Marry Surratt's Ghost
By
John William Tuohy
The inscription in front of Marry Surratt's
Boarding House at 604 H Street in Washington DC’s Chinatown
neighborhood reads "The nest in which the egg was hatched." which are
the words that President Andrew Johnson, used in April 1865 to describe this
innocuous brick house just five blocks from at Ford’s Theater where
President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated . Johnson was wrong; the house was
never the site of any meetings between the conspirators, although John Wilkes
Booth did visit the place several times directly before the murder.
Mary Surratt, was born Mary Jenkins in Southern Maryland
in the town of Waterloo and was educated in a private Roman Catholic girl's
boarding school, the Academy for Young Ladies in Alexandria, Virginia. (Located
on North Washington Street, the school eventually was incorporated into
Georgetown Visitation)
In 1839, she married 27 year old John Surratt in 1840. Surratt was
reported to be a mean drunk (he essentially drank himself to death) who beat
his 16 year old wife regularly. The couple had three children and
tried a number of occupations over the next twenty years including a 287 acre
tobacco farm, a general store, a gristmill, a tavern, and a post office.
(There son John was the Postmaster of the Surrattsville station)
John died in 1862 and left Mary in debt. The
family's slaves had either run away or been repossessed (it is unknown exactly
what became of them), the sale of a substantial amount of property which had
given hope of resolving the financial difficulties failed because of the
buyers' default, and John's many creditors still pressed to collect. Mary
leased the family farm and tavern to a former Washington, D.C., policeman named
John M. Lloyd and moved into the District, into a house that she and
her husband had owned, and turned it into a boarding house where her son John,
a Confederate courier, lived along with several other co-conspirators in the
Lincoln assassination.
Although living in the Union capital, she was quietly sympathetic
to the Confederacy. 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. Mary had
a son fighting in the Rebels army. Another son, John, (who was born
in the Congressional Heights District of DC and christened at St. Peter’s
church) was good friends with John Wilkes Booth. Dr. Samuel Mudd
introduced Surratt to Booth on December 23 1864.
At a meeting at the National Hotel in D.C., where Booth lived, (It
was on Pennsylvania Avenue and is today the site of the Newseum) Surratt
agreed to help Booth kidnap U.S. president Abraham Lincoln. The plan was to
capture Lincoln, take him to Richmond, Virginia, and trade him for thousands of
captured Confederate soldiers.
The plan was that on March 17, 1865, Surratt
and Booth and others, would lie in wait for Lincoln's carriage when
he left the Campbell General Hospital (Florida Avenue and 7th Street, was one
of nearly three dozen military hospitals in Washington) and returned to
Washington.
Their plans were foiled when Lincoln changed his mind and stayed
in Washington to meet with the 140th Indiana Regiment and to present to the
governor of Indiana a captured Confederate flag.
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 by her tenant, John Lloyd, a
former DC Policeman, later testified against her, saying she gave him a package
containing field glasses and told him to "make ready the shooting
irons." This referred to two repeating carbines and seven revolvers that
she had bought and stored for the conspirators on her property. Mary admitted
taking the package there but claimed that she did not know what the package
contained.
After assassinating President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, John
Wilkes Booth did in fact first stop at the Surrattsville tavern with his
accomplice David Herold. John Lloyd, the innkeeper, gave Booth and Herold
whiskey, pistols, and one of two Spencer carbines as well as the field glasses.
Lloyd claimed Surratt had told him to do this when she arrived earlier that
day.
Three days after the assassination, April 18, police detectives
came to interview Mrs. Surratt and by a very unlucky chance, Louis Powell, already
identified as part of the plot, showed up while the police were there. Powell,
a former member of John Mosby's Ranger, had attempted to assassinate Secretary
of State William H. Seward. Powell’s sudden appearance was enough of
a coincidence was enough for the authorities to implicate Surratt and arrest
her. Mary Surratt denied ever having seen Powell before but several witnesses
later testified Surratt had met Powell several times.
Mary was held in a makeshift cell on board a warship that was
being used as a prison for the conspirators. Her cell was sparse and equipped
with only a straw pallet and a bucket. Her head was covered in a
padded canvas bag to prevent a suicide attempt. She was kept manacled and was
constantly guarded by four soldiers.
Tried by a nine-member military commission beginning on May 9,
1865, Surratt was the oldest conspirator on trial and the only woman. She was
defended by Reverdy Johnson, a onetime Maryland Senator from Annapolis and
Attorney General of the United States under Millard Fillmore. In 1876, he would fall from a balcony at the
Governor’s Mansion in Annapolis and was killed instantly.
Mary maintained her innocence
throughout the trial, denying any knowledge of the assassination plot. The
evidence against her presented by the prosecution included a hidden photograph
of John Wilkes Booth found in her house and bullet molds on top of her dresser.
Still, the evidence against Mary Surratt is dubious. Weichmann
was eventually released after he testified against her and later said that the
government forced him to testify against Mary. He stuck to that story until the
day he died. Lewis Powell, a conspirator who was hanged with
Surratt, publicly stated she was innocent minutes before his execution. (The
others hanged were David Herold, and George Atzerodt) Regardless, a military
court convicted Surratt for her part in the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln
and condemned to death by hanging. President Andrew Johnson signed
her death warrant
The trial continued until late June 30, when Surratt
was sentenced to death by hanging for treason, conspiracy, and plotting murder,
although the court attached to its finding a recommendation of commutation of
her death sentence to life imprisonment, because of her sex and age.
At noon on July 6, Mary was informed she would be hanged the next
day. The reports are that she wept profusely and then collapsed. A priest,
her daughter Anna, and a few friends were allowed into see her but the guards
insisted that she wear handcuffs, leg irons and a hood during the entire
day before she was killed. She spent the night praying and refused
breakfast and 10:00 AM, she was told to prepare for her death although her
execution was delayed until the afternoon since most people expected, she would
be pardoned by the President and soldiers were stationed on every block between
the White House and the execution’s site to relay the expected pardon.
President Johnson later denied seeing the military judges'
recommendation that Surratt's sentence be commuted to life imprisonment, but
presiding Judge Joseph Holt said that Johnson read the recommendation and
discussed it with him. Johnson, according to Holt, said in signing the death
warrant that she had "kept the nest that hatched the egg”
She was hanged with three other conspirators at Fort
McNair in Southwest DC on July 5, 1865. Several pieces of the rope that had
ended Surratt's life and locks of her hair were sold as souvenirs. She was the
first woman executed by the Federal government. The government’s policy during
and after the civil war was to release female confederate spies and it more
than likely that Mary was tried only as a means to force her son John out of
hiding. Mary (and most of the others hung with her) were Roman
Catholic and the speculation remains that the strong religious prejudice of the
era contributed to rumors of a "Papist" conspiracy behind the
assassination plot and the lack of Presidential clemency for Mary.
At 1:15 P.M., a procession, headed by the nearly fainting Mary
Surratt, who wore a long black dress and black veil, and the other condemned
prisoners were marched towards the east wall of Fort Lesley McNair in hand manacles
and leg chains attached to a 75-pound iron balls. They were walked past their
newly dug graves and marched up the thirteen steps to the ten-foot high
gallows. Once there, Mary began to faint and had to be supported by two
soldiers. The hangman had made Surratt's noose with five turns
instead of the required seven because he had thought that the government would
never hang a woman.
They were all seated in chairs while their chains and shoes were
removed and their wrists were tied together behind them, their arms were bound
to their sides, and their ankles and thighs tied together with a white
cloth. Several members of the clergy stood nearby. Below them stood
military personnel, various officials, and one hundred civilian spectators who
had been issued tickets in order to be present to watch the convicted hang.
Powell stepped forward and yelled "Mrs.
Surratt is innocent. She doesn't deserve to die with the rest of us". But
he was pushed back with the others, nooses were placed around
their necks, and thin white cotton hoods were placed over their heads.
Mary Surratt turned to her guard and said, “Please don't let me
fall".
General Winfield Scott Hancock, who would later almost be
elected President of the United States, read out the death sentences in
alphabetical order. When he finished four soldiers knocked out the supporting
post, releasing the platform. The conspirators dropped about five or six feet,
which killed Herold and Atzerodt instantly, but failed to kill Powell and
Surratt, who both slowly strangled to death over five minutes. Surratt was
reported to have gagged and strained against her bonds as she died dangling in
the noose. Their bodies were hung for 25 minutes, then unhooded and allowed to
hang a further ten minutes before they were examined and pronounced dead.
Four years after the execution, the government gave Mary’s corpse
to Anna Surratt who buried her mother in Mount Olivet Cemetery in D.C., (1300
Bladensburg Road, NE.) Her headstone reads “Mrs. Surratt". The
body of John Lloyd, whose testimony may have sealed Mary's fate, is buried less
than 100 yards away.
Mary's son John was captured after a year and a half as a
fugitive, hiding in various Roman Catholic religious establishments as well as
the Papal States. In September 1865, he traveled from St. Liboire to
Montreal, to Quebec, and thence to Liverpool. He served for a brief time in the
Papal Zouaves under the name John Watson.
Arrested in 1866, he escaped and travelled to the Kingdom of
Italy, posing as a Canadian. He booked passage to Alexandria, Egypt, and was
arrested there by American officials on November 23, 1866, then extradited to
the United States. He was sent home on a U.S. naval warship and put on trial in a civilian court of the State of Maryland,
instead of before a military commission. He denied any involvement with the plot, and claimed that at the time
he was in Elmira, New York. Judge
David Cartter, a former US Congressman from Ohio, presided over the trial
which was held in DC.
Surratt’s attorney was Joseph H. Bradley (of 1517 Twenty-ninth-street) who hailed from an old and distinguished
Washington-Georgia family.
John Surratt
John Surratt was released due to a mistrial and the statutes
of limitations. The federal government attempted to retry him but
was unsuccessful. In
1872 he married a second cousin of Mary Victorine Hunter, a second cousin to
Francis Scott Key. He returned to Maryland tobacco farming and later taught at
the Rockville Female Academy and St. Joseph Catholic School in Emmetsburg
before serving as treasurer of the Old Bay Line steamship company, from where
he retired in 1914. He died of pneumonia two years later at age 72. He died in 1916 and is buried in Baltimore.
An older John Surratt
Mary Surratt’s ghost has been sighted in several places, including
the old Arsenal Penitentiary where she was hanged. Her body was temporarily
buried (the bodies were placed on the coffins, which had been gun boxes) near the
gallows before being move to permanent graves. Soldiers and their
families swear to seeing a hooded figure wearing black, bound at the hands and
feet, (She was buried with the hoods still on and a glass vial containing their
names to help identify the bodies.) roaming about the grounds. Mary’s spirit
has also been spotted at Surratt’s Clinton Maryland Tavern, on the stairs
and on the first and second floors. Her apparition is reported to
seen regularly at her DC Boarding House along with whispering and cried.
Mary Surratt's boarding house still stands and is listed on
the National Register of Historic Places. The Surrattsville tavern and house
are historical sites run by the Surratt Society located in Clinton, Maryland.