Program on C-Span this weekend

[L Verge]

(12-19-2013 03:40 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  Jerry's book has the name of the doctor who allegedly heard Bingham say on his deathbed, "The truth must remain sealed." His name was Dr. John S. Campbell. The information comes from an article titled "Secretary Stanton and Congressman Bingham" by Ervin G. Beauregard in the Winter 1989 Lincoln Herald. Does anyone have that article?

I actually remembered that I have had that article sitting on my desk for over a year after using it for another project. At the time of the article's publication, Dr. Beauregard was a professor of history at the University of Dayton and membership director of the American Catholic Historical Association. I added that latter role because of its significance in there being a possible bias in the author's mentions of the case of Mrs. Surratt.

John Bingham was appointed special judge advocate at the Conspiracy Trial by President Johnson upon the recommendation of Sec. Stanton, and was active in obtaining the convictions of the conspirators. He was also approached by five members of the Commission to write the clemency plea for Mrs. Surratt. One unknown source said that Bingham cooperated "much against the grain."

When it became known that there was a clemency plea that had not been acted upon one way or the other, blame was placed on JAG Holt as not having given it to Johnson. Holt charged that the lie was started by Johnson and Attorney General James Speed. (Citations for this are an 1888 letter from Holt to Bingham and also Benn Pitman stating that he never saw the clemency plea, but believed that it was made.)

Bingham had written a letter on August 4, 1865, to Professor Andrew F. Ross in Cadiz, Ohio, stating, "No defendant stirred the depth of my mind and the bottom of my heart than did Mrs. Surratt. I deliberated inwardly again and again as to why this dignified woman had followed a lamentable trail that had led to such a wickedly inglorious end. Her fate led me to recall the opposite side of womanhood, the Biblical heroines and also those of pagan antiquity. I remembered the patient suffering of my mother whose passing had so affected my youth. I thought and think of my dear wife as a superb model of female loyalty to the memorable cause of the Union. Yet Mrs. Surratt let herself succumb to the evil snares of the satanic cause of the rebels. Thus justice demanded her supreme punishment. Yet the Divine Will acted through the court's plea, which I drew up at the Military Commission's request, to President Johnson that he spare her life, replacing hanging with imprisonment for life. We had the petition brought to him but he did not see fit to honor it."

Bingham later told Holt (2/17/1873) that he had been told by Secretaries Stanton and Seward that Johnson had been presented the petition for clemency and had been duly considered by both Johnson and his advisers before continuing with the death sentence.

As to Mrs. Surratt being visited by Bingham and telling him the "great secret," the author of this article mentions it in a convoluted way. He first says that, shortly before his death in 1869, Stanton swore Bingham to perpetual silence on the case of Mrs. Surratt (at this point, no mention of the visit to Mrs. Surratt or to a reporting to Stanton in 1865).

He then skips to Bingham close to death nearly revealing "the secret" to his physician, Dr. John S. Campbell. The dying man stopped short and instead said, "The truth must remain sealed." The only citation for this story is the doctor supposedly telling the story to his son, who repeated it to the author Beauregard in an interview on May 22, 1978.

John Bingham died in 1900, so his deathbed story to Dr. Campbell would have occurred then. Seventy-eight years later, Campbell's son would tell it to Erving E. Beauregard, who would include it eleven years later in an article for The Lincoln Herald. Some big leaps in time there...