The Flimsy Case Against Mary Surratt: the Judicial Murder of One

The Flimsy Case Against Mary Surratt: 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 John Wilkes Booth and others to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, and sentenced her to death by hanging. Despite numerous appeals to commute her sentence to life in prison, she was hung seven days later on July 7. 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 1 * 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, John Surratt, 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 killing Lincoln 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 2 Mary Surratt and the other accused Booth accomplices could and should have been tried by a civilian court. But Secretary of War Edwin Stanton 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. 3 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.

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