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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. Then John Sr. began drinking. Never a stable man, he handled his pocketbook poorly, and soon he’d squandered his small inheritance. A fire destroyed the Surratt home 11 years into their marriage, and instead of rebuilding it, John Sr. decided to build a tavern just south of Washington, which quickly became a rough place. In 1862, John Sr.’s drinking reached its zenith, and he dropped dead of a stroke, leaving Mary with his debt and his tavern full of drunken Confederates. Two years later, exhausted with running the tavern, she moved to a townhouse located in what is now Washington’s Chinatown. At the outbreak of the Civil War 1861, both of Mary’s sons, now young men, joined the Southern cause: Isaac signed up with the Confederate Army in Texas, and John Jr. worked as a Confederate courier. During the war, John Jr. fell in with some shady characters, including a young Confederate spy named Lewis Powell, and the famous actor, John Wilkes Booth. Mary became acquainted with them. Later, they stayed at her townhouse, which she ran as a boardinghouse to bring in extra money. Booth, Powell and others met and plotted Lincoln’s death in the rooms of her home — but no evidence exists to show that Mary knew what the men discussed behind closed doors. On April 14, 1865, Mary spent the morning after Good Friday Mass haggling with creditors over her late husband’s debt. That afternoon, she and one of her son’s friends went downtown, where they saw a military parade in celebration of the Confederate surrender five days earlier. That evening, she read a letter from John Jr. telling her he was hastily departing for Canada. At around 10 p.m., as she sat in her room looking over her accounts, she heard shouts from down the street, and was informed that Lincoln had been shot. Later, around 2:30 a.m., she heard pounding on her door. She opened it to find two detectives who asked if she’d seen Booth: She hadn’t. They inquired about John Jr., and she told them he’d gone to Canada. “What is the meaning of this?” she asked, groggy and confused. Then they explained that Booth had shot the president, and her son was suspected of aiding in the plot. Three days later, D.C. police arrested Mary. She told them with hopeless naivete: “We often remarked that Mr. Booth was very clear of politics: he never mentioned anything of the [assassination plot], and it was a subject that we never indulged in.” She had no answers. Nevertheless, they took her to Old Capitol Prison and placed her in a dim room reeking of excrement. The authorities charged Mary with treason, opening an extensive investigation. The most damaging testimony came from John Lloyd, a Confederate who had stayed in the tavern. Lloyd had first insisted Mary knew nothing. But the police tortured him, stringing him up by his thumbs and only letting him down after he’d implicated her. Mary and three others, including Powell, were tried by a military tribunal. This could have been considered unconstitutional because the defendants were civilians, but Attorney General James Speed claimed they acted as “public enemies.” On May 11, 1865, Mary and the others entered the courtroom wearing heavy iron chains around their wrists and ankles. The trial lasted 48 days. The most critical evidence against Mary was the fact that the conspirators had plotted at her boardinghouse. The prosecution concluded that since the conspirators met in her townhouse, she must have known about the plot and been part of the conspiracy. Defense witnesses testified about her flawless character, but it didn’t matter. On July 6, the tribunal sentenced her to death. Mary was beside herself. According to the Washington Evening Star, she burst into an uncharacteristic “paroxysm of grief” and grew very pale. Over the next several hours, her attorneys desperately entreated the judge and President Andrew Johnson to give them a few more days. Powell, who’d also been condemned to hang, talked of nothing but Mary’s innocence, but no one listened. That night, Mary could not sleep. The next day she took her final communion, and with support from guards she walked to the gallows. When she reached the top of the scaffold and saw the noose, she collapsed and began to moan. The soldier operating her trapdoor, William Coxhill, vomited at the thought of what he had to do. At about 1:30 p.m., Mary Surratt said her last words: “Please don’t let me fall.” But the trapdoor opened, and fall she did, hanging for less than 10 seconds before she ceased to twitch. Questions about the justice of Mary’s execution have never been resolved after a case in which her son was never convicted. Some hold that she was a silent conspirator; others contend that the clear lack of damning evidence was ignored by an angry jury. Either way, Mary’s case stands as a tragedy. Rob Ogden is a writer living in Cleveland. .
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