John A. Bingham

Argument for the Prosecution

Special judge advocate John A. Bingham (1815–1900) began his closing statement for the government on June 27 with a lengthy legal argument justifying trying the defendants before a military commission. The following day he reviewed the evidence and restated a key element of the law: that all the parties to a conspiracy, whether or not they were present at the execution of a particular act, were “alike guilty of the several acts done by each in the execution of the common design.” Bingham denied that there ever had been a plot to capture Lincoln and accused Jefferson Davis and seven Confederate agents in Canada of having conspired with Booth, John Surratt, and the defendants to kill the President. As evidence of the Confederate leader’s guilt, Bingham cited the testimony of Lewis Bates, the North Carolina superintendent of the Southern Express Company, who had described Davis’s response to the news of Lincoln’s death. (Davis later denied that Bates was present when he learned of the assassination.) “When referring to the rebellion,” an officer serving in the courtroom recalled, Bingham’s “invective burned and seared like a hot iron.” But when he spoke of the martyred President, as Bingham did when recalling the fatal moments in Ford’s Theatre, “his lips would quiver with emotion, and his voice become as tender and reverent as if he were repeating the Lord’s Prayer.” In 1866, while serving in Congress as a Republican from Ohio, Bingham would help reshape the Constitution by drafting the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Two years later, while he was running for reelection, a heckler sought to unsettle him by shouting Mary Surratt’s name. Bingham responded by telling the man to consult the trial record.

 

But there is one other item of testimony that ought, among honest and intelligent people at all conversant with this evidence, to end all further inquiry as to whether Jefferson Davis was one of the parties, with Booth, as charged upon this record, in the conspiracy to assassinate the President and others. That is, that on the fifth day after the assassination, in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, a telegraphic dispatch was received by him, at the house of Mr. Bates, from John C. Breckinridge, his rebel Secretary of War, which dispatch is produced here, identified by the telegraph agent, and placed upon your record in the words following:

 

GREENSBORO’, April 19, 1865.

His Excellency, President Davis:

President Lincoln was assassinated in the theater in Washington on the night of the 14th inst. Seward’s house was entered on the same night and he was repeatedly stabbed, and is probably mortally wounded.

“JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE.”

 

At the time this dispatch was handed to him, Davis was addressing a meeting from the steps of Mr. Bates’ house, and after reading the dispatch to the people, he said: “If it were to be done, it were better it were well done.” Shortly afterward, in the house of the witness, in the same city, Breckinridge, having come to see Davis, stated his regret that the occurrence had happened, because he deemed it unfortunate for the people of the South at that time. Davis replied, referring to the assassination, “Well, General, I don’t know; if it were to be done at all, it were better that it were well done; and if the same had been done to Andy Johnson, the beast, and to Secretary Stanton, the job would then be complete.”

Accomplished as this man was in all the arts of a conspirator, he was not equal to the task—as happily, in the good providence of God, no mortal man is—of concealing, by any form of words, any great crime which he may have meditated or perpetrated either against his Government or his fellow-men. It was doubtless furthest from Jefferson Davis’ purpose to make confession. His guilt demanded utterance; that demand he could not resist; therefore his words proclaimed his guilt, in spite of his purpose to conceal it. He said, “If it were to be done, it were better it were well done.” Would any man, ignorant of the conspiracy, be able to devise and fashion such a form of speech as that? Had not the President been murdered? Had he not reason to believe that the Secretary of State had been mortally wounded? Yet he was not satisfied, but was compelled to say, “it were better it were well done”—that is to say, all that had been agreed to be done had not been done. Two days afterward, in his conversation with Breckinridge, he not only repeats the same form of expression—“if it were to be done it were better it were well done”—but adds these words: “And if the same had been done to Andy Johnson, the beast, and to Secretary Stanton, the job would then be complete.” He would accept the assassination of the President, the Vice-President, of the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of War, as a complete execution of the “job” which he had given out upon contract, and which he had “made all right,” so far as the pay was concerned, by the dispatches he had sent to Thompson by Surratt, one of his hired assassins. Whatever may be the conviction of others, my own conviction is that Jefferson Davis is as clearly proven guilty of this conspiracy as is John Wilkes Booth, by whose hand Jefferson Davis inflicted the mortal wound upon Abraham Lincoln. His words of intense hate, and rage, and disappointment, are not to be overlooked—that the assassins had not done their work well; that they had not succeeded in robbing the people altogether of their Constitutional Executive and his advisers; and hence he exclaims, “If they had killed Andy Johnson, the beast!” Neither can he conceal his chagrin and disappointment that the War Minister of the Republic, whose energy, incorruptible integrity, sleepless vigilance, and executive ability had organized day by day, month by month, and year by year, victory for our arms, had escaped the knife of the hired assassins. The job, says this procurer of assassination, was not well done; it had been better if it had been well done! Because Abraham Lincoln had been clear in his great office, and had saved the nation’s life by enforcing the nation’s laws, this traitor declares he must be murdered; because Mr. Seward, as the foreign Secretary of the country, had thwarted the purposes of treason to plunge his country into a war with England, he must be murdered; because, upon the murder of Mr. Lincoln, Andrew Johnson would succeed to the Presidency, and because he had been true to the Constitution and Government, faithful found among the faithless of his own State, clinging to the falling pillars of the Republic when others had fled, he must be murdered; and because the Secretary of War had taken care by the faithful discharge of his duties, that the Republic should live and not die, he must be murdered. Inasmuch as these two faithful officers were not also assassinated, assuming that the Secretary of State was mortally wounded, Davis could not conceal his disappointment and chagrin that the work was not “well done,” that the “job was not complete!”

 

Booth proceeded to the theater about nine o’clock in the evening, at the same time that Atzerodt, Payne and Herold were riding the streets, while Surratt, having parted with his mother at the brief interview in her parlor, from which his retreating steps were heard, was walking the avenue, booted and spurred, and doubtless consulting with O’Laughlin. When Booth reached the rear of the theater, he called Spangler to him (whose denial of that fact, when charged with it, as proven by three witnesses, is very significant), and received from Spangler his pledge to help him all he could, when with Booth he entered the theater by the stage door, doubtless to see that the way was clear from the box to the rear door of the theater, and look upon their victim, whose exact position they could study from the stage. After this view, Booth passes to the street, in front of the theater, where, on the pavement with other conspirators yet unknown, among them one described as a low-browed villain, he awaits the appointed moment. Booth himself, impatient, enters the vestibule of the theater from the front, and asks the time. He is referred to the clock, and returns. Presently, as the hour of ten approached, one of his guilty associates called the time; they wait; again, as the moments elapsed, this conspirator upon watch called the time; again, as the appointed hour draws nigh, he calls the time; and finally, when the fatal moment arrives, he repeats in a louder tone, “Ten minutes past ten o’clock.” Ten minutes past ten o’clock! The hour has come when the red right hand of these murderous conspirators should strike, and the dreadful deed of assassination be done.

Booth, at the appointed moment, entered the theater, ascended to the dress-circle, passed to the right, paused a moment, looking down, doubtless to see if Spangler was at his post, and approached the outer door of the close passage leading to the box occupied by the President, pressed it open, passed in, and closed the passage door behind him. Spangler’s bar was in its place, and was readily adjusted by Booth in the mortise, and pressed against the inner side of the door, so that he was secure from interruption from without. He passes on to the next door, immediately behind the President, and there stopping, looks through the aperture in the door into the President’s box, and deliberately observes the precise position of his victim, seated in the chair which had been prepared by the conspirators as the altar for the sacrifice, looking calmly and quietly down upon the glad and grateful people whom by his fidelity he had saved from the peril which had threatened the destruction of their government, and all they held dear this side of the grave, and whom he had come upon invitation to greet with his presence, with the words still lingering upon his lips which he had uttered with uncovered head and uplifted hand before God and his country, when on the 4th of last March he took again the oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, declaring that he entered upon the duties of his great office “with malice toward none—with charity for all.” In a moment more, strengthened by the knowledge that his co-conspirators were all at their posts, seven at least of them present in the city, two of them, Mudd and Arnold, at their appointed places, watching for his coming, this hired assassin moves stealthily through the door, the fastenings of which had been removed to facilitate his entrance, fires upon his victim, and the martyr spirit of Abraham Lincoln ascends to God.

“Treason has done his worst; nor steel nor poison,

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing

Can touch him further.”