicity.
"The fear of Andrew Johnson's resentment, added to a determination on his part to leave my reputation--then under fire from his silence--to its fate, sufficiently explain his otherwise inexplicable conduct."
But does it? Is this in truth a sufficient explanation?
Stanton, the stern War Minister, fear the resentment of Andrew Johnson!
When was he taken with it? When he bearded the President in his Cabinet?
When he defied him in the War Department, and scattered his missive of removal to the winds? Or did he wait to begin to fear him until the President retired to private life, just escaping conviction by impeachment, and shorn of all popularity North or South? The preposterous nature of the cause assigned casts suspicion upon the assignor himself.
As to the second cause, we are at a loss to conceive why Mr. Stanton should harbor such motiveless malignity against the reputation of his former colleague, then his pliant subordinate, and always his friend. We need, in this regard, an explanation of the explanation. If it be true, it settles the character of Stanton for all time.
But, it appears, in the words of General Holt, that "while he (Stanton) lived, this enforced silence was scrupulously obeyed." Again we ask why?
Why should Bingham have obeyed the "advice," even if given by Stanton so long before? Why should the associate of Holt, in the prosecution and execution of Mrs. Surratt, have ministered to the malignity of Stanton, scrupulously obeyed his base injunction, and never even told his beloved fellow-laborer on the field of courts-martial, that he possessed such secret sacred testimonials in his favor?
The General gives us no explanation of this "inexplicable conduct."
Surely, the undaunted Bingham--who, as manager on the impeachment trial, so clawed the character of the arraigned President, could have had no "fear of the resentment of Andrew Johnson." And, unless the masterful Stanton held some secret back to feather his "advice," or lend weight to his injunction of silence, we see no reason why the fear of Stanton should have closed the lips of the voluble Special Judge-Advocate. He surely could not have joined in the fine irony of the Secretary, that it would be better for their mutual friend, although "under fire," "to rely on the judgment of the people."
But another, and a final, explanation is necessary. The Great War Minister died in December, 1869. Holt more than hints that "Providence" shortened his life so that he should no longer "perpetrate so pitiless an outrage"
as keeping Bingham's mouth shut.
Why, then, do we hear nothing from Judge Bingham for three years more? In the words of Holt, "after the Secretary had, amid the world's funeral pomp, gone down into his sepulchre, the truth came up out of the grave to which he had consigned it," and was "resurrected and openly announced by Judge Bingham." But why was the resurrection delayed until February, 1873?
He does not tell us. Why should "the buzz of this slanderous rumor" (to use Holt's own words), "sadly recall to him that, though holding that proof, he was not yet privileged to divulge it?" There is no answer to this; none. The "scrupulosity" of Bingham did not end with the providential taking off of Stanton, but prolonged its reverential obedience to the advice of the dead, until his great colleague also was summoned from the scene.