In the conclave which Stanton and his two co-adjutors held, either during the recesses of the prolonged session of the first day, or most likely during the night of the adjournment, it was resolved, that if the manly reluctance of five soldiers to doom a woman to the scaffold could be overcome in no other way, to employ as a last resort the "_suggestion_," that the Court formally condemn her to death, and then, as a compromise, the soft-hearted five petition the President to commute--the three plotters trusting to the chances of the future, with the petition in their custody and the President under their dominion, to render ineffectual this forced concession to what they scorned as a weak sentimentalism. This suggestion of what was in truth a most extraordinary device--a petition to the President to do what the Court could do itself--could not have emanated from the merciful majority of the Court, which subsequently did sign the fatal document. _They_, at least, were sincere, and, if let alone, would have proceeded immediately to embody their own clemency in a formal sentence, as they had done with O'Laughlin and Arnold, and as they were about to do with Mudd. Had there been but one, or two, or three dissentients, so that they were powerless in the face of two-thirds of the Commission; or even had there been four--a number sufficient to block a death-sentence but not sufficient to dictate the action of the Court, then, indeed, recourse to the clemency of the Executive might have been a natural proceeding. But a clear majority had no need to look elsewhere for a power of commutation which they themselves possessed in full vigor, and which, in all probability, after the first three death-penalties, they had determined to apply in every one of the other cases. Neither could the suggestion have been made by one of the minority, because none of them signed the petition to the last. The four must have been steadfast and uncompromising for blood. The whole scheme proceeded from a quarter outside the Court--a quarter which, on the one hand, was possessed by an overmastering revengeful passion, such as was required to point the five officers to a seeming source of mercy to which they might appeal and thus avoid the exercise of their own prerogative in antagonism to their four brethren, and, on the other hand, harbored some secret knowledge or malign intent that the petition would or should be, in fact, an empty form; from a quarter, in short, where the desire for the condemnation to death of Mrs. Surratt was all-controlling and where the condition of the President was well known. They, who suggested the death-sentence and the petition as a substitute for the milder penalty, were surely all on the side of death, and hoped, if they did not believe, that the prayer of the petition would be of no avail; else they would not have adopted such a circuitous method to do what the five officers could immediately have accomplished themselves. In one word, the contrivers of the device of petition were not those who desired to save the bare life of the convicted she-conspirator, but were those who would be satisfied with nothing less than her death on the scaffold. The suggestion was wholly sinister and malevolent. On the other hand, the majority of the Court did really desire that her punishment should not exceed that of Arnold, O'Laughlin and Mudd, and they certainly would never have had recourse to a petition to the President, had they not been cheated into believing that that method of proceeding was likely to effectuate what they had full power to do. Never would these five soldiers, or any two of them, have given their voices for the death of this woman, had they dreamed for a moment that their signing of the petition was, and was meant to be, but a farce. They would not have played such a ghastly trick under the shadow of the gibbet.