A CRUEL FATE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 325, 11 July 1879, Page 16

A CRUEL FATE.

Eochester fN.Y.) Union. Gen. H. W. Slocum recently delivered a lecture in Brooklyn, on events of the great struggle, during the course of which he expressed the opinion, always held by the Union, that Mrs. Surratt was a murdered woman. He said : "I am going to speak to you one word about the execution of Mrs. burratt at the close of the war, for I think some good lesson can be learned from the story of her trial and death. I believe any people situated as we were ought to be cautioned against placing implicit confidence in evidence given at a time of high excitement. x could stand here to-night and relate to you fifty incidents that would serve to caution everybody against taking evidence against others when the people were all in a state of intense excitement, xnere never was a day, there never was an hour, that I did not Deueve that Mrs. Surratt was as innocent a woman as there is in this nail (applause). She was the keeper of a boarding-house in Washington. She boarded Wilkeu Booth and half-a-dozen other rebel sympathisers, and she had a son, John H. Surratt. Wilkes Booth was guilty of shooting Mr. Lincoln, and this poor woman was brought to trial in connection with Wilkes Booth, and, through the excitement os tne tim<?s, her neck was brought to the halter. Her daughter, a young girl, eighteen or nineteen years of age, on the morning of the execution, went to the President's room and begged permission to Bpeak to him on behalf of her mother, and a United States senator irom our own State, who acted as door-tender, repulsed her, saying, Jn : yy 2U2 U cann ? t S ° In> ' Worße tban that > meaner thata that, the poor girl, three or four years afterwUrd, married a clerk in the Treatl^Jf e E a v ? ent> • No char e es w e* made against him, but because tbis clerk had married the daughter of Mrs. Surratt, he was discharged. J^et ns brag of our achievements, but, at the same time, let us learn to look our faults and errors fairly and squarely in the face, and them when we have cause to. «™, m " r 4 d * r . of Mrs - Surratt was the most cruel and cowardly act ever committed m any civilized country. It is a curious and suggestive fact khat all who were chiefly responsible for the execution of that innocent woman, have felt the unseen hand of the Great Avenger. Stanton, Secretary of War, who was, perhaps, the worst of the number, committed suicide ia a fit of remorse, although the fact was sought to be concealed. Preston King, t.,e senator from New York, lS?°J e £ " d A £ me Surratt) at the President's door, in like manner ended his own life by deliberately jumping from a ferry-boat into the Worth River at New York, and drowning himself. Andrew Johnson, wno signed the death warrant, and despotically suspended the writ 2,™?* C °-in th . at had been g^nted by the court, was stricken suddenly with death upon his return to the senate, after he had left the presidency Judge Advocate Holt, who conducted the prosecu* tion, long ago disappeared from public view, and whether dead or uZ^A w I knows /? d n^ody cares. And John A. Bingham, who fSSif M K-r W f -v nVeU frOm Con g ress disgrace, as one of the b3o£ i he^SSw £" ' aud sought refuge in Japan ' wbere> we