The History Page: Lincoln's Female 'Assassin'
The History Page: Lincoln’s female ‘assassin’ Housekeeper Mary Surratt is hanged for conspiracy on flimsy evidence Photo: Corbis By Rob Ogden, Saturday, August 6, 2011, The Daily, http://bit.ly/ogbWUD More than 1,000 people watched as Mary Surratt, a handsome widow and mother of three, stood on a trapdoor with a noose around her neck. Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated just three months earlier, and Surratt had been convicted of conspiring to kill him. Despite her pleas of innocence, U.S. authorities took her to the gallows, put a noose around her neck and pulled the lever. Surratt became the first woman executed by the U.S. government on July 7, 1865. Though convicted of treason, she insisted on her innocence until her death, and evidence suggests that she was, in fact, uninvolved with the Lincoln assassination plot. Tragedy had followed Mary her whole life, beginning with her father’s death in 1825, when she was 2 years old. Her mother ran the family affairs well and put Mary through Catholic boarding school near her home in Waterloo, Md. She grew into a comely young woman with dark hair, high cheekbones and large, mournful eyes. She befriended the local priest and became devoutly Catholic. Perhaps for lack of fatherly guidance, she married at 16 to a man named John Surratt, who had a troublesome background including financial problems and an illegitimate child he’d fathered the year before. But things started off well enough: Between 1841 and 1844, Mary had three children: Isaac, Elizabeth and John Jr.
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