When the President of the United States, the Secretary of War, the Military Commission, the Judge-Advocates, and the Executioner-General had buried the woman against whose life the whole military power of the Government, fresh from its triumph over a gigantic rebellion, had been levelled;--buried her broken body deep beneath the soil of the prison-yard, in close contact with the bodies of confessed felons; flattened the earth over her grave, replaced the pavement of stone, locked the door of entrance to the charnel-house and placed the key in the keeping of the stern Secretary;--they may have imagined that the iniquity of the whole proceeding was hidden forever.
But, _horribile dictu!_ the ghost of Mary E. Surratt would not down. It troubled the breast of the witness Weichman. It haunted the precincts of the Bureau of Military Justice. It pursued Bingham into the House of Representatives. It blanched the laurels of the great War Minister. Politics, history and the very vicissitudes of human events seemed subservient to the vindication of this humble victim.
Hardly had the delivery of the prisons of Washington, which followed the close of the trial, taken place, before the man who, as he himself swore, always had been treated as a son by the woman he betrayed, began to make advances to her sorrowing friends. He pretended to make confession of his perjury. He told a friend that his testimony would have been very much more favorable had it not been dictated to him by the officers who had him in charge; that the meeting of Lloyd and Mrs. Surratt was accidental, as she and he (Weichman) had already started for home before Lloyd returned, and only turned back because the buggy was discovered to be broken. The traitor soon discovered that he made no headway by such disclosures, but only met with a sterner repulse and a deeper loathing. His troubled soul then turned to another quarter. It has been stated that his testimony on the trial was somewhat indefinite and inconclusive. Complaints had been uttered by the officers conducting the prosecution. It was proved upon a subsequent occasion that one of these officers had actually threatened the witness that he would hang as an accomplice in the assassination did he not make his evidence more satisfactory. It appeared, also, that the Secretary of War had promised to protect and take care of him. Driven back by Mrs. Surratt's friends from his attempt at propitiation, Weichman resolved that he would yet earn his reward by retouching his former testimony so as to make it more definite and telling. He saw, at last, that to save himself from everlasting ignominy he must, as far as in him lay, make sure of the guilt of his victim. Actuated by these or similar motives, he, on the 11th day of August, 1865, wrote out, and swore to, a statement in which he, by a suspicious exercise of memory, detailed conversations with Mrs. Surratt and significant incidents, all pointing to complicity with Booth, no mention of which had been made on the trial, and which this candid witness stated "_had come to my_ (his) _recollection since the rendition of my_ (his) _testimony_."