This interchange of letters between two associates in infamy, if infamy there were, the one applying for, and the other disclosing ostensibly for the first time, at so late a day, decisive information, which, in the ordinary course of things, the one must have asked for or the other revealed, and both talked over from the beginning, wears upon the face all the features of a collusive correspondence.
No one acquainted with the facts can be induced to credit what both these men state upon the threshold of their correspondence, and upon the truth of which their credibility is staked for all time, that, if two such conversations with Judge Bingham actually took place, this co-victim of a common charge would ever have withheld all knowledge of such important testimony from his brother in affliction for eight years, and until the lips of his two eminent interlocutors, whose confirmation would have at once and for ever crushed the calumny, were closed in death.
And, with this incontrovertible assertion, we dismiss John A. Bingham to keep company with Richard Montgomery and Sanford Conover, two witnesses who were once the subjects of his own fervid eulogy.
Another aspect of the case must for a moment detain us.
Under the admitted fact that the President approved the death-sentence on Wednesday, July 5th, it is by no means clear how we are to find room for this supposed Cabinet meeting.
The natural construction of Bingham's letter would lead us to believe that the Cabinet meeting, which the two Secretaries are said to have described, was a regular consultation between "the President and his advisers," held _before_ the "confidential interview" at which the President "approved the death-sentence;" and that the entire Cabinet voted on the question raised by the petition, because it was "a unit in denying the prayer." This is but another version of the "full Cabinet" of Judge Pierrepont's first statement, and forcibly suggests that the two have an identical origin--at first withdrawn under compulsion while Seward lived, at last brought forward again after his death.
And every one, on such construction, would expect to hear the voices of McCulloch, Welles and Dennison, still living in 1873, and accessible to the ex-Judge-Advocate.