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JOHN WILKES BOOTH: LETTER VIII
BY GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND
Chapters
JOHN WILKES BOOTH: LETTER VIII
LETTER VIII
THE TRIAL
Washington, May 26.
The most exciting trial of our times has obtained a very meager commemoration in all but its literal features. The evidence adduced in the course of it, has been too faithfully reported, through its far-fetched and monotonous irregularities, but nobody realizes the extraordinary scene from which so many columns emanate, either by aid of the reporters' scanty descriptions, or by the purblind sketches of the artists.
Now that the evidence is growing vapid, and the obstinacy of the military commission has lost its coarse zest, we may find enough readers to warrant a fuller sketch of the conspirators' prison.
About a mile below Washington, where the high Potomac Bluffs meet the marshy border of the Eastern branch, stands the United States arsenal, a series of long, mathematically uninteresting brick buildings, with a broad lawn behind them, open to the water, and level military plazas, on which are piled pyramids of shell and ball, among acres of cannon and cannon-carriages, and caissons. A high wall, reaching circularly around these buildings, shows above it, as one looks from Washington, the barred windows of an older and more gloomy structure than the rest, which forms the city front of the group of which it is the principal. This was a penitentiary, but, long ago added to the arsenal, it has been re-transformed to a court-room and jail, and in its third, or uppermost story, the Military Commission is sitting.
The main road to the arsenal is by a wide and vacant avenue, which abuts against a gate where automaton sentries walk, but the same gate can best be reached on foot by the shores of the Potomac, in the sight, of the forts, the shipping, and Alexandria.
The scene at the arsenal in time of peace is common-place enough, except that across the Eastern Branch the towers of the lunatic asylum, perched upon a height, look down baronially; but this trial of murderers has made the spot a fair.
A whole company of volunteers keeps the gate, through which are passing cabs, barouches, officers' ambulances, and a stream of folks on foot; while farther along almost a regiment crosses the drive, their huddled shelter tents extending entirely across the peninsula. These are playing cards on the ground, and tossing quoits, and sleeping on their faces, while a gunboat watches the river front, and under a circular wall a line of patrols, ten yards apart, go to and fro perpetually.
It is 10 o'clock, and the court is soon to sit. Its members ride down in superb ambulances and bring their friends along to show them the majesty of justice. A perfect park of carriages stands by the door to the left, and from these dismount major-generals' wives, in rustling silks; daughters of congressmen, attired like the lilies of the milliner; little girls who hope to be young ladies and have come with "Pa," to look at the assassins; even brides are here, in the fresh blush of their nuptials, and they consider the late spectacle of the review as good as lost, if the court-scene be not added to it. These tender creatures have a weakness for the ring of manacles, the sight of folks to be suspended in the air, the face of a woman confederate in blood.
They chat with their polite guides, many of whom are gallant captains, and go one after another up the little flight of steps which leads to the room of the officer of the day.
He passes them, if he pleases, up the crooked stairways, and when they have climbed three of these, they enter a sort of garret-room, oblong, and plastered white, and about as large as an ordinary town-house parlor.
Four doors open into it—that by which we have entered, two from the left, where the witnesses wait, and one at the end, near the left far corner, which is the outlet from the cells.
A railing, close up to the stairway door, gives a little space in the foreground for witnesses; two tables, transverse to this rail, are for the commission and the press, the first-named being to the right; between these are a raised platform and pivot arm-chair for the witness; below are the sworn phonographers and the counsel for the accused, and then another rail like that separating the crowd from the court, holds behind it the accused and their guards.
These are they who are living not by years nor by weeks, but by breaths. They are motley enough, for the most part, sitting upon a long bench with their backs against the wall,—ill-shaved, haggard, anxious, and the dungeon door at their left opens now and then to show behind it a moving bayonet. There are women within the court proper, edging upon the reporters, introduced there by a fussy usher, and through four windows filters the imperfect daylight, making all things distinguishable, yet shadowy. The coup d'oeil of this small and crowded scene is lively as a popular funeral.
There is the witness with raised hand, pointing toward heaven, and looking at Judge Holt. The gilt stars, bars, and orange-colored sashes of the commission; the women's brilliant silks and bonnets; the crowding spectators, with their brains in their eyes; the blue coats of the guards; the working scribes; and last of all the line of culprits, whose suspected guilt has made them worthy of all illustration.
Between the angle of the wall and the studded door, under the heavy bar of dressed stone which marks above the thickness of the gaol, sits all alone a woman's figure, clothed in solemn black. Her shadowy skirt hides her feet, so that we cannot see whether they are riveted; her sleeves of sable sweep down to her wrist, and dark gloves cover the plumpness of her hand, while a palm-leaf fan nods to and fro to assist the obscurity of her vail of crape, descending from her widow's bonnet.
A solitary woman, beginning the line of coarse indicted men, shrinking beneath the scornful eyes of her sex, and the as bold survey of men more pitiful, may well excite, despite her guilt, a moment of sympathy.
Let men remember that she is the mother of a son who has fled to save his forfeit life by deserting her to shame, and perhaps, to death. Let women, who will not mention her in mercy, learn from her end, in all succeeding wars, to make patriotism of their household duties and not incite to blood.
Mrs. Surratt is a graduate of that seminary which spits in soldiers faces, denounces brave generals upon the rostrum, and cries out for an interminable scaffold when all the bells are ringing peace.
How far her wicked love influenced her to participation in the murder rests in her own breast, and up to this time she has not differed from mothers at large—to twist her own bow-string rather than build his gibbet.
Beneath her shadowy bonnet, over her fan-tip, we see two large, sad eyes, rising and falling, and now and then when the fan sways to and fro, the hair just turning gray with trouble, and the round face growing wan and seamed with terrible reflection, are seen a moment crouching low, as if she would wish to grovel upon the floor and bury her forehead in her hands.
Yet, sometimes, across Mrs. Surratt's face a stealthiness creeps—a sort of furtive, feline flashing of the eye, like that of one which means to leap sideways. At these times her face seems to grow hard and colorless, as if that tiger expression which Pradier caught upon the face of Brinvilliers and fastened into a masque, had been repeated here. Not to grow mawkish while we must be kind, let us not forget that this woman is an old plotter. If she did not devise the assassination, she was privy to it long. She was an agent of contraband mails—a bold, crafty, assured rebel—perhaps a spy—and in the event of her condemnation, let those who would plead for her spend half their pity upon that victim whose heart was like a woman's, and whose hand was merciful as a mother's.
Before the door sits an officer, uncovered, who does not seem to labor under any particular fear, chiefly because the captives are ironed to immovability, and he stares and smiles alternately, as if he were somewhat amiable and extremely bored.
Next to the officer is a shabby-looking boy, whose seat is by the right jamb of the jail door. Of all boys just old enough to feel their oats, this boy is the most commonplace. His parents would be likely to have no sanguine hopes of his reaching the presidency; for his head indicates latent dementia, and a slice or two from it would recommend him, without exanimation, to the school for the feeble-minded. Better dressed, and washed, and shaved, he might make a tolerable adornment to a hotel door, or even reach the dignity of a bar-keeper or an usher at a theatre. But that this fellow should occupy a leaf in history and be confounded with a tragedy entering into the literature of the world, reverses manifest destiny, and leaves neither phrenology nor physiognomy a place to stand upon.
Come up! Gall, Spurzheim, and Lavater, and remark his sallow face, attenuated by base excesses! Do you know any forehead so broad which means so little? the oyster could teach this man philosophy! His chin is sharp, his eyes are blank blue, his short black hair curls over his ears, and his beard is of a prickly black, with a moustache which does not help his general contemptibleness. A dirty grayish shirt without a linen collar, is seen between the lapels of the greasy and dusty cloth coat, sloping at the shoulders; and under his worn brown trowsers, the manacle of iron makes an ugly garter to his carpet clipper.
This is David Harold, who shared the wild night-ride of Booth, and barely escaped that outlaw's death in the burning barn.
He stoops to the rail of the dock, now and then, to chat with his attorney, and a sort of blank anxiety which he wears, as his head turns here and there, shifts to a frolicking smile. But a woman of unusual attractions enters the court, and Harold is much more interested in her than in his acquittal.
Great Caesar's dust, which stopped a knot-hole, has in this play boy an inverse parallel. He was at best hostler to a murderer, and failed in that. His chief concern at present is to have somebody to talk to; and he thinks upon the whole, that if an assassination is productive of so little fun, he will have nothing to do with another one.
That Harold has slipped into history gives us as much surprise as that he has yet to suffer death gives us almost contempt for the scaffold. But if the scaffold must wait for only wise men to get upon it, it must rot. Your wise man does no murder in the first place, and if so, in the second, he dodges the penalty. In this world, Harold, idiotcy is oftener punished than guilt.
That Booth should have used Harold is very naturally accounted for.
Actors live only to be admired; vanity rises to its climax in them.
Booth preferred this sparrow to sing him peans rather than live by an
eagle and be screamed at now and then.
At the right hand side of Harold sits a soldier in blue, who is evidently thinking about a game of quoits with his comrades in the jail yard; he wonders why lawyers are so very dry, and is surprised to find a trial for murder as tedious as a thanksgiving sermon.
But on the soldier's other hand is a figure which makes the center and cynosure of this thrilling scene. Taller by a whole head than either his companions or the sentries, Payne, the assassin, sits erect, and flings his barbarian eye to and fro, radiating the tremendous energy of his colossal physique.
He is the only man worthy to have murdered Mr. Seward. When against the delicate organization, the fine, subtle, nervous mind of the Secretary of State, this giant, knife in hand, precipitated himself, two forms of civilization met as distinctly as when the savage Gauls invaded the Roman senate.
Lawlessness and intelligence, the savage and the statesman, body and mind, fought together upon Mr. Seward's bed.
The mystery attending Payne's home and parentage still exists to make him more incomprehensible. Out of the vague, dim ultima thule, like those Asiatic hordes which came from nowhere and shivered civilization, Payne suddenly appeared and fought his way to the sanctum sanctorum of law. I think his part in the assassination more remarkable than Booth's, The latter's crime was shrewdly plotted, as by one measuring intelligence with the whole government. But Payne did not think—he only struck!
With this man's face before me as I write, I am reminded of some Maori chief waging war from the lust of blood or the pride of local dominion. His complexion is bloodless, yet so healthy that a passing observer would afterward speak of it as ruddy. His face is broad, with a character nose, sensual lips, and very high cheek bones; the cranium is full and the brow speaking, while the head runs back to an abnormal apex at the tip of the cerebellum. His straight, lusterless black hair, duly parted, is at the summit so disturbed that tufts of it rise up like Red Jacket's or Tecumseh's; but the head is kept well up, and rests upon a wonderfully broad throat, muscular as one's thigh, and without any trace, as he sits, of the protuberance called Adam's apple. Withal, the eye is the man Payne's power. It is dark and speechless, and rolls here and there like that of a beast in a cage which strives in vain to understand the language of its captors. It seems to say, if anything, that, it has no sympathy with anybody approximate, and has submitted, like a lion bound, to the logic of conviction and of chains.
Payne looks at none of his fellow-prisoners: assassins caught seldom cares to recognise each other; for while there is faithfulness among thieves, there is none among murderers. His great white eyeball never roves to anybody's in the dock, nor theirs to his. He has confessed his crime and they know it; so they have no mutual hope; they listen to the evidence because it concerns them; ho looks at it only, because it cannot save him. He is entirely beardless, yet in his boyish chin more of a man physically than the rest, combined.
While I watch this man I am constantly repeating to myself that stanza of Bryant's:
"Upon the market place he stood,—
A man of giant frame,
Amid the gathering multitude
That shrank to hear his name;
All proud of step and firm of limb,
His dark eye on the ground—
And silently they gazed on him,
As on a lion bound."
His dress, which we scarcely notice in the grander contrast of his pose and stature, is an old shirt of woolen blue, with a white nap at the button-holes, and upon his knees of black cloth he twirls, as if for relaxation, between his powerful manacles, a soiled white handkerchief—if from his mother, we conjecture, a gift to a bloodhound from his dam. His heavy handcuffs make his broad shoulders more narrow. Yet we can see by the outline of the sleeves what girth the muscles has, and the hand at the end of his long and bony arm is wide and huge, as if it could wield a claymore as well as a dirk. He also wears carpet slippers, but his ankles are clogged with so heavy irons that two men must carry them when he enters or leaves the dock. For this man there can be no sentiment—no more than for a bull. The flesh on his face is hard, as if cast, rather than generated, and while we see how he towers above the entire court, we watch him in wonder, as if he were some maniac denizen of a zone where men without minds grow to the stature and power of fiends.
The face of Payne is not of the traditional southern peculiarities. He resembles rather a Pennsylvania mountaineer than a Kentucky rustic.
Three weeks ago I gave, in an account of the conspiracy which many gainsayed, but which the trial has fully confirmed, a sketch of this man, to which I still adhere. He was furnished to Booth and John Surratt from Canada; sent upon special service with his life in his hands; and he faced the murder he was to commit like any prize-fighter. I pity Beall, who died intelligently for a wretched essay against civilians, that his biography and fate must be matched by this savage's!
Next to Payne, and crouching under him like a frog under a rock, is an inconsiderable soldier, who chews his cud, and would cheerfully hang his protege for the sake of being rid of him. My sympathies are entirely enlisted for this soldier; he has neither the joy of being acquitted, nor the excitement of being tried. He is quite a sizable man by himself, but Payne overhangs him, and the dullness of the trial quite stultifies him. The few points of law which are admitted here are not so evident to this soldier as the point of his bayonet. I see what ails him.
He wants to swear.
A beam running overhead divides the court lengthwise in half, and as the prisoners sit at the end of the court, the German Atzerott, or Adzerota, has a place just beneath the beam. This is very ominous for Atzerott. The filthiness of this man denies him sympathy. He is a disgusting little groveler of dry, sandy hair, oval head, ears set so close to the chin that one would think his sense of hearing limited to his jaws, and a complexion so yellow that the uncropped brownness of his beard does not materially darken it. He wears a grayish coat, low grimy shirt, and the usual carpet slippers of threadbare red over his shifting and shiftless feet. His head is bent forward, and seems to be anxiously trying to catch the tenor of the trial. Many persons outside of the court, Atzerott, are equally puzzled!
From as much examination of this man as his insignificance permits, I should call him a "gabby" fellow—loud of resolution, ignoble of effort. Over his lager no man would be braver. His face is familiar to me from a review of those detective cabinets usually called "Rogues' Galleries." As a "sneak thief" or "bagman," I should convict him by his face; the same indictment would make me acquit him instantly of assassination. In this estimate I rely upon evidence as well as upon appearance. Atzerott swaggered about Kirk wood's Hotel asking for the Vice-President's room; Payne or Booth would have done the murder silently. Nobody pities a dirty man. The same arts of dress and cleanliness which please ladies influence juries.
Next to Atzerott sits a soldier—a very jolly and smooth faced soldier—who at one time hears a witness say something laughable. The soldier immediately grins to the farthest point of his scalp. But he is chagrined to find that the joke is too trivial to admit of a laugh of duration. Very few jokes before the present court do so. But this soldier being of long charity and excellent patience, awaits the next joke like a veteran under orders, and reposes his chin upon the dock as if aware that between jokes there was ample time for a nap.
The next prisoner to the right is O'Laughlin. He is a small man, about twenty-eight years of age, attired in a fine, soiled coat, but without white linen upon either his bosom or neck, and handcuffs rest hugely upon his mediocrity. His moustache, eye-brows, and hair are regular and very black. He does not look unlike Booth, though he seems to have little bodily power, and he is very anxious, as if more earnest than any of the rest, to have a fair lease upon life. His countenance is not prepossessing, though he might be considered passably good looking in a mixed company.
Between O'Laughlin and the next prisoner, Spangler, sits a soldier in ultramarine—a discontented soldier, a moody, dissatisfied, and arbitrary soldier. His definition of military justice is like the boy's answer at school to the familiar question upon the Constitution of the United States:
"What rights do accused persons enjoy ?"
The boy wrote out, very carefully, this answer:
"Death by hanging."
The boy would have been correct had the question applied to accused persons before a court-martial.
Spangler, the scene-shifter and stage-carpenter, has the face and bearing of a day-laborer. His blue woollen shirt does not confuse him, as he is used to it. He has an oldish face, wrinkled by fearful anticipations, and his hair is thin. He is awkwardly built, and watches the trial earnestly, as if striving to catch between the links of evidence vistas of a life insured. This man has a simple and pleading face, and there is something genial in his great, incoherent countenance. He is said to have cleared the stage for Booth's escape, but this is indifferently testified to. He had often been asked by Booth to take a drink at the nearest bar. Persons who drink assure me that the greatest mark of confidence which a great man can show a lesser one is to make that tender; this, therefore, explains Booth's power over Spangler.
Spangler is the first scene-shifter who may become a dramatis personæ.
A soldier sits between Spangler and Doctor Mudd. The soldier would like Spangler to get up and go away, so that he could have as much of the bench as he might sleep upon. This particular soldier, I may be qualified to say, would sleep upon his post.
Doctor Mudd has a New England and not a Maryland face. He compares, to those on his left, as Hyperion to a squatter. His high, oval head is bald very far up, but not benevolently so, and it is covered with light red hair, so thin as to contrast indifferently with the denseness of his beard and goatee. His nose would be insignificant but for its sharpness, and at the nostrils it is swelling and high-spirited. His eyes impinge upon his brows, and they are shining and rather dark, while the brows themselves are so scantily clothed with hair that they seem quite naked. Mudd is neatly dressed in a green-grass duster, and white bosom and collar; if he had no other advantages over his associates these last would give it to him. He keeps his feet upon the rail before him in true republican style, and rolls a morsel of tobacco under his tongue.
The military commission works as if it were delegated not to try, but to convict, and Dr. Mudd, if he be innocent, is in only less danger than if he were guilty. He has a sort of home-bred intelligence in his face, and socially is as far above his fellows as Goliah of Gath above the rest of the Philistines.
On the right of Doctor Mudd sits a soldier, who is striving to look through his legs at the judge-advocate, as if taking a sort of secret aim at that person, with the intent to fetch him down, because he makes the trial so very dry, and the soldier so very thirsty.
The last man, who sits on the extreme right of the prisoners, is Mr. Sam. Arnold. He is, perhaps, the best looking of the prisoners, and the least implicated. He has a solid, pleasant face; has been a rebel soldier, foolishly committed himself to Booth, with perhaps no intention to do a crime, recanted in pen and ink, and was made a national character. Had he recanted by word of mouth he might have saved himself unpleasant dreams. This shows everybody the absurdity of writing what they can so easily say. The best thing Arnold ever wrote was his letter to Booth refusing to engage in murder. Yet this recantation is more in evidence against than then his original purpose.
Arnold looks out of the window, and feels easy.
The reporters who are present are generally young fellows, practical and ardent, like Woods, of Boston; Colburn, of THE WORLD; and Major Poore, who has been the chronicler of such scenes for twenty years. Ber. Pitman, one of the authors of phonetic writing, is among the official reporters, and the Murphies, who could report the lightning, if it could talk, are slashing down history as it passes in at their ears and runs out at their fingers' ends.
The counsel for the accused strike me as being commonplace lawyers. They either have no chance or no pluck to assert the dignity of their profession. Reverdy Johnson is not here. The first day disgusted him, as he is a practitioner of law. Yet the best word of the trial has been his:
"I, gentlemen, am a member of that body of legislators which creates courts-martial and major-generals!"
The commission has collectively an imposing appearance: the face of Judge Holt is swarthy; he questions with slow utterance, holding the witness in his cold, measuring eye. Hunter, who sits at the opposite end of the table, shuts his eyes now and then, either to sleep or think, or both, and the other generals take a note or two, and watch for occasions to distinguish themselves.
Excepting Judge Holt, the court has shown as little ability as could be expected from soldiers, placed in unenviable publicity, and upon a duty for which they are disqualified, both by education and acumen. Witness the lack of dignity in Hunter, who opened the court by a coarse allusion to "humbug chivalry;" of Lew. Wallace, whose heat and intolerance were appropriately urged in the most exceptional English; of Howe, whose tirade against the rebel General Johnson was feeble as it was ungenerous! This court was needed to show us at least the petty tyranny of martial law and the pettiness of martial jurists. The counsel for the defence have just enough show to make the unfairness of the trial partake of hypocrisy, and the wideness of the subjects discussed makes one imagine that the object of the commission is to write a cyclopedia, and not to hang or acquit six or eight miserable wretches.
READ LETTER IX: JOHN WILKES BOOTH: LETTER IX