Mary Surratt

Encyclopedia : M : MA : MAR : Mary Surratt

---

Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt (May/June 1823 in Waterloo, Maryland, USA – July 7, 1865 in Washington, D.C), was the first woman executed by the United States federal government. She was hanged on July 7, 1865, for conspiracy relating to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. She was the mother of John Surratt, also alleged to be involved in the conspiracy.

Early life

Mary was born to Archibald Jenkins and Elizabeth Anne in southern Maryland. She had two brothers. Her father died when she was two years old. Mary enrolled at a private girl's boarding school, Academy for Young Ladies, in Alexandria, Virginia. She married John Harrison Surratt in 1839, when she was seventeen and he was twenty-seven. They had three children, Isaac (1841), Elisabeth Susanna (1843), and John Jr. (1844). Together they farmed tobacco, and opened a general store, gristmill, and tavern.

Lincoln assassination connection

She and her family were Southern sympathizers. Her older brother, Zadoc Jenkins, was arrested by Union forces for trying to prevent an "occupying" Federal soldier, from voting in the Maryland elections that gave Lincoln a second term. Until his death in 1862, her husband, John Surratt Sr., had operated a tavern and served as U.S. Postmaster, which was also the polling place, at a crossroads that was known as Surrattsville, thirteen miles southeast of Washington. After the assassination, it was renamed Robeysville and later Clinton, Maryland. In 1864, Mary Surratt rented the tavern and farm to John Lloyd, a former Washington policeman, and moved to Washington, D.C. with her children where she set up an eight-room boarding house on H Street. This boarding house was claimed to be the site of meetings between her son and the other Lincoln conspirators, including John Wilkes Booth. Her son later admitted that he was actively involved in an earlier plot to kidnap the president, but claimed he was not involved in the assasssination. He later testified at his own trial, that he was in Elmira, New York enroute to Montreal, Canada, when Lincoln was shot. He also denied that his mother was involved in the plot, in any way.

On the day of the assassination, Mary rode out to her tavern with one of her boarders, Louis J. Weichmann, a young War Department clerk, who was a friend of her son, John Surratt, Jr. Although Mary Surratt claimed to have made the journey to collect back rent owed to her by her tenant, John Lloyd, Lloyd later testified against her, saying she gave him a package containing field glasses and told him to " make ready the shooting irons." Supposedly this was in reference to weapons stored by the conspirators on her property. After assassinating President Lincoln at Ford's Theater, John Wilkes Booth did in fact make his first stop at the Surrattsville tavern along with his accomplice David Herold. The inn keeper, John Lloyd, gave them whisky, pistols, one of two Spencer carbines that Booth had purchased earlier and stored there, as well as the field glasses. They then proceeded to travel south, helped by many of the same Southern-sympathizers who aided John Surratt in his activities as a courier for the Confederacy.

Arrest and trial

While she was being questioned by police in her boarding house, Lewis Payne, the former John Mosby's Ranger, who had attempted to assassinate Secretary of State Seward, appeared at her door. Although witnesses testified she had met Payne several times, she denied ever having seen him before, thus linking her further to the conspiracy.

Held in military custody under sweltering conditions, Mary Surratt had her head enclosed in a padded canvas bag to prevent a suicide attempt. She was also kept manacled. She was constantly guarded by four soldiers. For two weeks after her arrest and before her trial she was held on board a warship that was being used as a prison for the conspirators in a windowless underwater cabin. During the trial Surratt and the rest of the conspirators were taken to the old arsenal where their trial took place. Her cell had only a straw pallet and bucket as furniture. It was popularly believed that Mary was on trial as a means of forcing her son out of hiding. That did not happen and she was found guilty in a military court and sentenced on June 30 to be "hanged by her neck 'till she be dead" for treason and ploting murder. Military tribunals had less strict rules of evidence than civilian trials and it was highly irregular for a civilian to be tried with one. Despite the desperate pleas of her daughter, President Andrew Johnson signed her death warrant, saying that she had "kept the nest that hatched the egg" and was second only to Booth in the designing of the plot. There is some dispute over whether he ever saw the military judges' recommendation that her sentence be commuted to life.

Because she and several other of the conspirators were Roman Catholics, there was speculation that the assassination was somehow connected to a Papist plot. There was still fairly rampant anti-Catholic sentiment in the country at that time.

Execution

On July 7, 1865, around 1:15 P.M., Mary Surratt and the rest of the condemned prisoners were lead through the courtyard, with their hands manacled and legs chained with heavy irons, past their own graves, and up the thirteen steps to the gallows to be hanged. They were seated in chairs while their chains and shoes were removed and their wrists were tied together, their arms were bound to their sides, and their legs were tied together. Mrs. Surratt also had an extra rope passed around her dress to preserve her modesty. The condemned men and woman were than moved up to the break, the nooses were placed around their necks, and white cotton hoods were placed over their heads. The hoods were not for the mercy of the condemned as they could easily see through them, but to save the spectators views of lolling tongues and blue faces. All of the men then withdrew from the scafold and General Winfield Scot Hancock read out the death sentences in alphabetical order. When he reached "that she be hanged by the neck til' she be dead" in Surratt's sentance, four members of Company F of the Fourteenth Veteran Reserves knocked out the supporting post releasing the platform. Surratt dropped about a foot and convulsed violently for several minutes before she died. Her last words, spoken to a guard as he put the noose around her neck, were "please don't let me fall". She was executed along with Payne (also known as Powell), Herold (who stayed with Booth until his death in a Virginia tobacco barn), and George Atzerodt (a German immigrant from Port Tobacco, Maryland, who was tasked with killing Vice President Johnson, a mission he failed to complete). All of the bodies were placed in simple pine coffins with a glass vial containing their names to help identify the bodies. They were all then buried in shallow graves next to the prison walls.

Her son John was ultimately captured after several years as a fugitive, hiding in various Catholic religious establishments, including the Vatican. In September 1865, he traveled from St. Liboire to Montreal, to Quebec, then to Liverpool. He served for a brief time in the Papal Zouaves under the name John Watson. Arrested in 1866 he escaped and traveled to the Kingdom of Italy posing as a Canadian citizen. He booked passage to Alexandria, Egypt and was arrested there by American officials on November 23, 1866, and extradited to the United States. He was sent home on a U.S. Naval warship and put on trial. He was ultimately released after a mistrial and the statutes of limitations had run out on lesser charges. The government attempted to retry him, and was unsuccessful. He died in 1916.

Mary Surratt's boarding house in Washington, D.C. is still standing; it is now a Chinese restaurant. The Surrattsville tavern is a historical site run today by the Surratt Society located in Clinton, Maryland.

Bibliography

• Manhunt: The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer; Swanson, James L.;William Morrow;ISBN-0-06-051849-9

External links

• [Mary Surratt]
• [Surratt Society]

 

---

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

?