The Battle Hymn of the Republic by Jack Martin

Author:Jack Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autoset from 'Battle Hymn of the Republic BODY styled for AeP.indd'
by 'Rebecca' on 17/10/2022 at 13:44
Content may have been edited since
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2022-10-26T17:54:19+00:00

Chapter 5

“He is sifting out of the hearts of men before his judgement seat …”

John Surratt slouched dejectedly in the tattered armchair set before the one window in the farmhouse’s cramped parlor, a disordered pile of newspapers on the table to his right. He stared out the window, seeing nothing of the weed-choked yard, oblivious to the faint, distant thundering of Niagara Falls, thinking only of what the newspapers had announced. There had been no civil trial for the survivors of the Lincoln conspiracy; Washington remained a largely Southern town, and the Johnson Administration feared unanimous guilty verdicts would be impossible to obtain in a civilian trial. Instead, using the excuse that martial law still applied to Washington City, a commission of military officers under the stern abolitionist General David Hunter had been established to determine their guilt and punishment. The latest papers had announced the verdicts, which arrived with shocking speed. Dr. Samuel Mudd: guilty, sentenced to life imprisonment; it would have been death, but according to the papers some colonel had argued passionately before the tribunal for mercy for the doctor, and it had been reluctantly granted. George Atzerodt: guilty, sentenced to death by hanging. David Herold: guilty, sentenced to death by hanging. Lewis Powell (or as he now claimed, Lewis Payne): guilty, sentenced to death by hanging.

Mary Surratt: guilty, sentenced to death by hanging.

Surratt kicked the wall under the window, swearing viciously and damning all Yankees to Hell. He was in this farmhouse on the outskirts of Buffalo at the express order of the late John Wilkes Booth, charged with helping any Confederate agents or refugees sneak into Canada, assisted by the farmhouse’s longtime resident and agent of the Confederate Civil Service, Nathan Tollafson. When Surratt had learned of Booth’s death and the subsequent trial, he had been of two minds, and he continued to be of two minds. Part of him wanted to cross the border to Canada, and from there, place an ocean between himself and Federal vengeance. The other part was reluctant to abandon his innocent mother to the Yankee executioner.

Bad enough that his brave comrades would hang, thought Surratt. But to execute a blameless woman who had known nothing of the plot, whose only crime was to run a boardinghouse where Booth and the comrades met …

He found it hard to believe that even the Yankees would stoop to such a crime. Yet there it was, in the newspapers. He had argued most of the morning with Tollafson. He had told the older man that he should offer to surrender himself to the Federals, in exchange for his mother’s life. Tollafson had laughed harshly and called him a fool, pointing out that the national government had never yet hanged a woman and was not about to start now; some states had occasionally executed a member of the fair sex, but never Washington.

Surratt was startled back into awareness of his surroundings by a polite but insistent knocking coming from the back kitchen door. From one of the bedrooms emerged the stringy figure of Nathan Tollafson, who scowled at Surratt.

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