On the 12th of November, Preston King, who held one side of the door of the White House while the daughter of Mrs. Surratt pleaded for admission, walked off a ferry-boat into the Hudson River, with two bags of shot in the pockets of his overcoat, and was seen no more. This event might have passed as a startling coincidence, to be interpreted according to the feelings of the hearer, had it not been followed by the suicide of Senator James S. Lane, who held the other side of the door, and who, on the 11th day of July, 1866, blew his brains out on the plains of Kansas. That these two men had together stood between the President and the filial suppliant for mercy, in a case of life and death, and that, then, within a year, both had perished by their own hands, aroused whispers in the air, caused a holding of the breath and a listening, as if to catch the faint but increasing cry of innocent blood, coming up from the ground.
When the Congress met in December, 1865, the leaders of the dominant party were in a fierce and bitter humor. The Rebellion had been suppressed, the South subjugated and its chiefs captured, yet no one--not even the arch-traitor Davis--had been hung. And, more deeply exasperating still, the man they had elected Vice-President, and who had thus succeeded the martyred Lincoln, upon whom their hopes had been fixed to make treason odious, to hang the leaders higher than Haman, and to set aside the humane policy of reconstruction his predecessor had already outlined and substitute a more radical and retributive method--this man, whose precious life had been providentially spared from the pistol of the assassin to be the Moses of the colored people, and for harboring any such blasphemous purpose as lying in wait for him, a Court, appointed by himself and whose sentence he himself had approved, had hung a bewildered German--why this man had already shown himself a renegade, was bent on a general amnesty, appeared to have forgotten the assassination, was already hobnobbing with southern traitors, and was attempting to carry out a policy of reconstruction in the South, the result of which could be nothing less than the dethronement of the party who had brought the war for the Union to a triumphant end. These men resolved that such treachery should be balked at whatever cost. Ignorant as yet of the tainted character and of the break-down of the evidence adduced to show Confederate complicity in the assassination, the House of Representatives passed resolutions calling for the trial of Jefferson Davis for treason and for the other crimes with which he was charged; the ill-starred Bingham, once again in the House, insisting that the Confederate Chief should be put upon trial before a military tribunal for the same offense of which his former court had found him guilty in his absence. The House appointed a committee to investigate the complicity of Davis and others in the assassination, and in July, 1866, through its chairman, Mr. Boutwell, made a report, followed by a resolution, "that it is the duty of the executive department of the Government to proceed with the investigation of the facts connected with the assassination of the late President without unnecessary delay, that Jefferson Davis and others named in the proclamation of President Johnson of May 2d, 1865, may be put upon trial," which was adopted _nem. con._ In this action, little as they reeked, these radical politicians were the unconscious tools of that Nemesis which stalks after lawlessness and triumphant crime. This resolution, and the news that John H. Surratt had been betrayed by one of his comrades in the Papal Zouaves into the hands of the Roman authorities, who had detained him to await the order of the American Government, and that the prisoner had escaped from his guard and fled to Malta, forced the Department of War to revoke the order of November, 1865, withdrawing the reward for the arrest of the fugitive.