V. As to Atzerodt, for whom there appears to have been no pity or sign of relenting, it is nevertheless a fact, that the testimony to his lying in wait for Andrew Johnson is so feeble as to be almost farcical. The poor German was a coward and never went near Johnson. There is no circumstance in the evidence inconsistent with his own confession, that he was in the plot to capture, knew nothing of the design to murder until 8 o'clock on the evening of the 14th, and then refused to enact the part assigned him by Booth.
Indeed, it would appear as if the Commission, by a sort of proleptic vision of the future course of the President in his desperate struggle with the Congress, in grim irony actually hung Atzerodt because he did _not_ kill Andrew Johnson.
VI. And as to Mrs. Surratt, the only witnesses of importance against her are Weichman and Lloyd. Without their testimony the case for the prosecution could not stand for a moment. Weichman, a boarder and intimate in her house, the college chum of her son, and, equally with him, the associate of Payne, Atzerodt, Herold and Booth, who, frightened almost to death at the outlook, was swearing, under a desperate strain, to clear his own skirts from the conspiracy and thus save his threatened neck:--Weichman's testimony before the Commission, even at such a pass, is for some reason quite vague and indefinite, and only becomes deadly when supplemented by Lloyd's. This man Lloyd it was who, in fact, furnished the only bit of evidence directly connecting Mrs. Surratt with the crime. He testifies to two conversations he had with her--one on the 11th and the other on the 14th of April--when she alluded to the weapons left weeks before at the hotel at Surrattsville owned by her and kept by Lloyd--on the 11th, that the "shooting-irons" would be wanted soon; on the 14th, that they would be called for that night. Lloyd, himself, however, admits, and it is otherwise clearly shown, that on the 14th he was so drunk as hardly to be able to stand up. Lloyd, also, was deeply implicated in the conspiracy to capture if not to assassinate. He had aided the fugitive assassins to escape, had kept their weapons hidden in his house, and he had, for two days after his arrest, denied all knowledge of Booth and Herold's stopping at his hotel at midnight after the murder. He had been placed in solitary confinement and threatened with death. His nervous system, undermined by debauchery, gave way; his terrors were startling to witness and drove him well-nigh mad, and, at last, in a moment of distraction, he turned against Mrs. Surratt and her son. Like Weichman's, his, also, was the frenzied effort of a terror-stricken wretch to avoid impending death by pushing someone forward to take his place. Reverdy Johnson, at the close of his plea to the jurisdiction of the court, let fall the following words, no less weighty for their truth than their force: