I wonder if that were the least of Booth's crimes—to slay this public servant in the stolen hour of recreation he enjoyed but seldom. We worked his life out here, and killed him when he asked a holiday.

Outside of this room there is an office, where his secretaries sat—a room more narrow but as long—and opposite this adjacent office, a second door, directly behind Mr. Lincoln's chair leads by a private passage to his family quarters. This passage is his only monument in the building; he added nor subtracted nothing else; it tells a long story of duns and loiterers, contract-hunters and seekers for commissions, garrulous parents on paltry errands, toadies without measure and talkers without conscience. They pressed upon him through the great door opposite his window, and hat in hand, come courtsying to his chair, with an obsequious "Mr. President!"

If he dared, though the chief magistrate and commander of the army and navy, to go out of the great door, these vampires leaped upon him with their Babylonian pleas, and barred his walk to his hearthside. He could not insult them since it was not in his nature, and perhaps many of them had really urgent errands. So he called up the carpenter and ordered a strategic route cut from his office to his hearth, and perhaps told of it after with much merriment.

Here should be written the biography of his official life—in the room where have concentrated all the wires of action, and where have proceeded the resolves which vitalized in historic deeds. But only the great measures, however carried out, were conceived in this office. The little ones proceeded from other places..

Here once came Mr. Stanton, saying in his hard and positive way:

"Mr. Lincoln, I have found it expedient to disgrace and arrest General Stone."

"Stanton," said Mr. Lincoln, with an emotion of pain, "when you considered it necessary to imprison General Stone, I am glad you did not consult me about it."

And for lack of such consultation, General Stone, I learn, now lies a maniac in the asylum. The groundless pretext, upon which he suffered the reputation of treason, issued from the Department of War—not from this office.

But as to his biography, it is to be written by Colonel Nicolay and Major Hay. They are to go to Paris together, one as attache of legation, the other as consul, and while there, will undertake the labor. They are the only men who know his life well enough to exhaust it, having followed his official tasks as closely as they shared his social hours.

Major Hay is a gentleman of literary force. Colonel Nicolay has a fine judgment of character and public measures. Together they should satisfy both curiosity and history.

As I hear from my acquaintances here these episodes of the President's life, I recall many reminiscences of his ride from Springfield to Harrisburg, over much of which I passed. Then he left home and became an inhabitant of history. His face was solid and healthy, his step young, his speech and manner bold and kindly. I saw him at Trenton stand in the Legislature, and say, in his conversational intonation:

"We may have to put the foot down firm."

How should we have hung upon his accents then had we anticipated his virtues and his fate.

Death is requisite to make opinion grave. We looked upon Mr. Lincoln then as an amusing sensation, and there was much guffaw as he was regarded by the populace; he had not passed out of partisan ownership. Little by little, afterward, he won esteem, and often admiration, until the measure of his life was full, and the victories he had achieved made the world applaud him. Yet, at this date, the President was sadly changed. Four years of perplexity and devotion had wrinkled his face, and stooped his shoulders, and the failing eyes that glared upon the play closed as his mission was completed, and the world had been educated enough to comprehend him.

The White House has been more of a Republican mansion under his control than for many administrations. Uncouth guests came to it often, typical of the simple western civilization of which he was a graduate, and while no coarse altercation has ever ensued, the portal has swung wide for five years.

A friend, connected with a Washington newspaper, told me that he had occasion to see Mr. Lincoln one evening, and found that the latter had gone to bed. But he was told to sit down in the office, and directly the President entered. He wore only a night shirt, and his long, lank hirsute limbs, as he sat down, inclined the guest to laughter. Mr. Lincoln disposed of his request at once, and manifested a desire to talk. So he reached for the cane which my friend carried and conversed in this manner:

"I always used a cane when I was a boy. It was a freak of mine. My favorite one was a knotted beech stick, and I carved the head myself. There's a mighty amount of character in sticks. Don't you think so? You have seen these fishing poles that fit into a cane? Well, that was an old idea of mine. Dogwood clubs were favorite ones with the boys. I 'spose they use'em yet. Hickory is too heavy, unless you get it from a young sapling. Have you ever noticed how a stick in one's hand will change his appearance? Old women and witches would'nt look so without sticks. Meg Merrilies understands that."

In this way my friend, who is a clerk, in a newspaper office, heard the President talk for an hour. The undress of the man and the witness of his subject would be staples for merriment if we did not reflect that his greatness was of no conventional cast, that the playfulness of his nature and the simplicity of his illustration lightened public business but never arrested it.

Another gentleman, whom I know, visited the President in high dudgeon one night. He was a newspaper proprietor and one of his editors had been arrested.

"Mr. Lincoln," he said, "I have been off electioneering for your re-election, and in my absence you have had my editor arrested. I won't stand it, sir. I have fought better administrations than yours."

"Why, John," said the President, "I don't know much about it. I suppose your boys have been too enterprizing. The fact is, I don't interfere with the press much, but I suppose I am responsible."

"I want you to order the man's release to-night," said the applicant. "I shan't leave here till I get it. In fact, I am the man who should be arrested. Why don't you send me to Capitol Hill?"

This idea pleased the President exceedingly. He laughed the other into good humor.

"In fact," he said, "I am under restraint here, and glad of any pretext to release a journalist."

So he wrote the order, and the writer got his liberty.

It must not be inferred from this, however, that the President was a devotee to literature. He had no professional enthusiasm for it. The literary coterie of the White House got little flattery but its members were treated as agreeable citizens and not as the architects of any body's fortune.

Willis went there much for awhile, but yielded to his old habit of gossiping about the hall paper and the teapots. Emerson went there once, and was deferred to us if he were anything but a philosopher. Yet he so far grasped the character of his host as to indite that noble humanitarian eulogy upon him, delivered at Concord, and printed in the WORLD. It will not do to say definitely In this notice how several occasional writers visited the White House, heard the President's views and assented to them and afterward abused him. But these attained no remembrance nor tart reproach from that least retaliatory of men. He harbored no malice, and is said to have often placed himself on the stand-point of Davis and Lee, and accounted for their defection while he could not excuse it.

He was a good reader, and took all the leading NEW YORK dailies every day. His secretaries perused them and selected all the items which would interest the President; these were read to him and considered. He bought few new books, but seemed ever alive to works of comic value; the vein of humor in him was not boisterous in its manifestations, but touched the geniality of his nature, and he reproduced all that he absorbed, to elucidate some new issue, or turn away argument by a laugh.

As a jester, Mr. Lincoln's tendency was caricatured by the prints, but not exaggerated. He probably told as many stories as are attributed to him. Nor did he, as is averred, indulge in these jests on solemn occasions. No man felt with such personal intensity the extent of the casualties of his time, and he often gravely reasoned whether he could be in any way responsible for the bloodshed and devastation over which it was his duty to preside.

An acquaintance of mine—a private—once went to him to plead for a man's life. He had never seen the man for whom he pleaded, and had no acquaintance with the man's family. Mr. Lincoln was touched by his disinterestedness, and said to him:

"If I were anything but the President, I would be constantly working as you have done."

Whenever a doubt of one's guilt lay on his mind, the man was spared by his direct interference..

There was an entire absence in the President's character of the heroic element. He would do a great deed in deshabille as promptly as in full dress. He never aimed to be brilliant, unconsciously understanding that a great man's brilliancy is to be measured by the "wholeness" and synthetic cast of his career rather than by any fitful ebullitions. For that reason we look in vain through his messages for "points." His point was not to turn a sentence or an epigram, but to win an effect, regardless of the route to it.

He was commonplace in his talk, and Chesterfield would have had no patience with him; his dignity of character lay in his uprightness rather than in his formal manner. Members of his government often reviewed him plainly in his presence. Yet he divined the true course, while they only argued it out.

His good feeling was not only personal, but national. He had no prejudice against any race or potentate. And his democracy was of a practical, rather than of a demonstrative, nature. He was not Marat, but Moreau—not Paine and Jefferson; but Franklin.

His domestic life was like a parlor of night-time, lit by the equal grate of his genial and uniform kindness. Young Thaddy played with him upon the carpet; Robert came home from the war and talked to his father as to a school-mate, he was to Mrs. Lincoln as chivalrous on the last day of his life as when he courted her. I have somewhere seen a picture of Henry IV. of France, riding his babies on his back: that was the President.

So dwelt the citizen who is gone—a model in character if not in ceremony, for good men to come who will take his place in the same White House, and find their generation comparing them to the man thought worthy of assassination. I am glad to sit here in his chair, where he has bent so often,—in the atmosphere of the household he purified, in the sight of the green grass and the blue river he hallowed by gazing upon, in the very centre of the nation he preserved for the people, and close the list of bloody deeds, of desperate fights of swift expiations, of renowned obsequies of which I have written, by inditing at his table the goodness of his life and the eternity of his memory.



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 person.

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.



LETTER IX.

THE EXECUTIONS.

Washington, Friday, July 7th.

The trial is over; four of the conspirators have paid with their lives the penalty of the Great Conspiracy; the rest go to the jail, and with one exception for the remainder of their lives.

Whatever our individual theories may be, the great crime is ended, and this is the crowning scene:

It was a long and dusty avenue, along which rambled soldiers in bluishly white coats, cattle with their tongues out, straying from the herd, and a few negroes making for their cabins, which dotted the fiery and vacant lots of the suburbs. At the foot of this avenue, where a lukewarm river holds between its dividing arms a dreary edifice of brick, the way was filled with collected cabs, and elbowing people, abutting against a circle of sentinels who kept the arsenal gate. The low, flat, dust-white fields to the far left were also lined with patrols and soldiers lying on the ground in squads beside their stacked muskets. Within these a second blue and monotonous line extended. The drive from the arsenal gate to the arsenal's high and steel-spiked wall was beset by companies of exacting sabremen, and all the river bank to the right was edged with blue and bayonets. This exhibition of war was the prelude to a very ghastly but very popular episode—an execution. Three men and a woman were to be led out in shackles and hung to a beam. They had conspired to take life; they had thrilled the world with the partial consummation of their plot; they were to reach the last eminence of assassins, on this parched and oppressive noon, by swinging in pinioned arms and muffled faces in the presence of a thousand people.

The bayonets at the gate were lifted as I produced my pass. It was the last permission granted. In giving it away the General seemed relieved, for he had been sorely troubled by applications. Everybody who had visited Washington to seek for an office, sought to see this expiation also. The officer at the gate looked at my pass suspiciously. "I don't believe that all these papers have been genuine," he said. Is an execution, then, so great a warning to evil-doers, that men will commit forgery to see it?

I entered a large grassy yard, surrounded by an exceedingly high wall. On the top of this wall, soldiers with muskets in their hands, were thickly planted. The yard below was broken by irregular buildings of brick. I climbed by a flight of rickety outside stairs to the central building, where many officers were seated at the windows, and looked awhile at the strange scene on the grassy plaza. On the left, the long, barred, impregnable penitentiary rose. The shady spots beneath it were occupied by huddling spectators. Soldiers were filling their canteens at the pump. A face or two looked out from the barred jail. There were many umbrellas hoisted on the ground to shelter civilians beneath them. Squads of officers and citizens lay along the narrow shadow of the walls. The north side of the yard was enclosed on three sides by columns of soldiers drawn up in regular order, the side next to the penitentiary being short to admit of ingress to the prisoner's door; but the opposite column reached entirely up to the north wall.

Within this enclosed area a structure to be inhabited by neither the living nor the dead was fast approaching completion. It stood gaunt, lofty, long. Saws and hammers made dolorous music on it. Men, in their shirt sleeves, were measuring it and directing its construction in a business way. Now and then some one would ascend its airy stair to test its firmness; others crawled beneath to wedge its slim supports, or carry away the falling debris.

Toward this skeleton edifice all looked with a strange nervousness. It was the thought and speculation of the gravest and the gayest.

It was the gallows.

A beam reached, horizontally, in the air, twenty feet from the ground; four awkward ropes, at irregular intervals, dangled from it, each noosed at the end. It was upheld by three props, one in the center and one at each end. These props came all the way to the ground where they were morticed in heavy bars. Midway of them a floor was laid, twenty by twelve feet, held in its position on the farther side by shorter props, of which there were many, and reached by fifteen creaking steps, railed on either side. But this floor had no supports on the side nearest the eye, except two temporary rods, at the foot of which two inclined beams pointed menacingly, held in poise by ropes from the gallows floor.

And this floor was presently discovered to be a cheat, a trap, a pitfall.

Two hinges only held it to its firmer half. These were to give way at the fatal moment, and leave only the shallow and unreliable air for the bound and smothering to tread upon.

The traps were two, sustained by two different props.

The nooses were on each side of the central support.

Was this all?

Not all.

Close by the foot of the gallows four wooden boxes were piled upon each other at the edge of four newly excavated pits, the fresh earth of which was already dried and brittle in the burning noon.

Here were to be interred the broken carcasses when the gallows had let go its throttle. They were so placed as the victims should emerge from the gaol door they would be seen near the stair directly in the line of march.

And not far from these, in silence and darkness beneath the prison where they had lain so long and so forbodingly, the body of John Wilkes Booth, sealed up in the brick floor, had long been mouldering. If the dead can hear he had listened many a time to the rattle of their manacles upon the stairs, to the drowsy hum of the trial and the buzz of the garrulous spectators; to the moaning, or the gibing, or the praying in the bolted cells where those whom kindred fate had given a little lease upon life lay waiting for the terrible pronouncement.

It was a long waiting, and the roof of a high house outside the walls was seen to be densely packed with people. Others kept arriving moment by moment; soldiers were wondering when the swinging would begin and officers arguing that the four folks "deserved it, damn them!" Gentlemen of experience were telling over the number of such expiations they had witnessed. Analytic people were comparing the various modes of shooting, garroting, and guillotining. Cigars were sending up spirals of soothing smoke. There was a good deal of covert fear that a reprieve might be granted. Inquires were many and ingenuous for whisky, and one or two were so deeply expectant that they fell asleep.

How much those four dying, hoping, cringing, dreaming felons were grudged their little gasp of life! It was to be a scene, not a postponement or a prolongation. "Who was to be the executioner?" "Why had not the renowned and artistic Isaacs been sent for from New York?" "Would they probably die game, or grow weak-kneed in the last extremity?" Ah, the gallows' workmen have completed the job! "Now then we should have it."

Still there was delay. The sun peeped into the new-made graves and made blistering hot the gallows' floor. The old pump made its familiar music to the cool plash of blessed water. The grass withered in the fervid heat. The bronzed faces of the soldiers ran lumps of sweat. The file upon the jail walls looked down into the wide yard yawningly. No wind fluttered the two battle standards condemned to unfold their trophies upon this coming profanation. Not yet arrived. Why? The extent of grace has almost been attained. The sentence gave them only till two o'clock! Why are they so dilatory in wishing to be hanged?

Suddenly the wicket opens, the troops spring to their feet, and stand at order arms, the flags go up, the low order passes from company to company; the spectators huddle a little nearer to the scaffold; all the writers for the press produce their pencils and note-books.

First came a woman pinioned.

A middle-aged woman, dressed in black, bonnetted and veiled, walking between two bare-headed priests.

One of these held against his breast a crucifix of jet, and in the folds of his blue-fringed sash he carried an open breviary, while both of them muttered the service for the dead.

Four soldiers with musket at shoulder, followed, and a captain led the way to the gallows.

The second party escorted a small and shambling German, whose head had a long white cap upon it, rendering more filthy his dull complexion, and upon whose feet the chains clanked as he slowly advanced, preceded by two officers, flanked by a Lutheran clergyman, and followed, as his predecessor, by an armed squad.

The third, preacher and party, clustered about a shabby boy, whose limbs tottered as he progressed.

The fourth, walked in the shadow of a straight high stature, whose tawny hair and large blue eye were suggestive rather of the barbarian striding in his conqueror's triumph, than the assassin going to the gallows.

All these, captives, priests, guards, and officers, nearly twenty in all, climbed slowly and solemnly the narrow steps; and upon four arm chairs, stretching across the stage in the rear of the traps, the condemned were seated with their spiritual attendants behind them.

The findings and warrants were immediately read to the prisoners by General Hartrauft in a quiet and respectful tone, an aid holding an umbrella over him meantime. These having been already published, and being besides very uninteresting to any body but the prisoners, were paid little heed to, all the spectators interesting themselves in the prisoners.

There was a fortuitous delicacy in this distribution, the woman being placed farthest from the social and physical dirtiness of Atzerott, and nearest the unblanched and manly physiognomy of Payne.

She was not so pale that the clearness of her complexion could not be seen, and the brightness of the sun made her vail quite transparent. Her eyes were seen to be of a soft gray; her brown hair lay smoothly upon a full, square forehead; the contour of her face was comely, but her teeth had the imperfectness of those of most southern women, being few and irregular. Until the lips were opened she did not reveal them. Her figure was not quite full enough to be denominated buxom, yet had all the promise of venerable old age, had nature been permitted its due course. She was of the medium height, and modest—as what woman would not be under such searching survey? At first she was very feeble, and leaned her head upon alternate sides of her arm-chair in nervous spasms; but now and then, when a sort of wail just issued from her lips, the priest placed before her the crucifix to lull her fearful spirit. All the while the good fathers Wigett and Walter murmured their low, tender cadences, and now and then the woman's face lost its deadly fear, and took a bold, cognizable survey of the spectators. She wore a robe of dark woolen, no collar, and common shoes of black listing. Her general expression was that of acute suffering, vanishing at times as if by the conjuration of her pride, and again returning in a paroxysm as she looked at the dreadful rope dangling before her. This woman, to whom, the priests have made their industrious moan, holding up the effigy of Christ when their own appeals became of no avail, perched there in the lofty air, counting her breaths, counting the winkfuls of light, counting the final wrestles of her breaking heart, had been the belle of her section, and many good men had courted her hand. She had led a pleasant life, and children had been born to her—who shared her mediocre ambition and the invincibility of her will. If the charge of her guilt were proven, she was the Lady Macbeth of the west.

But women know nothing of consequences. She alone of all her sex stands now in this thrilled and ghastly perspective, and in immediate association with three creatures in whose company it is no fame to die: a little crying boy, a greasy unkempt sniveller, and a confessed desperado. Her base and fugitive son, to know the infamy of his cowardice and die of his shame, should have seen his mother writhing in her seat upon the throne his wickedness established for her.

Payne, the strangest criminal in our history, was alone dignified and self possessed. He wore a closely-fitting knit shirt, a sailor's straw hat tied with a ribbon, and dark pantaloons, but no shoes. His collar, cut very low, showed the tremendous muscularity of his neck, and the breadth of his breast was more conspicuous by the manner in which the pinioned arms thrust it forward. His height, his vigor, his glare made him the strong central figure of this interelementary tableaux. He said no word; his eyes were red as with the penitential weeping of a courageous man, and the smooth hardness of his skin seemed like a polished muscle. He did not look abroad inquisitively, nor within intuitively. He had no accusation, no despair, no dreaminess. He was only looking at death as for one long expected, and not a tremor nor a shock stirred his long stately limbs; withal, his blue eye was milder than when I saw him last, as if some bitterness, or stolidness, or obstinate pride had been exorcised, perhaps by the candor of confession. Now and then he looked half-pityingly at the woman, and only once moved his lips, as if in supplication. Few who looked at him, forgetful of his crime, did not respect him. He seemed to feel that no man was more than his peer, and one of his last commands was a word of regret to Mr. Seward.

I have a doubt that this man is entirely a member of our nervous race. I believe that a fiber of the aboriginal runs through his tough sinews. At times he looked entirely an Indian. His hair is tufted, and will not lie smoothly. His cheek-bones are large and high set. There is a tint in his complexion. Perhaps the Seminole blood of his swampy state left a trace of its combative nature there.

Payne was a preacher's son, and not the worst graduate of his class. His real name is Lewis Thornton Powell.

He died without taking the hand of any living friend.

Even the squalid Atzerott was not so poor. I felt a pity for his physical rather than his vital or spiritual peril. It seemed a profanation to break the iron column of his neck, and give to the worm his belted chest.

But I remember that he would have slain a sick old man.

The third condemned, although whimpering, had far more grit than I anticipated; he was inquisitive and flippant-faced, and looked at the noose flaunting before him, and the people gathered below, and the haggard face of Atzerott, as if entirely conscious and incapable of abstraction.

Harold would have enjoyed this execution vastly as a spectator. He was, I think, capable of a greater degree of depravity than any of his accomplices. Atzerott might have made a sneak thief, Booth a forger, but Harold was not far from a professional pickpocket. He was keen-eyed, insolent, idle, and, by a small experience in Houston street, would have been qualified for a first-class "knuck." He had not, like the rest, any political suggestion for the murder of the heads of the nation; and upon the gallows, in his dirty felt hat, soiled cloth coat, light pantaloons and stockings, he seemed unworthy of his manacles.

A very fussy Dutchman tied him up and fanned him, and he wept forgetfully, but did not make a halt or absurd spectacle.

Atzerott was my ideal of a man to be hung—a dilution of Wallack's rendering of the last hours of Fagan, the Jew; a sort of sick man, quite garrulous and smitten, with his head thrown forward, muttering to the air, and a pallidness transparent through his dirt as he jabbered prayers and pleas confusedly, and looked in a complaining sort of way at the noose, as if not quite certain that it might not have designs upon him.

He wore a greyish coat, black vest, light pantaloons and slippers, and a white affair on his head, perhaps a handkerchief.

His spiritual adviser stood behind him, evidently disgusted with him.

Atzerott lost his life through too much gabbing. He could have had serious designs upon nothing greater than a chicken, but talked assassination with the silent and absolute Booth, until entrapped into conspiracy and the gallows, much against his calculation. This man was visited by his mother and a poor, ignorant woman with whom he cohabited. He was the picture of despair, and died ridiculously, whistling up his courage.

These were the dramatis person, no more to be sketched, no more to be cross-examined, no more to be shackled, soon to be cold in their coffins.

They were, altogether, a motley and miserable set. Ravaillae might have looked well swinging in chains; Charlotte Corday is said to have died like an actress; Beale hung not without dignity, but these people, aspiring to overturn a nation, bore the appearance of a troop of ignorant folks, expiating the blood-shed of a brawl.

When General Hartrauft ceased reading there was momentary lull, broken only by the cadences of the priests.

Then the Rev. Mr. Gillette addressed the spectators in a deep impressive tone. The prisoner, Lewis Thornton Powell, otherwise Payne, requested him to thus publicly and sincerely return his thanks to General Hartrauft, the other officers, the soldiers, and all persons who had charge of him and had attended him. Not one unkind word, look, or gesture, had been given to him by any one. Dr. Gillette then followed in a fervent prayer in behalf of the prisoner, during which Payne's eyes momentarily filled with tears, and he followed in the prayer with visible feeling.

Rev. Dr. Olds followed, saying in behalf of the prisoner, David E. Harold, that he tendered his forgiveness to all who had wronged him, and asked the forgiveness of all whom he had wronged. He gave his thanks to the officers and guards for kindnesses rendered him. He hoped that he had died in charity with all men and at peace with God. Dr. Olds concluded with a feeling prayer for the prisoner.

Rev. Dr. Butler then made a similar return of thanks on behalf of George A. Atzerott for kindness received from his guards and attendants, and concluded with an earnest invocation in behalf of the criminal, saying that the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin, and asking that God Almighty might have mercy upon this man.

The solemnity of this portion of the scene may be imagined, the several clergyman speaking in order the dying testament of their clients, and making the hot hours fresh with the soft harmonies of their benedictions.

The two holy fathers having received Mrs. Surratt's confession, after the custom of their creed observed silence. In this, as in other respects, Mrs. Surratt's last hours were entirely modest and womanly.

The stage was still filled with people; the crisis of the occasion had come; the chairs were all withdrawn, and the condemned stood upon their feet.

The process of tying the limbs began.

It was with a shudder, almost a blush, that I saw an officer gather the ropes tightly three times about the robes of Mrs. Surratt, and bind her ankles with cords. She half fainted, and sank backward upon the attendants, her limbs yielding to the extremity of her terror, but uttering no cry, only a kind of sick groaning, like one in the weakness of fever, when a wry medicine must be taken.

Payne, with his feet firmly laced together, stood straight as one of the scaffold beams, and braced himself up so stoutly that this in part prevented the breaking of his neck.

Harold stood well beneath the drop, still whimpering at the lips, but taut, and short, and boyish.

Atzerott, in his grovelling attitude, while they tied him began to indulge in his old vice of gabbing. He evidently wished to make his finale more effective than his previous cowardly role, and perhaps was strengthening his fortitude with a speech, as we sometimes do of dark nights with a whistle.

"Gentlemen," he said, with a sort of choke and gasp, "take ware." He evidently meant "beware," or "take care," and confounded them.

Again, when the white death-cap was drawn over his face, he continued to cry out under it, once saying, "Good bye, shentlemens, who is before me now;" and again, "May we meet in the other world." Finally he drifted away with low, half-intelligible ebullitions, as "God help me," "oh! oh!" and the like.

The rest said nothing, except Mrs. Surratt, who asked to be supported, that she might not fall, but Harold protested against the knot with which he was to be dislocated, it being as huge as one's double fist.

In fact all the mechanical preparations were clumsy and inartistic, and the final scenes of the execution, therefore, revolting in the extreme. When the death-caps were all drawn over the faces of the prisoners, and they stood in line in the awful suspense between absolute life and immediate death, a man at the neck of each adjusting the cord, the knot beneath the ears of each protruded five or six inches, and the cord was so thick that it could not be made to press tightly against the flesh.

So they stood, while nearly a thousand faces from window, roof, wall, yard and housetop, gazed, the scaffold behind them still densely packed with the assistants, and the four executioners beneath, standing at their swinging beams. The priests continued to murmur prayers. The people were dumb, as if each witness stood alone with none near by to talk to him.

An instant this continued, while an officer on the plot before, motioned back the assistants, and then with a forward thrust of his hand, signaled the executioners.

The great beams were darted against the props simultaneously. The two traps fell with a slam. The four bodies dropped like a single thing, outside the yet crowded remnant of the gallows floor, and swayed and turned, to and fro, here and there, forward and backward, and with many a helpless spasm, while the spectators took a little rush forward, and the ropes were taut as the struggling pulses of the dying.

Mrs. Surratt's neck was broken immediately; she scarcely drew one breath. Her short woman's figure, with the skirts looped closely about it, merely dangled by the vibration of her swift descent, and with the knot holding true under the ear, her head leaned sideways, and her pinioned arms seemed content with their confinement.

Payne died a horrible death; the knot slipped to the back of his neck, and bent his head forward on his breast, so that he strangled as he drew his deep chest almost to his chin, and the knees contracted till they almost seemed to touch his abdomen. The veins in his great wrists were like whip-cords, expanded to twice their natural dimensions, and the huge neck grew almost black with the dark blood that rushed in a flood to the circling rope. A long while he swayed and twisted and struggled, till at last nature ceased her rebellion and life went out unwillingly.

Harold also passed through some struggles. It is doubtful that his neck was broken. The perspiration dripped from his feet, and he swung in the hot noon just living enough to make death irritable.

Atzerott died easily. Life did not care to fight for his possession.

The two central figures lived long after the two upon the flanks.

There they hung, bundles of carcass and old clothes, four in a row, and past all conspiracy or ambition, the river rolling by without a sound, and men watching them with a shiver, while the heat of the day seemed suddenly abated, as if by the sudden opening of a tomb.

The officers conversed in a half-audible tone; the reporters put up their books; the assistants descended from the gallows; and the medical men drew near. No wind stirred the unbreathing bodies, they were stone dead.

The bodies were allowed to hang about twenty minutes, when surgeon Otis, U. S. V., and Assistant Surgeons Woodward and Porter, U. S. A., examined them and pronounced all dead. In about ten minutes more a ladder was placed against the scaffold preparatory to cutting the bodies down. An over-zealous soldier on the platform reached over and severed the cord, letting one body fall with a thump, when he was immediately ordered down and reprimanded. The body of Atzerott was placed in a strong white pine box, and the other bodies cut down in the following order, Harold, Powell, and Mrs. Surratt.

The carcasses thus recovered were given over to a squad of soldiers and each placed in a pine box without uncovering the faces. The boxes were forthwith placed in the pits prepared for them, and directly all but the memory of their offense passed from the recording daylight.

In the gloomy shadow of that arsenal lies all the motive, and essay of a crime which might have changed the destinies of our race. It will be forever a place of suspicion and marvel, the haunted spot of the Capitol, and the terror of all who to end a fancied evil, cut their way to right with a dagger.



EXTRA MURAL SCENES.

As everything connected with this expiation will be greedily read I compile from gossip and report a statement of the last intramural hours of the prisoners.

During the morning a female friend of Atzerott, from Port Tobacco, had an interview with him—she leaving him about eleven o'clock. He made the following statement:

He took a room at the Kirkwood House on Thursday, in order to get a pass from Vice-President Johnson to go to Richmond. Booth was to lease the Richmond theater and the President was to be invited to attend it when visiting Richmond, and captured there. Harold brought the pistol and knife to the room about half-past two o'clock on Friday. He (Atzerott) said he would have nothing to do with the murder of Johnson, when Booth said that Harold had more courage than Atzerott, and he wanted Atzerott to be with Harold to urge him to do it. There was a meeting at a restaurant about the middle of March, at which John Surratt, O'Laughlin, Booth, Arnold, Payne, Harold and himself were present, when a plan to capture the President was discussed. They had heard the President was to visit a camp, and they proposed to capture him, coach and all, drive through long old fields to "T. B.," where the coach was to be left and fresh horses were to be got, and the party would proceed to the river to take a boat. Harold took a buggy to "T. B." in anticipation that Mr. Lincoln would be captured, and he was to go with the party to the river. Slavery had put him on the side of the South. He had heard it preached in church that the curse of God was upon the slaves, for they were turned black. He always hated the nigger and felt that they should be kept in ignorance. He had not received any money from Booth, although he had been promised that if they were successful they should never want, that they would be honored throughout the South, and that they could secure an exchange of prisoners and the recognition of the confederacy.

Harold slept well several hours, but most of the night he was sitting up, either engaged with his pastor, Rev. Mr. Olds, of Christ Church, or in prayer. His sisters were with him from an early hour this morning to twelve o'clock; they being present when he partook of the sacrament at the hands of Dr. Olds. The parting was particularly affecting. Harold conversed freely with them, and expressed himself prepared to die.

Powell conversed with Dr. Gillette and Dr. Striker on religious topics during the morning, sitting erect, as he did in the court-room. From his conversation it appears that he was raised religiously, and belonged to the Baptist church until after the breaking out of the rebellion. He appeared to be sincerely repentant, and in his cell shed tears freely. He gave his advisers several commissions of a private character, and stated that he was willing to meet his God, asking all men to forgive, and forgiving all who had done aught against him. Colonel Doster, his counsel, also took leave of him during the morning, as well as with Atzerott.

Mrs. Surratt's daughter was with her at an early hour. One of her male friends also had an interview with her, and received directions concerning the disposition of her property. During the night and morning she received the ministrations of Revs. J. A. Walter and B. F. Wigett, and conversed freely with them, expressing, while protesting her innocence, her willingness to meet her God. Her counsel, Messrs. Aiken & Clampitt, took leave of her during the morning.

A singular feature of this execution was the arrest of General Hancock this morning, who appeared in court, to answer a writ of habeas corpus, with a full staff. It is well to notice that this execution by military order has not, therefore, passed without civil protest. President Johnson extended to General Hancock the right conferred upon the President by Congress of setting aside the habeas corpus.

As usual in such executions as this, there were many stirring outside episodes, and much shrewd mixture of tragedy and business. A photographer took note of the scene in all its phases, from a window of a portion of the jail. Six artists were present, and thirty seven special correspondents, who came to Washington only for this occasion.

The passes to the execution were written not printed, and, excepting the bungling mechanism of the scaffold, the sorrowful event went off with more than usual good order. Every body feels relieved to night, because half of the crime is buried.

On Monday, Mudd, Arnold, O'Laughlin, and Spangler, will go northward to prison. The three former for life, the last for six years.

Applications for pardon were made yesterday and to-day to President Johnson, by Mrs. Samuel Mudd, who is quite woe-begone and disappointed, in behalf of her husband, by the sisters of Harold, and by Miss Ann Surratt. Harold's sisters, dressed in full mourning and heavily veiled, made their appearance at the White House, for the purpose of interceding with the President in behalf of their brother. Failing to see the President, they addressed a note to Mrs. Johnson, and expressed a hope that she would not turn a deaf ear to their pleadings. Mrs. Johnson being quite sick, it was deemed expedient by the ushers not to deliver the note, when, as a last expedient, the ladies asked permission to forward a note to Mrs. Patterson, the President's daughter, which privilege was not granted, as Mrs. Patterson is also quite indisposed to-day. The poor girls went away with their last hope shattered.

The misery of the pretty and heart-broken daughter of Mrs. Surratt is the talk of the city. This girl appears to have loved her mother with all the petulant passion of a child. She visited her constantly, and to-day made so stirring an effort to obtain her life that her devotion takes half the disgrace from the mother. She got the priests to speak in her behalf. Early to-day she knelt in the cell at her mother's feet, and sobbed, with now and then a pitiful scream till the gloomy corridors rang. She endeavored to win from Payne a statement that her mother was not accessory, and, as a last resort, flung herself upon the steps of the White-House, and made that portal memorable by her filial tears. About half-past 8 o'clock this morning, Miss Surratt, accompanied by a female friend, again visited the White-House, for the purpose of obtaining an interview with the President. The latter having given orders that he would receive no one to-day, the door-keeper stopped Miss Surratt at the foot of the steps leading up to the President's office, and would not permit her to proceed further. She then asked permission to see General Muzzy, the president's military secretary, who promptly answered the summons, and came down stairs where Miss Surratt was standing. As soon as the general made his appearance, Miss Surratt threw herself upon her knees before him, and catching him by the coat, with loud sobs and streaming eyes, implored him to assist her in obtaining a hearing with the President. General Muzzy, in as tender a manner as possible, informed Miss Surratt that he could not comply with her request, as President Johnson's orders were imperative, and he would receive no one. Upon General Muzzy returning to his office, Miss Surratt threw herself upon the stair steps, where she remained a considerable length of time, sobbing aloud in the greatest anguish, protesting her mother's innocence, and imploring every one who came near her to intercede in her mother's behalf.

While thus weeping she declared her mother was too good and kind to be guilty of the enormous crime of which she was convicted, and asserted that if her mother was put to death she wished to die also. She was finally allowed to sit in the east room, where she lay in wait for all who entered, hoping to make them efficacious in her behalf, all the while uttering her weary heart in a woman's touching cries: but at last, certain of disappointment, she drove again to the jail and lay in her mother's cell, with the heavy face of one who brings ill-news. The parting will consecrate those gloomy walls. The daughter saw the mother pinioned and kissed her wet face as she went shuddering to the scaffold. The last words of Mrs. Surratt, as she went out of the jail, were addressed to a gentleman whom she had known.

"Good-bye, take care of Annie."

To-night there is crape on the door of the Surratt's, and a lonely lamp shines at a single window, where the sad orphan is thinking of her bereavement.

The bodies of the dead have been applied for but at present will not given up.

Judge Holt was petitioned all last night for the lives and liberties of the condemned, but he was inexorable.

The soldiers who hung the condemned were appointed against their will. I forbear to give their names as they do not wish the repute of executioners. They all belonged to the Fourteenth Veteran Reserve Infantry.

Here endeth the story of this tragedy upon a tragedy. All are glad that it is done. I am glad particularly. It has cost me how many journeying to Washington, how many hot midnights at the telegraph office, how many gallops into wild places, and how much revolting familiarity with blood.

The end has come. The slain, both good and evil, are in their graves, out of the reach of hangman and assassin. Only the correspondent never dies. He is the true Pantheist—going out of nature for a week, but bursting forth afresh in a day, and so insinuating himself into the history of our era that it is beginning to be hard to find out where the event ends and the writer begins.

Next week Ford's Theater opens with the "Octoroon." The gas will be pearly as ever; the scenes as rich. The blood-stained foot-lights will flash as of old upon merry and mimicking faces. So the world has its tragic ebullitions; but its real career is comedy. Over the graves of the good and the scaffolds of the evil, sits the leering Momus across whose face death sometimes brings sleep, but never a wrinkle.

THE END