In the spring of 1865 Washington was celebrating victory in a bitterly fought civil war. It had begun in 1861 when six southern states had seceded from the Union, setting up the separate Confederate state with its capital in Richmond. For Southerners, the Union threatened to abolish the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery without which, they held, the whole agrarian society of the south would collapse in ruins. They were fighting for survival. On 9 April 1865 the main army of the Confederates surrendered. Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, was seen by Confederates as the political architect and living symbol of their defeat.
On the evening of 14 April John Wilkes Booth burst into Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, shooting the President at short range. Booth, a handsome ladykiller, was a celebrated actor; as actors sometimes do, he saw himself as performing a heroic role offstage. By 1865 his hatred of Lincoln had become obsessional. He must be put out of the way. After shooting him he leapt out of the box on to the stage, breaking his leg. Astonishingly he evaded his pursuers for several days, his leg set by a Confederate doctor, to be shot escaping from a burning barn.
Thus he could not be tried in person by the military commission set up to investigate those responsible for Lincoln’s assassination. Nor could John Surratt, long suspected by the Union authorities of being a Confederate spy and courier, who was Booth’s friend and closest associate. With safe houses provided by Confederate sympathisers and Catholic priests he escaped to Canada. In the absence of the two main conspirators the military commission was left with the task of trying Booth’s accomplices. One of them was Mary Surratt, John’s mother. Found guilty, she was condemned to be hanged on 16 July.
Mary was a resolute defender of the cause of the Confedederate rebels. She herself employed slaves, two of whom testified to her good character at her trial. On becoming a Catholic she displayed all the zeal of a convert. Her defence lawyers dwelt on her piety as a Christian. She was married to a hopeless drunkard, who died leaving her loaded with his debts; to meet these she became a business woman. In Washington she made a respectable living running a boarding house. One of her lodgers was Louis Weichmann, a fellow Catholic and friend of Mary’s son John. Weichmann found Mary a warm-hearted landlady but was puzzled by the goings-on at the boarding house: the frequent visits of Booth and his private conversations with her son John. After Lincoln’s assassination he became convinced to the end of his life that she was guilty of the charges of the military commission.
To the prosecution it was immediately clear that Mary had kept a safe house for the assassins. Her boarding house was the nest where the conspiracy to kill Lincoln was hatched in. Weichmann’s testimony was damning. A hidden photograph of Booth was found by a detective in Mary’s room. Lewis Payne, whose task in the Booth conspiracy was to murder William Seward, Secretary of State for War, burst into Seward’s house but failed to stab him to death. He was caught seeking refuge in Mary’s house to change his bloodstained jacket. Larson maintains that she must have known what her son and Booth were up to. There is no direct evidence of her conversations and dealings with Booth and her son. Mary swore in court that she was innocent of any knowledge of their plans. My typist points out that I have only the haziest notion of what my sons and their friends are up to; and as a landlady she herself does not enquire into her guests’ concerns. I accept, with reservations, Larson’s conclusion that Mary was guilty of the charges brought against her by the military commission.
Did she receive a fair trial by what was in, in effect, a court martial? Her leading defence counsel, Reverdy Johnson, argued that, with the end of the war, she should have been tried by a civil court which would have accepted reasonable doubt as a legitimate plea. The military mind was bored and unconvinced by Johnson’s lengthy lawyer’s arguments. The commission rejected them out of hand. For Johnson Mary’s conviction amounted to judicial murder. That was that. He left the defence of Mary to two junior attorneys who, unaware of the investigations of detectives and others on which the prosecution’s case was based, blundered and revealed themselves as liars.
Larson captures brilliantly the atmosphere of Mary Surratt’s trial in a crowded court room — murder trials attract morbid spectators — during the sweltering heat of a Washington summer. Her description of the drama of Mary’s last hours, when she was broken by a death sentence that neither she nor her lawyers had believed possible, makes compelling reading. A minority of the military tribunal appealed to Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor as President, to commute the death sentence to imprisonment ‘in consideration of the sex and age of the said Mary E. Surratt’. Even Mrs Douglas, a close friend of the Lincolns’, moved by the hysterical appeals of Mary’s daughter Anna, pushed past the bayonets of Johnson’s guard to plead for the commutation of the death sentence. We know nothing of their conversation except that Johnson was unmoved. Mary should not be spared the death sentence; ‘if she was guilty at all her sex did not make her less guilty’. To the very last moment Mary’s supporters hoped that the President might relent. The road from the White House to the scaffold was cleared to make way for a message to get through with speed. The hangman tied the rope round Mary’s neck loosely in the hope that he would not have to hang her. But Johnson did not relent, presumably on the assumption that assassins of presidents and their accomplices must die in order to deter future assassins.
One of my few lifelong passions has been a horror of capital punishment, and the execution of women I find especially obscene. Mary was the first woman to be executed by the government of the United States. On the scaffold she could not stand up and was sedated to stop her screaming that she was innocent. During her trial she had been reviled in the press as an arrogant liar. After her death it was not only Confederate and Catholic sympathisers who regarded the execution of a middle-aged widow and mother as, somehow or other, repulsive.
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