As I’ve previously reported on here, I was fascinated by the story of the Lincoln assassination as a ten-year-old in Mr. Michael Cohn’s fifth grade class at Victor Mravlag School 21 in Elizabeth, NJ, and became just as interested in it again when the limited series MANHUNT began on Apple TV. In fact, I got so impatient from having to wait every week for the next episode to air that I also watched THE CONSPIRATOR, starring James McAvoy and Robin Wright, which deals with an aspect of the same crime.
In fact, it deals with a pretty STRANGE aspect of it, if you ask me: the involvement, or not, of Mary Surratt.
Mary Surratt ran a boarding house in Civil War era Washington, D.C. Her son John was a friend and co-conspirator of John Wilkes Booth. The plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson was, in large part, planned around the table in her boarding house.
Lincoln was the only one who was actually assassinated. The stabbing attempt that another conspirator, Lewis Powell, made on the life of William Seward failed, thank goodness. He was wounded, and so were members of his household who got into the fray, but they all lived. As for the plot to murder Andrew Johnson, well, the guy who was supposed to do that, one George Atzerodt, didn’t even try to pull it off. He chickened out at the last minute.
It didn’t help him any. He wound up on trial for his life, before a military tribunal, and then hung for it. So did Lewis Powell, as well as David Herold, an accomplice of Booth’s who helped him escape.
But so did Mary Surratt.
Now, do not get me wrong here. By all accounts, Mary Surratt was an unrepentant Confederate sympathizer. She doesn’t even strike me as the brightest bulb on the Washington chandelier because apparently she made several pro-Confederate statements, when arrested, that certainly did not help her case. She is portrayed as the kind of gal who practically spits nails as she parries the inquiries of the authorities. After all, in her mind, anyway, they’re “damn Yankees” and that makes them “the enemy.” Furthermore, considering that the assassination plans were made at her table at her boarding house, it’s pretty safe to assume she knew all about them and was fully aware of what these guys were planning.
But did she deserve the death penalty over it?
The new president himself, Andrew Johnson, thought she did. An attempt to get her case transferred to another court and re-tried failed because he went and vetoed it.
I wonder, though. This was a woman who didn’t pick up any guns or knives. She’s not the one who pulled the trigger on Lincoln. I could see putting her away for a good long time over having knowledge of the assassination and not reporting it, as she should have, and for helping Booth at one point, but death by hanging for her? It seems extreme.
If anyone was in it up to his neck, it was her son, John, who was a Confederate spy, and had once plotted with Booth to kidnap Lincoln, but by the time of the assassination, John Surratt had fled the country. He wasn’t a direct participant in this mess, either, as a result of not being in D.C. when it happened. He may have helped plan it, but he wasn’t there. Later he was caught, put on trial, and released due to a mistrial.
They put an end to the wrong Surratt.
Splendiferous Everything 