The Charleston Daily News

The blackest chapter in American history is closed at last. Three years and eight months after the execution of Mrs. Mary E. Surratt, who was sent to the gallows within twenty-four hours after the trial by a military tribunal, which, according to the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, had no jurisdiction in her case, and upon evidence which no fair-minded man now looks upon as sufficient for her conviction, her inanimate body has been released from its imprisonment. The grave has given up its dead—the sole measure of atonement, in all probability, which will be yielded to the memory of an innocent and murdered woman till that awful hour when all graves shall give up their dead, and when small and great, subjects and rulers, the shedders of innocent blood and their helpless victims, shall stand at a tribunal where there can be no error in the administration of justice—a High Court of Appeals, where the errors of all other tribunals, as well as all wrongs of earth, shall be righted, and those who wrought them held to a final account.