Such an incident is consistent only with the theory that the assassination plot was concocted at the last moment as a forlorn hope, and that, if there had been any conspiracy, it was a conspiracy to capture. It is easy to see why the Bureau of Military Justice suppressed this testimony also, because, although it bears hard upon Payne himself, and Herold, and possibly John Surratt, it renders it highly improbable that Mrs. Surratt was aware of any design to kill.
Even such a fragmentary review, as the foregoing, of the public history of the two years succeeding the execution--which any reader may complete, as well as test, for himself by referring to the Congressional Globe of that period, to the printed reports of the Committee, and to the leading newspapers of the day--is sufficient to indicate how the general tendency of events, and every event in its place, appear to have conspired to the accomplishment of one result,--the setting aside, in the public mind, of the verdict of the Military Commission in the case of Mrs. Surratt.
This was not done by a direct assault upon that tribunal, or upon its mode of procedure; not even upon the character of the witnesses against the particular culprit, nor upon the weakness of the case made against her. These points of attack were all passed by, and the verdict was taken on the flank.
The condemnation of the woman was subverted by the _wind_, so to speak, of passing events.
The irrepressible conflict between the President and the Congress; the consequent schism in the very ranks of the triumphant conquerors; the insane charge against Andrew Johnson of complicity in a conspiracy against his own life, supported by the incredible statements of the very witnesses who were responsible for the charge of complicity against Jefferson Davis and others; the final and complete exposure of the fiction of a conspiracy to assassinate, either by the Confederate authorities, or anybody else; and the true, historical character of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln;--all combined to shake the edifice of guilt, which the Bureau of Military Justice had so carefully built up around their helpless victim, upon such an aerial foundation. Whilst the gradual abatement of that furious uncharitableness, which in the hey-day of the war could find nothing not damnable in the Southern people, and no secessionist who was not morally capable either of murder or of perjury in its defense or concealment, was, surely but imperceptibly, clearing up the general atmosphere of public opinion, and thus preparing for the cordial reception of such a measure of retributive justice, as Time, with his sure revenges, was daily disclosing to be more and more inevitable.