As we let fall the curtain at the close of this dark and shameful tragedy, let us endeavor to anticipate the verdict of history.
The execution of Mary E. Surratt is the foulest blot on the history of the United States of America.
It was a violation of the most sacred provisions of that Constitution, whose enforcement was the vaunted purpose of the War.
It was a violation of the fundamental forms and principles of criminal jurisprudence, centuries older than the Constitution.
It was a violation of that even-handed justice, which is said to rule in the armies of Heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.
It was a violation of those chivalrous impulses which spring unbidden to the manly breast in the presence of woman.
It was a violation of the benign precepts of Jesus, which enjoin tenderness to the fatherless and the widow.
It was a violation of the magnanimity of the brave soldier, which scorns to wound the weak, the fallen and the helpless.
It was a violation of even the common instincts of fairness, which subsist, as a matter of course, between man and man.
It was unconstitutional. It was illegal. It was unjust. It was inhumane. It was unholy. It was pusillanimous. It was mean. And it was each and all of these in the highest or lowest degree. It resembles the acts of savages, and not the deeds of civilized men.
The annals of modern times will be searched in vain to furnish its parallel. Execrations rise to our lips, as we read, in the pages of Macaulay, of the hanging of Alice Lisle, and the burning of Elizabeth Gaunt. But Alice Lisle and Elizabeth Gaunt were indicted by grand juries, tried by petit juries, found guilty, and sentenced, in strict accordance with criminal procedure. The forms of law, which the bigoted James, and even the infamous Jeffrey, were careful to observe, were swept aside by Holt and Bingham and Stanton, with a sneer.
We turn aside with sickening horror from the recital of the murderous orgies of the Terrorists of the French Revolution--shedding the blood of the young, the tender, the beautiful, the brave. But the Terrorists of France could plead the excuse, that they were driven to madness by the thought, that the invading hosts, encompassing the new-born Republic, were drawing nearer and nearer, every hour, with vengeance and counter-revolution perched upon their banners; and a merciful destiny granted them the grace to expiate their bloody deeds on the same scaffold as their victims.