Judge Bingham is a most willing witness. He relates with great circumstantiality that "after the Military Commission had tried and sentenced the parties" he "prepared the form of the petition to the President." He then gives the form thus prepared as he now recollects it (in which there are two significant mistakes); he states that he wrote it with his own hands, that General Ekin copied it, and the five signed the copy; as if all this particularity had any relevance to the question at issue, as if the point in dispute was the existence of the paper, and not its suppression at a critical moment after it was written. He affects to believe it necessary to state to his old colleague, that he "deemed it his duty to call the attention of Secretary Stanton to the petition, and did call his attention to it before the final action of the President;"--as if it were among the possibilities, that the head of the War Department could in any case have overlooked so important a paper, much less that the imperious Chief of this very prosecution could have been kept in ignorance, one hour, of what was done by his tools.
The Special Assistant, however, at last comes to the point:
"After the execution, the statement to which you refer was made that President Johnson had not seen the petition for the commutation of the death sentence upon Mrs. Surratt. I afterwards called at your office, and, without notice to you of my purpose, asked for the record in the case of the assassins. It was opened and shown me, and there was then attached to it the petition, copied and signed as hereinbefore stated."
Oh, what an artless pair of correspondents! The former Special Assistant tells the former Judge-Advocate how he played the detective on him to his friend's justification; "_without notice of my purpose_"!
"Soon thereafter I called upon Secretaries Stanton and Seward, and asked if this petition had been presented to the President before the death-sentence was by him approved, and was answered by each of those gentlemen that the petition was presented to the President, and was duly considered by him and his advisers, before the death-sentence upon Mrs. Surratt was approved, and that the President and the Cabinet upon such consideration were a unit in denying the prayer of the petition; Mr. Stanton and Mr. Seward stating that they were present."