The Judges of the Secret Court (25 page)

Mr. Nokes said that Herold was a light and trifling boy, and that very little reliability was to be placed in him.

Herold did not think that fair. Mr. Booth had relied on him. And of course he lied. After all, nobody wanted to be caught out. He felt hurt. He had always liked Mr. Nokes. He didn't understand why Mr. Nokes had to talk about him that way.

Now it was Dr. Charles W. Davis, who agreed that Herold was a trifler. What was that supposed to mean? What was wrong with trifles? Davis also said he was easily led. Well, if that had anything to do with Mr. Booth, he had liked Mr. Booth. He never followed anybody he didn't like.

“He was more a boy than a man,” said Davis, and stepped down. Herold didn't like it. On the other hand, they wouldn't hang a mere boy, would they? A boy didn't mean any harm.

Dr. Samuel McKim testified next. Dr. McKim had never liked him. Again there was that line about his being a very light, trivial, unreliable boy. “So much so that I would never let him put up a prescription of mine if I could prevent it, feeling confident he would tamper with it if he thought he could play a joke on anybody. In mind, I consider him about eleven years of age.”

Well, what was wrong with a joke once in a while? You had to get some fun out of life. Herold waited to see what the next witness would have to say.

There wasn't one. This was supposed to be his defence, and yet there wasn't one.

It was the turn of the prosecution. A Mr. Doherty was telling the court what Herold had said when they tied him to that tree. He'd forgotten, but they said he'd said: “Let me go. I will not go away. Who is that who has been shot in there in the barn? I did not know that it was Booth.”

He'd been pretty sharp to think of saying that, but what he had said did not seem to help. Nobody ever believed you. Even when he'd said he'd met Booth by accident, seven miles out of Washington City, at midnight, they hadn't believed him. Well, he
had
met Mr. Booth by accident. He had never wanted to see Mr. Booth again. All he'd been doing was lighting out for the swamps until things blew over. He always felt safer in the swamps than he did at home.

And now they wouldn't even let him go home. It wasn't his fault Mr. Booth had made him guide him through the swamps. He'd been scared. He hadn't known what to do, and at least Mr. Booth had been somebody to be with. Didn't they understand that?

No, they didn't.

It was Edward Spangler's turn to stand accused.

At least Spangler knew why he was here. He sat unshaven in the dock, blinking only because he had
tic douloureux
. He was here because for once in his life, he had done something decent, and he was not ashamed of it.

Spangler had no doubts about what he was. He was a drunk. Life hadn't gone right for him ever, and it had been a lot worse since his wife had died a couple of years ago. She was buried in Baltimore. That was why he always called Baltimore home, even though he worked in Washington City and slept at Ford's Theatre. Why shouldn't he sleep there? That way he saved money.

He knew what the world thinks of a drunk, and what it can do to a man who can't defend himself. He'd had forty years to find out. But because a man's a bum doesn't mean he's stupid, and since he hadn't been able to get any booze in prison, his head was pretty clear. He could follow what was going on, all right.

He hadn't given a damn about President Lincoln, and he had a pretty good hunch that these men didn't either, except perhaps some of the Counsel for the Defence and General Lew Wallace, on the judges' side. General Lew Wallace sometimes had the bamboozled look of a soft-shell liberal who doesn't quite believe that what he is doing for the public good is necessarily justified. Wallace was a gentleman, all right, but the other judges were politicians, and a gentleman among politicians is the easiest dupe in the world. He has about as much chance of survival as a piece of ice on a hot stove.

Alone of the conspirators, Spangler wasn't guilty of anything, apart from having given Booth a head start. That meant he could see the trial for the farce it was.

Through some accident, at the beginning of the trial four of the conspirators had entered with those canvas snuffers on. The snuffers were something Stanton insisted they wear, but not something he wanted seen. The accident did not happen again. One gasp from the spectators abolished the snuffers. But Edward Spangler had been one of those four.

He did not like to be stared at. It was quite true, as the witnesses said: he had no self-respect. But he did not like people to observe that for themselves.

He could neither see nor talk to his fellow prisoners, most of whom were strangers to him. He had met Herold and Payne casually, the others he did not even recognize by name. What he could see was the court, the spectators, and the Counsel for the Defence.

Of Defence Counsel he did not think much. Only two of the men seemed worth bothering about: former Provost Marshal William E. Doster, because he seemed to know his business, and Reverdy Johnson, because everyone knew who he was. Not that Johnson wasn't an over-bloated gasbag. He had a mouth modified by too much sucking at the public tit, and the result was an angry and petulant expression. On the one hand, he posed as a person of probity. On the other, he wanted more. You could tell just by looking at him that he was not happy to be here. He had chosen the wrong lost cause. To get a reputation as a fearless champion of lost causes, you must be canny to choose only that lost cause which people secretly long to find again. One look at the judges, and Johnson knew that he was in the wrong room. He was chief counsel for Mrs. Surratt's defence.

General Hunter, the presiding officer for the prosecution, rose to read a statement by General T. M. Harris, one of the judges. No one could ever be quite sure of what Reverdy Johnson might do, but if he wanted out as much as his appearance indicated he did, Stanton was prepared to give him a pretext.

In 1864 Reverdy Johnson had advised the members of the Maryland Convention to take the oath demanded of them, even though at the same time telling them that the Convention had no right to impose it. Therefore, said Hunter, reading patiently, Johnson did not appear to believe in the validity of sworn oaths, and so was not competent to stand attorney in this court.

Johnson's face turned the colour of boiled beef. It was an out, of course, but he was so infuriated to have his integrity impugned, that he launched into a defence of himself which soon turned, as most of his nobler speeches did, into a denunciation of everybody else. Who gave the court jurisdiction to decide the moral character of the attorneys appearing before them, he demanded. What had his own moral standing to do with the case in hand? Besides, he was a member of the United States Senate, and who was responsible for the legality of this court, if not the Senate?

The court had to back down. Its leaders had misjudged Johnson.

But Johnson had misjudged himself. He backtracked. Having been offered an out, he took it. His honour was impugned. He would not appear before this court again. He withdrew, and left Mrs. Surratt to the mercies of his colleagues, two bright young men competent enough to toddle through a straightforward case in a court of law, given a judge to guide them, but not old enough to stand up against an unjust magistrate. Lost causes were one thing. Being trapped on the losing side was quite another. Johnson had his career to think of. As a parting shot, he filed an argument on the jurisdiction of the Military Court. It was futile, of course. One cannot sway a group of generals by means of a legal quibble. But it would look well in the newspapers.

The court had no difficulty in turning down his argument. That wily creature, the Honourable John A. Bingham, the Assistant Judge Advocate, knew his business. He said that no Court had the power to declare its own authority null and void. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that any body of men, constituted as a tribunal, can sit in judgment upon the proposition that they are not a court? Why not crown the absurdity by asking the members to determine that they are not men?” That silenced the argument on jurisdiction, and Johnson slipped gratefully out from under.

The absurdity remained. Edward Spangler watched the Honourable John A. Bingham, who had the hard face of a Longfellow who had gone into banking. In that face Spangler could see that their lives had already been bought and sold. Bingham was only there to supervise the transaction. He knew Stanton and had a seat in Congress to keep.

Spangler began to sweat. The courtroom was sultry, and he suffered from prickly heat. But he went on watching. As for the evidence itself, he could make nothing of it. Ford was on the stand. Booth, he said, was a peculiarly fascinating man. He had known how to control the lower class of people better than an ordinary man would have done.

That's me, thought Spangler. I'm the lower class of people, all right. But he was grateful to Ford. Ford was doing his best for him, and under the circumstances, that was not only damn decent, but showed courage. It was more than most of the witnesses were trying to do.

He began to see quite easily how a man could be hanged for trying to help a friend. He didn't see that was his fault. You don't usually ask a friend if he's done anything criminal, before you help him.

Now they were talking about whether he wore a moustache. He didn't bother to listen. He'd never worn a moustache in his life.

That was what would save his life.

The first thing which made Mrs. Surratt panic was the withdrawal of Reverdy Johnson. He was an older man. She had always trusted older men. Clampitt and Aiken, her other lawyers, were only children. She sent a message to Stone, who represented Herold and Dr. Mudd. Of all that crowd clustered beyond the dock in their defence, only he seemed to have enough character to stand up to the court. But there was nothing Stone could do for her. He had double work already. There was nothing anyone could do.

Yet there was always a rustle of attention whenever witnesses appeared for or against her. There were more women in the courtroom on those days. She had seen the faces of such women before, as they chattered away amiably about the downfall of a friend. She knew all about that snakelike false sympathy. She had once or twice been guilty of it herself.

Honora Fitzpatrick was on the stand. She was an innocent girl, but Stanton had given her the privilege of seeing the inside of a prison, all the same. She appeared as a witness, though not a willing one, for the prosecution, and was forced to admit that she had gone to Ford's Theatre one evening in March, accompanied by John Surratt and by Payne. Poor girl, that was as close to conspiracy as the detectives had been able to draw her.

By the time the Defence recalled her, at the end of May, Honora had become hollow eyed. No doubt she did not like to be so close to death. For the defence she said that Mrs. Surratt's eyesight was defective.

It was a fault one usually did one's best to conceal. Now her life seemed to depend upon it. It was because she had said she had not recognized Payne in the hall, that night of her arrest. One detective said the hall had been purposely dimmed, another that it had been as purposely brilliantly lit. Whether purposely or not, she remembered it had been dim. Why did the first detective seem so nervous about telling what was merely the truth?

She found it strange to see her former boarders in the witness box. They were only boarders but, a lonely woman, she had tried to make friends out of them, as she did of everyone she met. Perhaps that had been her mistake. There must be some moral reason why she was here.

Now they had her brother on the stand. He, too, had been flung in jail. There seemed no end to the capacity of that prison. It was to her brother that Stanton had relayed that rumour about her own eventual release, if only she would say nothing. So she said nothing. But she began to tremble.

Poor Jenkins had always been a prickly man. During the war he had had a hard time with the Federals. But there was nothing wrong with his courage. He tried to speak up for her. Judge Advocate Bingham would not allow that. It amazed her that a man so well-bred should be so venal and so vile. Sometimes she thought she sat in this dock only for having been so short sighted, for yes, she was short sighted, as to take the world at its own best behaviour. That was the result not so much of optimism, as of wistfulness, but the cause did not matter. The error had landed her here.

Bingham harried Jenkins about Kallenbach. Kallenbach, a country neighbour at Surrattsville, was a witness for the prosecution. He was a worthless man. Everyone round Surrattsville knew that. But no one seemed to wish to know it here.

“All I said,” said Jenkins, “to Kallenbach was that my sister had fed his family, but I did not say that if Kallenbach or anyone else testified against my sister, that I would send him to hell or see that they were put out of the way, nor did I use any threats against him in case he appeared as a witness against Mrs. Surratt. What I did say was, that I understood he was a strong witness against my sister, which he ought to be, seeing that she had raised his family for him.”

Bingham pounced on that.

“When I said that Mr. Kallenbach ought to be a strong witness against my sister, on account of her bringing up his children, I spoke ironically,” explained Jenkins, speaking ironically. “I am under arrest, but I do not know for what. The Commissioners of our County offered 2,000 dollars for any information that could be given leading to the arrest of any person connected with the assassination. Mr. Cottingham asked me to get him that money, since he had arrested my sister's tenant, John M. Lloyd. I suppose that is why I am here.”

It did him no good.

She understood Kallenbach well enough. But she would never understand why fear should lead to such conduct. It was true, she had fed his children. Perhaps her error had been in not feeding him as well. Nor had she realized that justice hinged so circumstantially upon its own rewards, or that a criminal could be so easily created out of the sum offered for his apprehension.