The Flimsy Case Against :

The Judicial Murder of One of the Accused

Lincoln Assassination Conspirators

Michael T. Griffith 2019 @All Rights Reserved

On June 30, 1865, an illegal military tribunal found Mrs. Mary Surratt guilty of conspiring with and others to assassinate President Abraham , and sentenced her to death by . Despite numerous appeals to commute her sentence to life in prison, she was hung seven days later on . She was the first woman ever to be executed by the federal government.

The evidence that the military commission used as the basis for its verdict was flimsy and entirely circumstantial. Even worse, the War Department’s prosecutors withheld evidence that indicated Mrs. Surratt did not know that Booth intended to shoot President Lincoln. The prosecutors also refused to allow testimony that would have seriously impeached one of the two chief witnesses against her.

Mary Surratt John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin. He shot President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865.

The military tribunal claimed that Mary Surratt:

* Knew about the assassination plot and failed to report it

* On April 11, 1865, told John Lloyd that the “shooting irons” (rifles) that had been delivered to him would be needed soon

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* An April 14, the day of the assassination, gave Lloyd a package from Booth and told him to have the rifles ready that night

* Falsely claimed that she did not recognize Lewis Payne (Lewis Powell) when he showed up at her boarding house on April 17

* Falsely claimed that her youngest son, , was not in Washington on the day of the assassination

Two Plots: Kidnapping and Assassination

Before we begin to examine the military commission’s case against Mary Surratt, we need to understand that Booth initiated two separate plots against Lincoln. The first plot was a kidnapping plot. The second plot was the assassination plot.

Booth began to conspire to kidnap Lincoln months before the assassination. The plan was to kidnap Lincoln and to use him as ransom to force the United States government to release the thousands of Confederate prisoners it was holding. The kidnapping scheme failed, and at least two of the people Booth recruited for the plot decided they wanted nothing more to do with him.

Although the military commission suppressed this fact, multiple sources, including Booth’s own diary, indicate that Booth did not seriously consider until the day of the assassination. The tribunal also tried to obscure the fact that several of the people who were involved in the kidnapping plot had nothing to do with the assassination plot.

John Surratt, youngest son Louis Weichmann, The Surratt House and Tavern, where Mary of Mary Surratt one of the military Surratt allegedly gave John Lloyd a package commission’s prime from Booth on the day of the assassination witnesses against and told Lloyd to have the “shooting irons” Mary Surratt ready that night

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Mary Surratt and the other accused Booth accomplices could and should have been tried by a civilian court. But Secretary of War falsely claimed that Confederate leaders had ordered and funded the assassination, and he used this baseless claim as his excuse to push for a military tribunal.

Knowledge of the Assassination Plot

No one ever claimed they heard Booth discuss the murder plot with Mary Surratt. Nor did anyone ever claim they heard any of the other accused conspirators discuss the murder plot with her. Nor did anyone ever claim Mrs. Surratt told them that Lincoln was about to be assassinated.

The military commission’s evidence that Mary Surratt knew about the assassination conspiracy was entirely circumstantial, and it came from witnesses who were under threat of prosecution and whose memories seemed to improve every time they were interviewed or made a statement.

Louis Weichmann is the leading example of this. In his testimony at the conspiracy trial conducted by the military commission, Weichmann did not claim that Booth visited Mary Surratt at 9:00 PM on April 14; did not claim that she was “nervous, agitated, and restless” after this alleged visit; and did not claim that prior to Lincoln’s inauguration, Mary was “in the habit” of saying that “something was going to happen to old Abe which would prevent him from taking his seat.” Weichmann made these claims in a strange August 11, 1865, affidavit to Col. H. L. Burnett, six weeks after the conspiracy trial ended and five weeks after Mrs. Surratt was executed.

In his belated August 11 affidavit, Weichmann claimed that he “later ascertained” that the person who supposedly visited Mary Surratt at 9:00 PM on the night of the assassination was Booth. He also claimed that after this supposed meeting, Mrs. Surratt was visibly nervous and agitated. He did not explain how he had “ascertained” that the alleged visitor was Booth, nor did he explain why he said nothing about Mary being nervous and agitated after this alleged visit in any of his previous statements and testimony.

Two years later, at the John Surratt trial, Weichmann made a number of claims that he had never made before. For example, he claimed that when he and Mary Surratt were about to leave for the Surrattsville tavern at around 2:40 on April 14, Mrs. Surratt said, “Wait, Mr. Weichmann, I must get those things of Booth's" (Poore 1:391). This was the first time he had ever claimed that Booth gave her anything that day. He said nothing about this in his statement to the Metropolitan Police, nor in his testimony at the conspiracy trial, nor in his affidavit to Burnett.

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Weichmann’s belated story about Booth visiting Mary Surratt at 9:00 PM on the night of the assassination suffered a major blow at the John Surratt trial. The same can be said for Richard Smoot’s dubious tale that he visited Mary at 9:30 PM that night, that he found her in a state of “feverish excitement,” and that she urged him to leave the city (Smoot 11-13). The defense called witnesses who stated that the visitor was a military officer named Scott, that Captain Scott came to see one of Mary’s boarders, and that Mary did not look nervous or agitated after the visit. Guy Moore discusses this testimony in his excellent book The Case of Mrs. Surratt:

The defense produced testimony to show (a) that it was Anna, not her mother, who answered the door; (b) that it was a naval captain named Scott who called, and that he came to leave some papers for Miss Jenkins; (c) that no one else in the parlor noticed Mrs. Surratt’s being nervous, and no one heard her ask Weichmann to pray for her intentions, though the ladies were present as long as he was in the room. (Moore 84)

Weichmann’s story about the alleged late-night visit of Booth is further refuted by the fact that shortly before Mrs. Surratt left to go to Surrattsville, she assured Eliza Holohan she would attend church with her that evening, and that she left for church with Eliza after dinner (Trindal 117). When Mary and Weichmann returned from Surrattsville that night, Mary ate dinner and then left for church with Eliza. As Mary and Eliza were walking to church, the weather seemed like it was going to get bad. Eliza suggested that they return home, and Mary agreed. Clearly, Mary was not expecting a visitor that night, as Moore observes:

There is nothing to show that she was expecting or received a caller that night— indeed, she set out for church after dinner but was turned back by threatening weather. (Moore 101)

It is important to note that when Weichmann went to the Metropolitan Police to turn himself in and to tell what he knew about Booth and his associates, he apparently said nothing that implicated Mary Surratt. How do we know this? Because the police went to Mary’s house to look for John Surratt before Weichmann went to the police station. After Weichmann spent several hours telling the police what he knew, they saw no reason to return to Mrs. Surratt's house. Military authorities, not the police, were the ones who ordered Mary’s arrest, and they did not do so until two days after the police went to her house. If Weichmann had told the police half of the things he later claimed about Mrs. Surratt, they immediately would have returned to her house to arrest her. Moreover, the military’s decision to arrest Mary had nothing to do with anything Weichmann told the police.

Weichmann did not begin to supply incriminating statements about Mary Surratt until after he was jailed by the military and after he was subjected to numerous

4 interrogations, both at the War Department and at the Old Capitol Prison. According to several sources, those interrogations included dire threats if Weichmann did not agree to say what the War Department wanted him to say. Thomas Bogar, author of the highly acclaimed book Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination, discusses the coercion to which Weichmann and other witnesses were subjected by the War Department:

One day that week John Ford overheard an egregious instance of “witness preparation” in the prison yard: [Lafayette] Baker going at Rittersbach, putting words in his mouth. Whereas Rittersbach had actually heard Ned Spangler that night [April 14] say, “Hush your mouth. You don’t know whether it’s Booth or not,” Baker now told him to add that Spangler had slapped him across the face and warned, “For God’s sake, shut up! And don’t say which way he went.” If Rittersbach would not so testify, Baker threatened, he would be thrown definitely into the general prison population at Old Capitol. This approach by Baker, Ford believed, would unnerve anyone, “and cause him to think he believed he heard what did not.” Even though Rittersbach was self-motivated to testify and required little prodding, he was hauled before Colonel Burnett on the eve of the trial for another conversation. No notes exist of its nature.

Ford, his brother Harry, and Gifford witnessed the same sort of pressure brought to bear within the prison on a terrified Louis Weichmann, a Booth associate who had boarded at Mrs. Surratt’s. Weichmann would in due course provide exceedingly incriminating testimony, which led to the conviction and execution of several of the conspirators. A day later, Maddox, Gifford, and Carland overheard an officer in Old Capitol tell Weichmann “if he didn’t swear to more than he had told, he would be hung.” (Weichmann shortly after the trial would confess to Carland that he had perjured himself to save his skin, and tell Gifford “I’d give a million dollars if I had had nothing to do with it.”) As John Ford recorded in his ever-lengthening jail house manifesto, “Another damnable feature in this prison is that if a prisoner will not or cannot give such information as may be demanded of him, he is ordered to his room or cell and handcuffed and tortured into a more compliant witness or informer.” (Bogar 180-181; see also pp. 249-250, and Dewitt 1895:18-19)

Toward the end of the conspiracy trial, the defense obtained evidence that Weichmann had given false testimony because he had been threatened, and that one of the officials who had coerced Weichmann was none other than the chief prosecutor, . However, the commission would not allow this evidence to be presented. In his 1880 article on the case, John W. Clampitt, one of her Mary Surratt’s defense attorneys, discussed this episode:

In further illustration of this animus of the Commission, one other case will be cited. Near the close of the trial, and after the testimony of the heartless and

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perjured Weichmann had been given, stung by feelings of remorse, Weichmann called at the rooms of a young man, now connected with one of the Catholic institutions of learning, but at that time a resident of Washington, with whom he was on terms of intimacy, and, during an earnest conversation, admitted that he had sworn falsely with regard to the connection of Mrs. Surratt with the murder of the President; that having been an inmate of her home during the formation of the conspiracy he was himself suspicioned and was threatened by the authorities of the War Department, in which for some time he had been a clerk, with arrest and trial with the other prisoners, unless he made a statement implicating Mrs. Surratt; that upon such demand he prepared a statement, which was rejected by the Judge-Advocate-General [Holt] with the remark that “it was not strong enough”; that his life being threatened, he made out another statement which was in accordance with their wishes and demands, and this “statement” he swore to on the witness stand, falsely implicating Mrs. Surratt in the conspiracy.

The young man to whom Weichmann made this confession communicated it to the counsel of Mrs. Surratt, and offered to go upon the witness-stand and swear to the same. We took the proper steps to have him called as a witness, but the Commission, taking advantage of a technical ground, refused to permit him to testify on this all-important point. (Clampitt 233-234)

Incidentally, after Mary Surratt was executed, Secretary of War Stanton and Joseph Holt arranged for Weichmann to get a government job in Philadelphia, and Weichmann held that job for most of the rest of his life (B. Thomas and Hyman 427-428; Cottrell 247; Marvel 381).

Lewis Powell, who sometimes went by the name Lewis Payne (sometimes spelled Paine), was identified as one of the eight alleged Booth conspirators tried by the military tribunal. Powell reportedly confessed to being involved in the assassination plot and was sentenced to death by the military commission. Shortly before he was executed, Powell/Payne told anyone who would listen that Mary Surratt “knew nothing about the conspiracy at all, and is an innocent woman” (Ferguson 153; Moore 59).

The commander of the Old Capitol Prison, General John Hartranft, informed President that “Payne” (identified as Powell) had told him that Mrs. Surratt was innocent and that she was unaware of Booth’s plots against Lincoln. In an 1880 article on the case, Clampitt quoted from General Hartranft’s letter to President Johnson:

The prisoner Payne has just told me that Mrs. Surratt is entirely innocent of the assassination of President Lincoln, or of any knowledge thereof. He also states that she had no knowledge whatever of the abduction plot, that nothing was ever said to her about it, and that her name was never mentioned by the parties

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connected therewith. . . . I believe that Payne has told the truth in this matter. (Clampitt 240; Dewitt 141)

Samuel Arnold, another one of the accused conspirators, said Mary Surratt knew nothing about the kidnapping plot (Arnold 7, 15-17, 61, 145; Moore 98). Arnold did not know whether or not Mrs. Surratt knew about the murder plot because he stopped associating with Booth a few weeks before the assassination; however, he said he believed that the only ones who knew about the murder plot were , , and Lewis Powell. Arnold himself knew nothing about any plot to kill Lincoln. At the time Arnold ended his association with Booth, Booth had not yet decided to try to murder Lincoln. If none of the conspirators told Mary about the kidnapping plot, it seems very unlikely they would have told her about the assassination plot.

Shortly after Lincoln’s murder, the War Department obtained Booth’s diary. Secretary of War Stanton suppressed the diary’s existence, and the War Department’s prosecutors did not enter the diary into evidence at the conspiracy trial. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons the prosecutors did not enter the diary into evidence is that Booth wrote in the diary that he did not consider killing Lincoln until the day of the assassination (Rhodehamel and Taper 154). This statement would have cast serious doubt on the prosecution’s case against Mary Surratt.

Booth’s diary entry about when the plan changed from kidnapping to murder agrees with one of the believable parts of the confession that George Atzerodt, one of the accused conspirators, gave to Provost Marshall James McPhail at the Washington Arsenal on May 1, 1865. The military commission found Atzerodt guilty of conspiring with Booth and sentenced him to death by hanging. Atzerodt gave his confession under extreme duress. He was being subjected to a form of torture when he gave it. Some parts of his confession are doubtful or spurious and were probably fed to him or added later, such as the claim that Booth told him that “Mrs. Surratt went to Surrattsville to get out the guns.” But, some parts of the confession seem credible. One of the parts that sound believable is the statement that Booth never discussed assassination plans with Atzerodt until the day of the murder (D. Thomas 218-220). This statement is supported by Sam Arnold’s assertion that during all of his discussions with Booth, Booth said nothing about any plan to kill Lincoln (Arnold 138).

Two years after Lincoln’s death, Colonel Lafayette Baker, the head of the National Detective Police during most of the war, revealed that the War Department had Booth’s diary and that the department had obtained the diary less than two weeks after the assassination. This revelation greatly embarrassed the War Department and led to a Congressional investigation. The War Department was forced to admit that it had the diary and was compelled to release the diary for examination by members of Congress.

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When Representative Benjamin Butler, a leading Radical Republican in the House of Representatives, read the diary, he became convinced that Mary Surratt was “an innocent woman” who had been convicted “without sufficient evidence”; he also concluded that the War Department had committed a serious injustice by not entering the diary into evidence at the conspiracy trial.

Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War. , one of the War Benjamin Butler. Stanton controlled the Department’s prosecutors at When Butler read Booth’s assassination investigation and the conspiracy trial and later a diary, he became convinced sought to suppress any evidence member of the House of Mary Surratt had been that contradicted his Confederate Representatives wrongly convicted. conspiracy theory.

On the floor of the House of Representatives in 1867, Butler had a heated exchange with Representative John Bingham, who had served as one of the prosecutors at the conspiracy trial. Butler attacked Bingham over the failure to introduce the diary as evidence at the trial and over the execution of Mary Surratt. Butler began his assault by accusing Bingham of having participated in the execution of an innocent woman, i.e., Mrs. Surratt:

The gentleman [Bingham] has had the bad taste to attack me for the reason that I could do no more injury to the enemies of my country. I agree to that. I did all I could, the best I could. . . . But the only victim of that gentleman's prowess that I know of was an innocent woman hung upon the scaffold, one Mrs. Surratt. And I can sustain the memory of Fort Fisher if he and his present associates can sustain him in shedding the blood of a woman tried by a military commission and convicted without sufficient evidence in my judgment. (Dewitt 1909:176-177; Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, March 26, 1867, p. 118)

Bingham answered that he had executed no one but had merely acted as a judge advocate general of the United States. Bingham questioned Butler’s knowledge of the case and then demanded to know by what right Butler attacked ''the tribunal of true and honorable men who found the facts upon their oath and pronounced the judgment.” Butler responded a few days later:

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The statement I made the other day was not a sporadic thought with me; it was the result of a careful examination of the case for another and a different purpose, in the endeavor to ascertain who were concerned in fact in the great conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln. . . .

Now, what I want to know is this: was that diary whole when it came into the hands of the Government? Second, if it was good judgment on the part of the gentlemen prosecuting the assassins of the President to put in evidence the tobacco pipe which was found in Booth's pocket, why was not the diary, in his own handwriting, put in evidence, and wherein he himself had detailed the particulars of that crime?

I understand the theory to be that that evidence was not produced lest Booth's glorification of himself, as found in his diary, should go before the country. I think that a lame excuse. If an assassin can glorify himself, let him do so. No harm could result from it in the minds of a patriotic and intelligent people. Therefore, I again ask, why was a most remarkable piece of evidence not put forward, not brought to the great public mind? I believe that piece of evidence would have shown what the whole case, in my judgment, now shows: that up to a certain hour Booth contemplated capture and abduction, and that he afterward changed his purpose to assassination. . . .

And if Mrs. Surratt did not know of this change of purpose, there is no evidence that she knew in any way of the assassination, and ought not, in my judgment, to have been convicted of taking part in it. . . .

That diary, as now produced, has eighteen pages cut out, the pages prior to the time when was massacred, although the edges as yet show they had all been written over. . . .

Who spoliated [altered, mutilated] that book? Who suppressed that evidence? Who caused an innocent woman to be hung when he had in his pocket the diary which stated at least what was the idea and purpose of the main conspirator? (Clark 146-147; Dewitt 177-180; Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, March 26, 1867, p. 118; Gazette and Virginia Advertiser, March 27, 1867)

Butler also made the point that the War Department’s prosecutors did not even inform the members of the military commission that they had Booth’s diary. Indeed, Butler noted that when Lieutenant Colonel Everton Conger, the man who supposedly found the diary on Booth’s body, testified at the conspiracy trial, the prosecutors carefully phrased their questions so that Conger’s answers contained no reference to the diary. Said Butler,

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Why was not Lieutenant Colonel Conger allowed to go on and state what had been found on Booth's body? The questions were carefully put to him so that he should not tell about this book. He identified a knife, pair of pistols, holster, tobacco pipe cartridge, and a bill of exchange, etc., but he was nowhere asked, "were these all the articles that were found on Booth?” If he had been asked that question, he would have answered that he took Booth's diary from his pocket. (Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser, March 27, 1867)1

John Lloyd, Mary Surratt, “Shooting Irons,” and Booth’s Package

John Lloyd gave the most damaging testimony against Mary Surratt, but even a cursory analysis of Lloyd’s story raises serious questions and doubts about his veracity and reliability. In the months leading up to the assassination, Lloyd was leasing and managing Mrs. Surratt’s tavern in Surrattsville.

Many scholars have noted that the War Department had a much stronger case against Lloyd as a Booth accomplice than it did against Mary Surratt. Lloyd was acquainted with some of the leading conspirators. About a month before the assassination, when Booth accomplices John Surratt, George Atzerodt, and David Herold came to the tavern, Lloyd agreed to let John Surratt hide two of Booth’s rifles in the tavern. Lloyd knew that John Surratt hid the rifles in the floorboards above the kitchen. People in the area reported that Booth visited the tavern a number of times. On the night of the assassination, Booth and Herold stopped at the tavern and took one of the rifles. However, when the Washington police questioned Lloyd on April 15, he said nothing about hiding the rifles and denied that he knew any of the conspirators. Moreover, he sent the police in the wrong direction, so that they traveled to Piscataway, back toward Washington.

Like Weichmann, Lloyd only began to supply incriminating statements against Mary Surratt after he was jailed and threatened. Lloyd was threatened with death if he would not say what the War Department wanted him to say (Moore 77-79; Dewitt, 1895:18- 19). Given the evidence that Lloyd knew the War Department had against him, he knew this was not an idle threat. Indeed, Mrs. Surratt was hung on the basis of less evidence than the government had against Lloyd.

Lloyd claimed that on April 11, three days before the assassination, he encountered Mrs. Surratt near the Navy Yard Bridge in Uniontown, on her way to Surrattsville, and that she told him that the “shooting irons” would be needed soon. He further claimed

1 When and how Conger obtained Booth’s diary is still a matter of debate. Conger was one of Lafayette Baker’s henchmen. For some odd reason, Baker assigned Conger to accompany the 25-man search party from the 16th New York Cavalry Regiment led by Lieutenant Edward Doherty. According to the War Department, this search party found and killed Booth in Richard Garrett’s barn. In his report, Doherty said nothing about any items being found on Booth’s body, nor was Doherty allowed to testify at the conspiracy trial.

10 that on the day of the assassination, April 14, she came to Surrattsville and delivered a package to him from Booth and told him to get the “shooting irons” ready for pickup that night. Lloyd said the package contained a pair of field glasses (binoculars).

The evidence is clear, however, that Mary Surratt went to Surrattsville on April 11 and April 14 to try to collect a sizable debt from John Nothey, not to speak with Lloyd (Moore 49-52, 80-87, 91-97; Laughlin 322-323; Dewitt 1909:117-120).

Mrs. Surratt encountered Lloyd purely by chance on her way to Surrattsville on April 11. Since she was Lloyd’s landlord, it is not surprising that she chatted with him for a few minutes. Moreover, it should be noted that Mary did not initiate the conversation: when Lloyd saw her, he got out of his carriage and came over to speak with her. Weichmann, who was sitting right next to Mary in the carriage, admitted he did not hear her say anything to Lloyd about any weapons during their brief conversation. Weichmann, ever the weasel, tried to weaken this admission by saying that Lloyd and Mary whispered to each other, but Lloyd insisted they did not whisper but spoke in a normal tone of voice (Moore 81).

The prosecution argued that Booth paid for the buggy for the April 11 trip to Surrattsville. Weichmann claimed at the conspiracy trial that Mrs. Surratt asked him to try to borrow Booth’s buggy, but that Booth gave him $10 to rent a buggy because Booth had sold his. However, under cross-examination, Weichmann admitted that Mary was unaware that Booth had paid for the carriage. Booth was known to be quite free with his money; he frequently gave or loaned money and often insisted on paying for drinks and meals. Given that Booth was a friend of Mrs. Surratt’s youngest son, John, and given that Booth saw Mary a few times when he came to visit John at the boarding house, it would be neither surprising nor suspicious if he gave Weichmann $10 to rent a buggy for her.

However, since Mrs. Surratt was not allowed to respond to any of Weichmann’s claims about the April 11 trip, we cannot be certain how Weichmann paid for the carriage or if Mary actually asked him to try to borrow Booth’s buggy. We do know that Mary gave Weichmann $10 on April 14 to rent a buggy for the trip to Surrattsville that day.

Mrs. Surratt returned to Surrattsville on April 14 to once again speak with Nothey about the large sum of money he owed her. Earlier in the day, she had received a letter from her creditor demanding payment, but she could not pay her creditor until Nothey paid her. Significantly, she received the creditor’s letter before Booth knew for certain that Lincoln would be at Ford’s Theatre that night. Furthermore, at the John Surratt trial, Weichmann acknowledged that Mrs. Surratt told him about the note from her creditor and asked him to get a buggy before Booth came to the boarding house to supposedly give Mary the package to take to Lloyd (Trial of John H. Surratt 1:391).

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There are contradictions in Weichmann’s accounts about Booth’s alleged afternoon visit to Mary Surratt’s boarding house on April 14. For example, Weichmann testified at the conspiracy trial that at about 2:30, he saw Booth and Mrs. Surratt conversing in the parlor, that Booth and Mary spoke for no more than “three or four minutes,” and that “immediately after that” he and Mary departed for Surrattsville (Poore 1:18). His wording clearly implied that he had already returned with the buggy when he first saw Booth at the house and that he and Mary left three or four minutes after that. Weichmann gave the distinct impression that he did not see Booth enter the house but that he saw Booth and Mary talking three or four minutes before he and Mary began their trip to Surrattsville. However, two years later, at the John Surratt trial, Weichmann claimed that after Mrs. Surratt told him about the creditor’s note and asked him to go get a buggy, he saw Booth enter the house, and that he saw Booth and Mary conversing in the parlor when he returned with the buggy (Trial of John H. Surratt 1:391).2

There are some timing issues with Weichmann’s story. An entirely fair and reasonable reading of Weichmann’s conspiracy trial testimony puts his and Mary Surratt’s departure for Surrattsville between 2:30 and 2:35. However, Booth was seen by several people at Ford’s Theatre at 2:45, and their accounts suggest he had been there for some time before they saw him.

Ford’s Theatre Mary Surratt’s Boarding House, Washington, D.C.

Thomas Bogar documents that Ford Theater employees James Maddox and William Ferguson saw Booth at around 2:45 “seated calmly at the prompter’s table, chatting quietly with Gifford, Spangler, and Spear” (Bogar 92).

Mrs. Surratt’s boarding house was half a mile from Ford’s Theater. If Booth had ridden his horse at a normal trot (about 10 mph), he would have arrived at the theater in three minutes, assuming he did not stop to chat with anyone along the way. Then, add time

2 Michael Kauffman confuses the sequence of these events. He mistakenly has Booth leaving just as Weichmann arrives home from work, and he has Mary asking Weichmann to get a buggy after Booth leaves (Kauffman 219). 12 for Booth to tie his horse outside the theater and to walk inside. Then, add time for Booth to find Gifford, Spangler, and Spear in the theater. Then, add time for the four of them to decide to sit down at the prompter’s table. Then, add time for the four of them to converse long enough that when Maddox and Ferguson noticed them, they were “seated calmly” and “chatting quietly” at the prompter’s table.

The timing becomes more difficult if we accept the story that Weichmann told at the John Surratt trial about when he first saw Booth arrive at the boarding house. While saying that his memory on the subject had actually improved, Weichmann claimed that he first saw Booth enter the house as he was leaving to get the buggy and that this occurred between 2:25 and 2:35:

Q. On your examination here, if I recollect aright, you stated that on the 14th of April, when you were about starting after a buggy to take Mrs. Surratt to Surrattsville, in passing out of the door you saw Mr. Booth in conversation with her in the parlor?

A. I wish to have it distinctly understood that I first met Mr. Booth as I was passing out of the door, at which time I shook hands with him. He said to me, "How are you, Mr. Weichmann?" That is all that passed.

Q. At what time was that?

A. Between twenty-five minutes after two and twenty-five minutes before three. (Trial of John H. Surratt 1:443)

Perhaps realizing the timing problem, Weichmann claimed it only took him seven or eight minutes to go to the stable, order the buggy, wait for the stable to hitch the buggy, and return to the house. The defense was justifiably skeptical. When they pressed Weichmann on the timing, he said he could have made the trip in 10 minutes (Trial of John H. Surratt 1:444).

Even if we accept the earliest and shortest times given by Weichmann at the John Surratt trial, Booth would have been hard pressed to arrive at Ford’s Theatre in time to be seen sitting and chatting at the prompter’s table at 2:45. If we use the later and longer times, the timing seems to be impossible.

In any case, when Mary Surratt and Weichmann arrived at the tavern on April 14, Lloyd was not there, and she made no inquiries about him. She was waiting for Nothey in order to follow up with him about the debt he owed her. She waited for Nothey as long as she could and then sent a sharply worded note to him via Captain Bennett Gwynn, who was acting as her intermediary with Nothey. Lloyd happened to arrive at the tavern just as Mrs. Surratt was about to leave. Even though the defense produced Mary’s note

13 to Nothey and the creditor’s note to her, the War Department’s prosecutors, incredibly enough, claimed that her business with Nothey was all a pretense and that the real purpose of her visits to Surrattsville was to meet with Lloyd, especially her visit on the day of the assassination. As Clara Laughlin noted, “It seems far likelier that if she were implicated in the plot, she would have refused to go near Surrattsville that day” (Laughlin 323).

Lloyd’s sister-in-law, Emma Offutt, was at the tavern during Mrs. Surratt’s visit on April 14. When Mrs. Offutt testified at the conspiracy trial, she was about to relate what Mary Surratt had told her about why she had come to the tavern, but the prosecution interrupted and objected, and the judges sustained the objection (Poore 1:302-303). Then, when defense attorney Fred Aiken asked Mrs. Offutt if she had heard any reference to “shooting irons” that day, the prosecution objected again, and the judges once again sustained the objection (Poore 1:303). In both cases, the prosecution objected on the grounds that Mrs. Offutt’s answers would be hearsay. This was raw hypocrisy. The prosecutors solicited plenty of hearsay testimony from their witnesses, and the judges allowed that testimony to be given because it favored the prosecution. But the prosecutors and the judges teamed up to prevent Mrs. Offutt from giving hearsay testimony that would have contradicted Lloyd’s story.

The defense at the John Surratt trial established beyond all doubt that Lloyd was visibly and severely drunk when he happened to encounter Mary Surratt at the Surrattsville tavern on April 14. Under cross-examination, Lloyd himself admitted that he was drunk when he arrived at the tavern, that he had a drinking problem, and that alcohol negatively affected his memory. Thus, by Lloyd’s own admission, he was drunk when Mrs. Surratt supposedly told him to get the rifles ready for pickup that night and when she supposedly handed him the package that Booth had allegedly given to her. John Cottrell put it well when he noted that no civilian court would have convicted Mary Surratt on the basis of Lloyd’s dubious testimony:

No civil court would have convicted her on this unsupported evidence of a drunkard. But the commission readily accepted Lloyd’s flimsy testimony. (Cottrell 170)

Dr. Robert Ferguson, a professor of law and literature at Columbia University, likewise doubts the value of Lloyd’s testimony:

The farm tenant [John Lloyd] who provided innuendo regarding Mrs. Surratt’s knowledge of firearms for the conspirators at Surrattsville told a story with many contradictions. His reliability was also open to question: He had been drunk when Mrs. Surratt visited the farm and intoxicated again on the stand; he was clearly an intimidated witness who cooperated only under the threat of prosecution for

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his own role in conveying supplies and firearms to the assassins in their flight. (Ferguson 162-163)

Perhaps this is one reason that Lloyd, toward the end of his life, said he believed Mrs. Surratt was innocent and a victim of circumstances (Winkler 232).

According to the official story, the package that Booth allegedly gave to Mary Surratt contained a small pair of field glasses, or opera glasses. Why would Booth have bothered to have anyone deliver opera glasses to Lloyd when he could have easily carried them in one of his pockets?

The War Department’s story about the field glasses suffered an embarrassing blow at the John Surratt trial when Lloyd refused to identify the alleged Booth field glasses as the ones he said he was given on April 14. The prosecution introduced field glasses that they said were the ones Booth had given to Mary Surratt to deliver to Lloyd. But when the prosecution showed them to Lloyd during the trial, he said they did not look like the field glasses he said he received from Mrs. Surratt, and he noted differences between the ones he saw and the ones the prosecution showed him.

Lloyd testified (1) that his impression was that the alleged Booth field glasses were not the ones he saw on April 14; (2) that the field glasses he saw had the words “field glass” written in the top-center, whereas the alleged Booth field glasses did not; (3) that the writing on the field glasses he saw was larger than the writing on the alleged Booth field glasses, and (4) that the lettering on the field glasses he saw was yellow, whereas the lettering on the alleged Booth field glasses was not (Trial of John H. Surratt 1:288).

Lloyd was not the only one who did not recognize the alleged Booth opera glasses that the prosecution presented at the John Surratt trial. John Garrett said the alleged Booth field glasses were not the field glasses he saw with the man identified as Booth at the Garrett farm (Trial of John H. Surratt 1:303-304).

Lieutenant Luther Baker claimed he found Booth’s field glasses. However, he gave conflicting stories about when and where he found them, as Deborah Warner, curator at the National Museum of American History, points out:

Luther Byron Baker, the detective who brought the field glasses from Virginia to Washington, testified in one place that he saw them "at the Garrett place, where Booth was captured," and in another that he and Mr. Garrett found them "about nine miles from Garrett's place," at the home of people who may have been their relatives. (Warner)

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When Lieutenant Baker testified at the Johnson impeachment proceedings, he said the five-/six-year-old Garrett boy told him about the field glasses. He stated that the little boy not only knew that Booth had given the field glasses to his older sister Joanna but that the field glasses were in Mr. Garrett’s writing desk. That little boy must have been remarkably alert and attentive to notice such things and to be able to recall them eight weeks later.

Baker further told the impeachment trial that after speaking with the little boy, he talked with Mr. Garrett, that he then called in Joanna and demanded the field glasses, that Joanna then broke down and cried, that Mr. Garrett then spoke with her privately for a moment, and that Mr. Garrett then told him that the field glasses were nine miles away at a relative’s house.

However, at the John Surratt trial, Baker said that he “ascertained” from the little boy that he needed to ask Mr. Garrett about the field glasses; that after he asked Mr. Garrett about them, he learned that the field glasses were not at the Garrett house; and that, thanks to Mr. Garrett’s information, he found them nine miles away.

Some defenders of the official version claim that Lucinda Holloway, Mr. Garrett’s sisters-in-law and the live-in teacher of his children, corroborated Baker’s story about finding the field glasses. In actuality, she severely contradicted both of Baker’s accounts.

Holloway claimed that Baker confronted her, not Joanna, about the field glasses, and that she, not Mr. Garrett, was the one who told Baker where to find them. She also claimed that this happened a few days after Booth was reportedly shot in Mr. Garrett’s barn, whereas Baker said he did not retrieve the field glasses until late July, about eight weeks later. Additionally, Holloway said nothing about the field glasses being given to Joanna, nothing about Baker confronting Joanna, nothing about Joanna breaking down in tears, and nothing about Mr. Garrett taking Joanna aside to speak privately with her.

The pronounced contradictions in the accounts about the field glasses are often what you get when a story has been fabricated, when some people are willingly lying, and when other people are lying under duress.

There is yet another problem with the official story about the alleged Booth field glasses: At the conspiracy trial, Weichmann said that the package that Mary Surratt reportedly gave to Lloyd looked like “two or three saucers” wrapped in paper (Poore 1:85) At the John Surratt trial, Weichmann said that the package looked like “three or four saucers wrapped together” and that he thought it was a “glass dessert dish” (Trial of John H. Surratt 1:447).

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Some scholars believe these are the field glasses that the prosecutors at the John Surratt trial introduced into evidence.

How could small field glasses, small enough to be opera glasses, wrapped in paper appear to be several saucers wrapped in paper? Go look at pictures of the alleged Booth field glasses, or at pictures of field glasses that were similar in size (see picture above). Imagine wrapping them in some paper, and then try to imagine how the package could look like “two or three saucers” or a “glass dessert dish” wrapped in paper. A pair of field glasses wrapped in paper would be rectangular in shape and would look nothing like some saucers wrapped in paper.

In addition, Lloyd said that when he unwrapped the package on April 14, the only thing in it was a pair of field glasses. Therefore, it cannot be theorized that Booth or Mrs. Surratt put the field glasses on a few saucers and wrapped them in paper to disguise their appearance. And it is worth repeating that Weichmann never claimed that Booth gave the package to Mary Surratt, or even that the package originated with Booth, until after Mrs. Surratt was executed.

The Non-Recognition of ”Lewis Payne”

According to the military commission, Lewis Powell, using the alias Lewis Payne, showed up at Mary Surratt’s boarding house late at night on April 17 while military officers were in the process of arresting Mrs. Surratt and others in the house. Payne claimed that Mary had asked him to dig some ditches for her in the morning and that he was just dropping by to confirm the details of the job. When one of the officers asked Mary if she recognized Payne, she said she did not. The War Department’s prosecutors claimed that her denial was false and that she must have recognized Payne because he had stayed at her boarding house.

The fact that the military judges accepted this dubious charge is further evidence that they were determined to convict no matter what the evidence showed. The defense firmly established that Mary Surratt had poor eyesight, so much so that she sometimes

17 failed to recognize people she knew when she passed them on the street (Pitman 297- 298). One of the witnesses noted that Mary was unable to read or sew at night because of her eyesight (Peterson 89). Sometimes she would ask others to read letters for her because she could not read them (Trindal 115). The defense also pointed out that when Payne came to the boarding house that night, he looked very different than he looked when Mrs. Surratt had seen him previously (Pitman 297-298). Additionally, Mary was not the only person in the house who did not recognize Payne that evening (Moore 53; Pitman 297-298; Trindal 266). It should also be mentioned that Payne had only stayed at the boarding house for a few days. But the military commission, following the prosecution’s lead, dismissed all of these facts and found Mary guilty.

Was John Surratt in Washington on April 14?

Within hours of Lincoln’s assassination, Secretary of War Stanton falsely claimed that John Surratt had attacked Secretary of State William Seward on orders from Booth. Seward was attacked at around the same time that Lincoln was shot. It soon became clear that John Surratt was not Seward’s attacker and that he had not even been in the city when the attack occurred. John had been part of the kidnapping plot but had dropped out of it about two weeks before the assassination occurred. He was in Elmira, New York, on April 14, the day Lincoln and Seward were attacked.

Nevertheless, the prosecutors at the conspiracy trial claimed that John Surratt had been part of the murder plot and that he was in Washington on the day of the assassination. The prosecutors knew they could not credibly charge John with participating in the murder plot if he was nowhere near Washington when Lincoln was shot. They dismissed Mary Surratt’s statement to the police and military officers that John had left the city about two weeks before the murder, that she had not seen him since, and that he had recently written her a letter from , Canada.

When John Surratt was put on trial in 1867, the defense proved beyond any reasonable doubt that he was not in Washington on the day of the murder. Virtually all Lincoln assassination scholars now agree that he was in New York when Lincoln was shot. Indeed, the War Department, contrary to the posturing of their prosecutors, knew soon after the murder that John was not in Washington on April 14:

[John] Surratt was charged as an accomplice in Lincoln’s murder, which meant that the prosecution had to prove he was involved in the assassination—a major task considering that Surratt was 300 miles from Washington when Lincoln was killed. The prosecution, with the aid of the War Department’s hired witness hunters, drummed up a dozen people who swore they saw Surratt in Washington on that date. One of them even claimed that he saw Surratt in the vestibule of the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre. . . .

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Surratt’s able attorney Joseph H. Bradley easily broke down these testimonies, drawing out so many inconsistencies that all their stories were highly suspect. Bradley, who defended Surratt without remuneration, further outmaneuvered the prosecution by showing convincingly that Surratt had been in Elmira, New York, from April 13 to 15. For the clincher, Bradley tried to secure the register of Surratt’s hotel in Elmira, which contained his signature for the dates indicated, but the register had mysteriously disappeared, and as Bradley noted, “the proprietors and servants of the hotel were scattered in every direction.”

Clearly the prosecutors were aware of Surratt’s presence in Elmira and had deliberately based their case on what they knew to be fabrications. In 1865 the government had, in fact, traced Surratt’s movements, and one of its own witnesses, a doctor named McMillan, had testified to a congressional committee that Surratt was in Elmira at the time of the assassination. The hotel register had apparently been confiscated by the government.

Surratt’s attorneys did have the register of the Webster House in Canandaigua, where Surratt stayed from April 15 to 17, but the trial judge refused to admit it as evidence. (Winkler 245)

Mary Surratt was telling the truth when she told police and military investigators that John was not in town when the assassination occurred and that she had not seen him since he had left about two weeks earlier.

William Seward Immediately after Seward was attacked, the War Department falsely claimed that John Surratt was the assailant.

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Mary Surratt’s Character

Even Weichmann admitted that prior to the assassination, he believed Mrs. Surratt was a devout Christian woman and a person of outstanding character. He said she cared for him deeply and treated him like a son. At the conspiracy trial, the defense produced numerous witnesses who testified that Mary was an honest and charitable Christian lady. Two of her former slaves testified that she had always treated them kindly (Moore 54 n 73). One witness noted that Mary fed and aided Union soldiers during the war (Winkler 230-231). , Mary’s lead defense attorney, appealed to the evidence of her good character in his part of the defense’s closing argument:

That a woman, well educated, and, as far as we can judge from all her past life, as we have it in evidence, a devout Christian, ever kind, affectionate, and charitable, with no motive disclosed to us that could have caused a total change in her very nature, could have participated in the crimes in question is almost impossible to believe. Such a belief can only be forced upon a reasonable, unsuspecting, unprejudiced mind by direct and uncontradicted evidence, coming from pure and perfectly unsuspected sources. Have we these? Is the evidence uncontradicted? Are the two witnesses, Weichmann and Lloyd, pure and unsuspected? (Pitman 262)

Johnson went on to point out the same thing that many scholars have noted, namely, that there was much more evidence against Weichmann and Lloyd than there was against Mrs. Surratt:

But this conclusion in regard to these witnesses must be, in the minds of the court, and is certainly strongly impressed upon mine, that, if the facts which they themselves state as to their connection and intimacy with Booth and Payne are true, their knowledge of the purpose to commit the crimes, and their participation in them, is much more satisfactorily established than the alleged knowledge and participation of Mrs. Surratt. (Pitman 262)

Miscellaneous Myths About the Mary Surratt Case

Myth: Mrs. Surratt’s house was the “nest” of the assassination conspiracy, the main hub for the conspirators.

Fact: Historian Michael Kauffman has debunked this myth:

Contrary to the common understanding, though, Mary Surratt’s house was not the conspirators’ primary meeting place, nor did they all live there. Herold had been there only once, and Powell stayed there just twice. Arnold and O’Laughlen

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had never been inside the place. The conspirators typically met at stables, and Booth was known to show up at Howard’s as often as six times a day. He checked in on Atzerodt at the Pennsylvania House, and Arnold and O’Laughlen at Rullman’s Hotel, but he never called them together at Mrs. Surratt’s. (Kauffman 197)

Myth: Given the size of her boarding house, Mrs. Surratt must have known what her son, Booth, Herold, and Powell were talking about.

Fact: Mary Surratt’s boarding house was three stories tall and had 2,900 square feet of space. Even by today’s standards, that is a large house. In addition, Mary was not always at the house. She went to church often, ran errands, went places with friends, and so forth. So it seems like quite a reach to claim that she “must” have known what they were talking about.

Furthermore, as noted above, Mary’s boarding house was not the primary meeting place for the conspirators. Herold came only once. Powell stayed there only twice. Booth never stayed there, although he did drop by on a number of occasions to see John Surratt.

Moreover, Weichmann admitted that in February, two months before the assassination, Mary was getting worried about what business Booth had with her son, and that when she later asked John about it, he told her their business involved cotton speculation (Moore 86-87).

Myth: Mrs. Surratt’s denial of recognizing Payne was overly dramatic and suggests she was lying. Instead of simply saying she did not recognize him, she raised her right hand and said, “Before God, sir, I do not know this man, and have never seen him, and I did not hire him to dig a gutter for me.”

Fact: There is conflicting testimony about what Mary Surratt said when she was asked if she knew Payne, as Moore points out:

Captain Wermerskirch asserted the dramatic confrontation; Major Smith supported him. Yet Captain Morgan, who was present as the women went out the door, heard nothing, except perhaps Mrs. Surratt mutter something. Honora Fitzpatrick couldn’t remember that Mrs. Surratt had said she had not seen this man before. (Moore 53)

Winkler:

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The captain commanding the arrest party [Captain Morgan] stayed at her [Mrs. Surratt’s] side throughout the interrogation. Later he rebutted the soldier at the trial, saying that he never heard her make that statement, but his testimony was ignored by the court. (Winkler 230)

As with all the other claims made against her, Mrs. Surratt was never allowed to give her side of this event during the conspiracy trial. On the night of her arrest, she was taken to General Christopher Augur’s headquarters, where a special commission consisting of three Army colonels was taking testimony. She appeared before this special commission, but, conveniently enough, the transcript of her testimony went “missing” and has never been found (Dewitt 1909:66).

Senator Reverdy Johnson

Myth: Mary Surratt’s first attorney, Senator Reverdy Johnson, who was a former U.S. Attorney General, indicated he believed Mrs. Surratt was guilty. In his opening remarks at the conspiracy trial, Senator Johnson said he would not represent Mrs. Surratt if he believed she were guilty, and then he dropped out of the case, which suggests he believed she was guilty.

Fact: This silly myth is peddled by Kate Larson, one of the few modern defenders of the military commission’s verdict against Mary Surratt. Johnson decided to let his two junior counsels handle the bulk of the case (1) because on Johnson’s first day in court two of the judges questioned his loyalty and moral fitness, and (2) because his heavy workload prevented him from appearing daily at the trial (Poore 1:51-62). Even before two of the judges attacked him, Johnson stated that he might not be able to spend a lot of time at the trial due to his heavy workload:

I do not know whether I shall be able to appear or not. I have taken no part in the case thus far, except to speak to the counsel. Whether I shall appear or not will depend on whether I can find that I can stay as long as may be necessary. I have

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no objection to appearing if the court will permit me to leave it at any time. (Poore 1:51)

Yet, Johnson cross-examined Weichmann at length (Poore, 1:81-92). Johnson wanted the commission to delay Lloyd’s testimony by one day so he could cross-examine him (of course, the commission denied the request). Johnson, as mentioned earlier, wrote part of the closing argument in defense of Mrs. Surratt. And, when the commission announced its verdict of death for Mary Surratt, Johnson directed Aiken and Clampitt to try to get a writ of habeas corpus to prevent the enforcement of the sentence and to compel the government to try Mary in a civilian court.

Myth: Richard Smoot’s account of his visit to Mary Surratt’s house on the night of the assassination proves that she knew Lincoln was about to be killed. In his book The Untold Story of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Smoot recalled that when he saw Mary that night, she was in a state of “feverish excitement” and urged him to leave the city.

Fact: Smoot’s story is a specious tale that does not deserve serious consideration. Several pages could be spent discussing the odd and problematic claims in Smoot’s yarn. No one at the boarding house, not even Weichmann, mentioned seeing Smoot there that night, nor did anyone recall seeing him there on April 12, the day of his first alleged visit. No one but Smoot and Weichmann said Mary Surratt was nervous or excited that night. Weichmann was the only resident at the boarding house who said Mary seemed nervous or worried that evening, and Weichmann, as mentioned earlier, did not make this claim until after the conspiracy trial and after Mary was dead.

If Mary had urged Smoot to leave the city, would she not have also urged her own daughter to leave? Mary barely knew Smoot. She had met him only a few days earlier and had spoken with him for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes. Yet, we are supposed to believe that Mary warned Smoot to leave the city but did not warn her own daughter, or Weichmann, or any of the other boarders. For that matter, if Mary had known that Lincoln was about to be killed, she herself surely would have left the city, since she knew that a number of people were aware that Booth had visited her house.

Smoot claimed that when he arrived at Mrs. Surratt’s house at 9:30 that night, she was standing on the porch with a bonnet on her head, and that as he began to walk up the steps to the porch, she turned abruptly and entered the house, partially closed the door, and then asked who he was. But none of the residents at the boarding house saw Mary leave the house after dinner that night, except for her prematurely ended trip to church with Eliza Holohan. When Mary and Eliza returned to the house, they chatted on the porch for five or 10 minutes and then went inside, and Mary went to the parlor (Trial of John H. Surratt 1:689). Eliza saw Mary enter the house and saw her head toward the

23 parlor. She did not mention seeing Mary suddenly coming inside and asking someone to identify himself, much less urging someone at the door to leave the city.

Myth: Mary Surratt’s guilt is clearly suggested by the fact that she did not act surprised when police officers told her a few hours after the murder that Lincoln had been killed and two days later when military officers came to her house and told her that she, her daughter, and her tenants were going to be arrested.

Fact: First of all, this is questionable psychoanalysis. People do not react to bad news in the same way. Moreover, shortly after the murder, before the city police came to her house to look for her son John, soldiers came down her street and announced that Lincoln had been shot, so she knew about Lincoln’s murder before the police arrived (Trindal 261-262).

When military officers came to her house two days later, Mary had no reason to be surprised that she and her daughter would be arrested. The city police had already come to her house looking for John. She knew that several people were aware that Booth had visited her house. Mary asked the officers if she could pray before they took her and the others away, so it is not like she treated the matter casually.

When the military officers came to arrest Mary, they told her they were taking her to General Augur’s headquarters to be questioned. She might have believed she would be released after her interrogation, which would explain why she did not exhibit any signs of panic. In addition, the fact that Mary made no effort to flee after the city police came to her house, and that she was still in her house when the military officers arrived to arrest her two days later, suggests she was innocent.

Final Thoughts

Congressman and scholar David Dewitt called Mary Surratt’s trial and execution “judicial murder” in his book The Judicial Murder of Mary Surratt. He had good reasons for this judgment. He discussed the clear evidence that the military tribunal was not only illegal but grossly unfair, and he noted the obvious holes in the prosecution’s case.

Secretary of War Stanton was fanatically determined to see Mrs. Surratt executed. This was most unfortunate for Mary because Stanton controlled the investigation of the assassination. He personally helped to pressure Weichmann to provide incriminating testimony against her, and he helped Weichmann get a government job after the conspiracy trial. He saw to it that the accused conspirators were treated harshly and inhumanely while they were in prison for as long as he could get away with it. He was the driving force behind the creation of the military commission. He tried to punish a newspaper editor who questioned the legality of the military tribunal. He was the chief

24 peddler of the myth that Confederate leaders had ordered and funded Lincoln’s death, and he used this myth as his excuse for insisting on a military commission. He ensured that the existence of Booth’s diary was kept secret. And he opposed commuting Mary’s sentence to life in prison.

With these facts in mind, it is interesting to note that shortly before he died, Stanton evoked a promise from John Bingham, one of the War Department’s prosecutors at the conspiracy trial, to “keep forever secret what both men knew of the Surratt case” (Thomas and Hyman 432). What did Stanton and Bingham know about Mrs. Surratt’s case that Stanton wanted Bingham to swear never to reveal?

Some authors have concluded that the Radical Republicans were behind Lincoln’s assassination and that Stanton was one of them. Lafayette Baker, who served as Stanton’s chief henchman during the war, left behind cipher notes shortly before he died in which he claimed that Stanton and other Radicals conspired to have Lincoln murdered (Guttridge and Neff 9-55, 171-176; Cottrell 210-229; Mills 204-217; Fowler 4- 23; Hyams 67-92). President Johnson came to suspect that certain Radical Republicans were responsible for Lincoln’s death, and he even voiced this suspicion in a speech (Hoar, p. 267; Stryker, p. 281).

To fully understand what happened to Mary Surratt, we must comprehend the fact that Stanton was the main reason she was executed. Stanton freed suspects, such as Weichmann and Lloyd, against whom there was far more evidence of guilt than there was against Mrs. Surratt. If Stanton had not been determined to see Mary executed, her life would have been spared.

Whether Stanton did what he did because he was trying to conceal the identities of the real conspirators, or because he was so fanatical that he felt Mrs. Surratt had to die as a proxy for her son John and because he believed she “should” or “must” have known what was going on in her boarding house, the fact remains that he was the driving force behind her judicial murder. He could have released her and prosecuted any of the numerous suspects whom he chose to free even though he had much more evidence against them than he had against her. Instead, from start to finish, he doggedly insisted that she was guilty and that she had to be executed.

And so Mary Surratt was hung. She was tried by an illegal military court and executed on the basis of flimsy circumstantial evidence. Her priest, Father Jacob Walter, put it well when he said, “there wasn’t enough evidence against her to hang a cat” (Winkler 212-213).

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Sources:

Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser, Wednesday Evening, March 27, 1867. Available here.

Arnold, Samuel. Memoirs of a Lincoln Conspirator. Edited by Michael W. Kauffman. Bowie, : Heritage Books, 1995. You can also find much of this book online in Arnold’s long essay titled “The Lincoln Plot,” The Sun, December 8-20, 1902. Arnold’s essay was originally published in The Baltimore American in 1902. The Sun republished the essay one chapter at a time from December 8 through December 20. Each article has its own link. If you would like all the links, please contact me.

Bogar, Thomas. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford’s Theatre. Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2013.

Clampitt, John W. "The Trial of Mrs. Surratt," The North American Review. September 1880, pp. 223-240. Available at https://ia801307.us.archive.org/21/items/trialofmrssurrat00clam/trialofmrssurrat00clam.p df.

Clark, Allen C. Abraham Lincoln in the National Capital. Washington, D.C.: W. F. Roberts Company, 1925.

Cottrell, John. Anatomy of an Assassination: The Murder of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1966.

Dewitt, David. The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Its Expiation. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1909. Available at https://ia800307.us.archive.org/24/items/assassinationofa00indewi/assassinationofa00i ndewi.pdf.

-----. The Judicial Murder of Mary Surratt. Baltimore: John Murphy & Company, 1896. Available at https://ia902702.us.archive.org/28/items/judicialmurderm00dewigoog/judicialmurderm00 dewigoog.pdf.

Ferguson, Robert. The Trial in American Life. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Fowler, Robert H. “Was Stanton Behind Lincoln’s Murder?”, Civil War Times. Volume 3, Number 5, August 1961, pp. 4-23.

Guttridge, Leonard and Ray A. Neff. Dark Union: The Secret Web of Profiteers, Politicians, and Booth Conspirators That Led to Lincoln’s Death. New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2003.

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Hoar, George, editor. Charles Sumner: His Complete Works. Volume 13. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1874

Hyams, Edward. Killing No Murder: A Study of Assassination as a Political Means. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1969.

Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, March 26, 1867. Available here.

Laughlin, Clara. The Death of Lincoln: The Story of Booth’s Plot, the Deed, and the Penalty. New York: Doubleday, 1909.

Marvel, William. Lincoln’s Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Mills, Robert Lockwood. It Didn’t Happen the Way You Think: The Lincoln Assassination: What the Experts Missed. Bowie, Maryland: Heritage Books, 1994.

Moore. Guy W. The Case of Mrs. Surratt: Her Controversial Trial and Execution for Conspiracy in the Lincoln Assassination. University of Oklahoma Press, 1954.

Peterson, T. B., editor. The Trial of the Alleged Assassins and Conspirators, Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1865.

Pitman, Benn, editor. The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators. New York: Moore, Wilsatch, and Baldwin, 1865. This is the Pitman version of the transcript of the conspiracy trial.

Poore, Benjamin, editor. The Conspiracy Trial for the Murder of the President. Volume 1. Boston: J. E. Tilton and Company, 1865.

Rhodehamel, John and Louise Taper, editors. “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me”: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth. University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Smoot, Richard. The Unwritten History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Clinton, Massachusetts: W. J. Coulter, 1908.

Stryker, Lloyd Paul. Andrew Johnson: A Study in Courage. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1936.

Thomas, Don. The Reason Lincoln Had to Die. Chesterfield, Virginia: Pumphouse Publishers, 2013.

Thomas, Benjamin and Harold Hyman. Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

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Trial of John H. Surratt in the Criminal Court for the District of Columbia. Volume 1. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1867.

Trindal, Elizabeth. Mary Surratt: An American Tragedy. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Comany, 1996.

Warner, Deborah. “Are These John Wilkes Booth’s Field Glasses?” The Natural Museum of American History website. July 7, 2014. Available at http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2014/07/are-these-john-wilkes-booths-field- glasses.html.

Winkler, H. Donald. Lincoln and Booth: More Light on the Conspiracy. Nashville, Tennessee: Cumberland House, 2003.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael T. Griffith holds a Master’s degree in Theology from The Catholic Distance University, a Graduate Certificate in Ancient and Classical History from American Military University, a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from Excelsior College, two Associate in Applied Science degrees from the Community College of the Air Force, and an Advanced Certificate of Civil War Studies and a Certificate of Civil War Studies from Carroll College. He is a two-time graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, in Arabic and Hebrew, and of the U.S. Air Force Technical Training School in San Angelo, . He has completed advanced Hebrew programs at Haifa University in Israel and at the Spiro Institute in London, England. He is the author of four books on Mormonism and ancient texts, and of one book on the John F. Kennedy assassination.

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

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