opening testimony, along with a can of worms ~

[lookingland]

i am way behind. yesterday had a near-death dog emergency (she's looking better today; i have her on a home hydrator catheter thing. if i can get her to start eating in another day or so, she just may pull through). needless to say this has occupied mt every waking thought (and most of my attempted sleeping ones as well). so i am groggy and out of it and i haven't read my flist for two days except a brief scroll through yesterday morning, for which i apologize. i will try to get to it today.

meanwhile, it's update day at Reconstruction (and there goes the last of my buffer, so it's going to be an interesting weekend ~ geh).

here follows some assassination trial nonsense mostly for my own record-keeping, but if you want to read my blithering,

yesterday in my worried brainlessness, i worked on part of day one of the trial (skipped the biggies like Von Whosis and Richard Montgomery), and day one of the open testimony (so: May 12, 13).

i dunno what on earth i was thinking. the script for these two days alone is 120 pages. granted, i intend to cut a lot and try to tighten as much as i can, but Weichmann's endless blithering is 80 pages just by itself and much of it is very necessary unfortunately. blerg. Doster's first cross-examination of Weichmann is great [i paraphrase]: Do you know anything about this? No. Do you know anything about that? No. Do you know anything? No. and yet somehow Weichmann manages to implicate everybody without actually knowing anything. and then the mustache exchange, which is one of my favorites:

REVERDY: When he came home, as I understood you, he seemed to be feeling for something; said he had lost something. Did he not ask for the mustache?

WEICHMANN: Yes, sir: he said, "Where is my mustache?"

REVERDY: Why did you not give it to him? It was not yours. Did you suspect him at that time of intending any thing wrong?

WEICHMANN: I thought it rather queer that a Baptist preacher should use a mustache; and I did not care about having false mustaches lying around on my table.

REVERDY: What did you intend to do with it?

WEICHMANN: I did not intend to do any thing with it. I took it, and exhibited it to some of the clerks in the office the day afterwards, and was fooling with it. I put on a pair of spectacles and the mustache, and was making fun of it.

REVERDY: Your only reason for not giving it to him, when he said it was his, was, that you thought it was singular that a Baptist preacher should be fooling with a mustache?

WEICHMANN: Yes, Sir; and I did not want a false mustache about my room.

REVERDY: It would not have been about your room if you had given it to him, would it?

also on the good side, i am coming up with tactics for handling the long court scenes. Aiken, Clampitt, and Ewing are developing into quite the interesting little peanut gallery, and the more i work with Reverdy Johnson, the more i love the snit fit he throws when Harris tries to get him thrown off the counsel. while this trial is nowhere near the three-ring-circus that J. Surratt's will be in a few years, it definitely has its moments.

i'm also having fun with Hartranft (this side story is its own little saving grace). i love all the little obnoxious directional nuances going on in the background of the major drama. i may have to do a little fact-bending just to keep things from being too scattershot, but i feel very ambivalent about mucking too much with the historical side of things. it's one thing to pare down the testimony or to throw in asides from the counsel for the sake of exposition, but it feels altogether different to move time and space in a way things didn't occur. i'm working out a tenuous balance.

overall, i would say this has been a lot more work than i anticipated. i really expected to just trim from the transcript and baste in some exposition around it, but it's proving far more complicated. and i want to be fair (as fair as my biases will allow). i don't for a moment pretend that i don't feel about this trial exactly as Doster did (which is why it's through his eyes I want to tell this). every one of the prisoners on the dock is guilty of something. it's the degree to which they ought to have been punished that's arguable.

and though historians and lawyers have weighed in on the issue of jurisdiction, the question has never been settled, really. if it was, we wouldn't still be arguing about it today. so i am not interested in painting the conspirators as victims, but i do want to show that the military commission and the prosecuting judges (and by extension CzarNastyOwlFace) were all rotten to the core. the trial was a farce. anyone who says it wasn't is really kidding themselves.

today's picture is another mugshot. this is George Azerodt's cousin, Hartman Richter, who was arrested with him after the assassination. Richter spent a good spell in the Arsenal prison and Hartranft seems to have shuttled him around quite a bit and wrote numerous letters to Hancock saying: this guy's not on trial, can we take off his constraints? etc.


scores of people like Richter, Celestino (a "known" spy), Willie Jett, most everybody who worked at Ford's Theatre, for example, and all of Booth's brothers (they would have arrested his sister Asia as well, but she was too pregnant, so they put her under house arrest) were "apprehended" shortly after the assassination and held without charges (just on suspicion) for far too long for it to be Constitutionally legal. but the government gets to make up new rules in such cases, apparently.

sound familiar?

: o p

Comments

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

thankie! i ain't giving up on her yet!

: D