Chapter II: Preface: XI (1)

_1. She Helped to Kill a President_ 1
UNITED STATES V. SURRATT

_2. Atlanta’s Northern Jew_ 24
GEORGIA V. FRANK

_3. In Union There is Death_ 37
CALIFORNIA V. MOONEY

_4. Anarchists With Bloody Hands_ 65
MASSACHUSETTS V. SACCO AND VANZETTI

_5. He Defied the Bible_ 102
TENNESSEE V. SCOPES

_6. Their Skin was Black_ 120
ALABAMA V. PATTERSON

_7. A Traitor from Harvard_ 137
UNITED STATES V. HISS

_8. They Gave the Bomb to Russia_ 170
UNITED STATES V. ROSENBERG

_9. Contempt by Silence_ 194
UNITED STATES V. LAMONT

_10. Five Against God_ 210
ENGEL V. VITALE

BIBLIOGRAPHY 230

INDEX 232

1

_She Helped to Kill a President_

The United States

_versus_

Mary Eugenia Jenkins Surratt

A few minutes after eight o’clock on the morning of Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee sat down at a field table and wrote a note to General Grant, requesting an interview “with reference to the surrender of this army.” That afternoon, at the McLean farmhouse on the edge of Appomattox village, the fifty-eight-year-old Lee turned over the Army of Northern Virginia to its embarrassed conqueror. The brief surrender document was written out in pencil by Grant at a table in the McLean living room and corrected by Lee who, resplendent in dress uniform sat across the room from the somewhat disheveled Union commander. At 3:45 p.m., the Confederate general signed his acceptance of Grant’s rather generous terms and went out to explain to his incredulous troops what he had done.

Even though Joe Johnston and Kirby Smith were still at large in the deep South, the Civil War was all but over. Two days after Appomattox, Grant and his wife arrived in Washington where the general was promptly lionized by a city gone wild after more than four nerve-wracking years of being a front line capital. In honor of the couple, Mrs. Lincoln had done her part by inviting them to a theatre party at Ford’s Opera House on the evening of Good Friday, April 14th. _Our American Cousin_, a new comedy with the incomparable Laura Keene, had been playing to enthusiastic audiences throughout the North and, although the President wasn’t particularly overjoyed at the prospect of sitting through a late-evening play, he knew better than to obstruct Mary’s plans. However, at the last moment the Grants begged off, primarily because the general had little stomach for what he termed “show business.”

At nine o’clock on Good Friday evening, coachman Francis Burns stopped the White House carriage in front of Ford’s between E and F on Tenth Street. Outside of the Lincolns, his only other passengers were Major Henry Reed Rathbone and Clara Harris, an engaged couple who were filling in for the Grants. When the quartet entered the Presidential box, Major Rathbone and Miss Harris took the two seats nearest the stage with their hosts sitting behind them. Lincoln sprawled in a haircloth rocking chair directly in front of a door that opened on a narrow hallway. Sometime during the afternoon, a small hole had been bored in the door, through which it was possible to observe the box’s occupants from the corridor.

Shortly after the Lincoln party had entered the box, John F. Parker, a perennially thirsty patrolman who had been assigned by the Metropolitan Police to guard the President, decided to leave his post in the hallway and look for a nearby bar. At 10:15, just as, on stage, Harry Hawk was referring to Mrs. Mountchessington as “you sockdologizing old mantrap,” actor John Wilkes Booth opened the now unguarded door and put a bullet into the head of the dozing man in the rocker. The rest was for the chroniclers--the leap to the stage, the broken shinbone, the mad dash across the Navy Yard Bridge, the frenzied manhunt through the woods and swamps of Northern Virginia, and the end of the trail in a burning barn on Garrett’s farm just south of Port Royal.

The self-styled avenger, who believed that “God ... made me the instrument of his punishment,” was destined to die just before sunrise on April 26th on the front porch of a Virginia tobacco farm. The cause of death--a bullet wound in the neck. Whether Booth shot himself, as Colonel Everton Conger, the leader of the cavalry patrol which had run him to earth, believed, or was killed by fanatical Sergeant Boston Corbett who claimed that God had been looking over his shoulder when he squeezed the trigger, didn’t change the essential fact that the assassin was as dead as he was ever going to be. The troopers who searched his body found a small diary and the daguerrotypes of five women in his pockets.

Seconds after Booth’s one-shot derringer had earned him a sizeable place in the history books, a wild-eyed young man on a bay horse pulled up in front of Secretary of State William H. Seward’s mansion on Lafayette Square. Pretending to be a messenger sent by Seward’s physician, he broke into the Secretary’s bedroom where he stabbed him three times. Only a steel frame which the victim had been wearing to support a fractured jaw saved him from death. The intruder then fought his way out of the house, seriously wounding four other people in the process, and rode off toward the east.

Meanwhile, four Pennsylvania artillerymen carried the President’s unconscious form across Tenth Street to William Peterson’s house. There he was placed on a walnut cot in the first floor bedroom of William Clark, one of Peterson’s boarders. He lingered during the night, but it was soon obvious to the six physicians in the room, who could do little more than remove the pressure-causing blood clots that continuously formed at the entrance to the wound, that their illustrious patient would never see another day. By dawn, his breath had become stertorous and labored and, at 7:22 a.m., Surgeon-General Joseph K. Barnes, recorded the last heartbeat. “Now,” Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was supposed to have said, as he closed the dead man’s eyes, “he belongs to the ages.”

Some four hours earlier, a Metropolitan Police squad, headed by a detective named Clarvoe, had arrived at a small boardinghouse at 541 H Street, which was owned by one Mary Eugenia Surratt, a widow who had come to Washington from Surrattville, Maryland, in the Spring of ’64. They were looking for Mrs. Surratt’s son, John, who, Clarvoe told her, had just murdered Secretary Seward. When Mrs. Surratt informed them that John had left for Canada when Richmond fell on April 3rd, the squad searched the eight-room brick building from cellar to attic. After ordering Louis J. Weichmann, one of Mrs. Surratt’s borders, to report to headquarters the next morning, the policemen left the house.

As soon as Lincoln died, Stanton, to whom one cause was as good as another so long as he remained _primus motor_, announced that he would not rest until he had found and prosecuted everybody who had anything to do with what his reward circulars referred to as “the stain of innocent blood.” Booth and David E. Herold, a slow-witted youth whose only redeeming feature was his devotion to the actor, had been identified as soon as they fled across the Navy Yard Bridge, minutes after the murder. Herold had been captured by Colonel Conger’s cavalry patrol just before it set fire to the barn in which the two men were hiding.

By that time, Stanton had rounded up seven other persons whom he accused of conspiring to kill the President. There was Lewis Payne, a Confederate deserter and the son of a Florida minister, who had created the havoc at the Seward house. Payne and George A. Atzerodt, a carriage-maker from Port Tobacco, had both boarded at Mrs. Surratt’s prior to the assassination. Atzerodt, who, with Herold’s help, was supposed to kill Vice-President Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood House, had lost his nerve and spent the night of April 14th wandering aimlessly around the streets of Washington. He was finally captured on April 20th at his cousin’s farm in nearby Germantown. Payne was picked up when he showed up at the H Street boardinghouse at midnight on April 17th, with his head wrapped in a bloody shirtsleeve, just as Major H. W. Smith was in the process of arresting Mrs. Surratt.

Edward Spangler, the cantankerous stage carpenter at Ford’s had held Booth’s horse while the actor was about his murderous business in the President’s box. Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlin, both of whom had known Booth since childhood, had been persuaded by him to help out in an abortive 1864 scheme to abduct Lincoln and hold him a hostage until the North came to terms with the Confederacy. After almost a year of fruitless discussions with Booth about ways and means, both men had withdrawn from the project. On the night of the President’s murder, O’Laughlin had been on a drinking bout in Washington with three friends while Arnold was working for a sutler at Fortress Monroe near Baltimore. Lastly, there was Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, the Maryland physician who had set the murderer’s broken leg the morning after the shooting.

By the end of April, Stanton had everybody he wanted. Herold was brought back to Washington on the same steamboat as his master’s blanket-wrapped corpse, and incarcerated with the other prisoners in the brigs of some gunboats moored near the Navy Yard. All that remained was the selection of a court. The Secretary of War was determined not to let his prizes enjoy the benefits of a civil trial and urged the new President to appoint a military commission to try them. Johnson agreed and, on May 1st, named a commission composed of seven generals and two colonels “for the trial of David E. Herold, George A. Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, Michael O’Laughlin, Edward Spangler, Samuel Arnold, Mary E. Surratt, Samuel A. Mudd ... implicated in the murder of the late President, Abraham Lincoln, and the attempted assassination of William H. Seward, Secretary of State, and in an alleged conspiracy to assassinate other officers of the Federal Government at Washington City.” The main charge--“maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously murdering the said Abraham Lincoln, then President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

As far as Mrs. Surratt was concerned, Brigadier-General Joseph Holt, the Judge Advocate General, didn’t mince words. She did, he said, “receive, entertain, harbor and conceal, aid and assist, the said John Wilkes Booth, David E. Herold, Lewis Payne, John H. Surratt, Michael O’Laughlin, George A. Atzerodt, Samuel Arnold and their confederates, with the knowledge of the murderous and traitorous conspiracy ... with intent to aid, abet and assist them in the execution thereof, and in escaping from justice after the murder of the said Abraham Lincoln, as aforesaid.” On March 10th, Mrs. Surratt and the seven other defendants pleaded, “Not Guilty.”

Their trial, which began officially at ten a.m. on May 10th, was held in a large room on the third floor of the Old Penitentiary. Several days earlier, the defendants had been transferred from their nautical prisons to cells in the same building where they were kept in solitary confinement. Even their guards were forbidden by Stanton to utter a word to them. Shortly after their arrival at the Penitentiary, the male prisoners’ heads were encased in heavy canvas sacks which were slit in the vicinity of their mouths. Payne’s attempted suicide by butting his head against his cell’s stone wall had alerted the Secretary of War to the possibility that some of his birds might succeed in beating their brains out before he could properly hang them. When General Hartranft, the Special Provost Marshal assigned to the commission, suggested the hoods, Stanton was quick to order them.

The trial had been scheduled to get underway on Tuesday, May 9th, but since the defendants all asked for time in which to find lawyers, General David Hunter, the President of the Commission, postponed it twenty-four hours. The next morning, Mrs. Surratt applied for permission, as Benn Pitman, the chief court stenographer recorded it, “to introduce Frederick Aiken, Esq. and John W. Clampitt, Esq., as her counsel, which applications were granted.” Dr. Mudd was the only other defendant to have drummed up a lawyer, and Hunter adjourned the Commission to the next day “to allow further time for the accused to secure the attendance of counsel.”

Aiken and Clampitt were two young attorneys who volunteered their services in Mary Eugenia’s behalf. Neither had had much experience in criminal trials and they were only too happy to welcome the assistance of Reverdy Johnson, the United States Senator from Maryland, who felt that the least he could do for an old constituent was to help her defend her life. On Saturday, his co-counsels introduced him to the Commission, only to find that one member--Brigadier-General T. M. Harris--objected to Johnson because he had publicly questioned the legality of the loyalty oath of 1862. When the Senator informed the Commission that he had merely expressed his opinion that the Maryland Constitutional Convention of 1864 did not have the authority to make the taking of such an oath a condition of voting on the new charter, Harris withdrew his objection.

As the prisoners filed into the courtroom, Pitman and his fellow reporters noticed that all except Mrs. Surratt and Dr. Mudd wore ten-inch manacle bars which prevented them from bringing their hands together. Mudd sported ordinary handcuffs while the feet of all the male defendants were shackled together with chains. With Atzerodt and the half-mad Payne, Stanton had taken the additional precaution of welding heavy weights to their steel anklets which made it impossible for them to walk without help from their guards.

The courtroom itself was a dimly lit room with only four small windows to illuminate its more than twelve hundred square feet. The prisoners’ dock consisted of a railed-off raised platform at the far end of the room. The defendants were separated from each other by blue-clad guards who sat between them. Mrs. Surratt’s seat was the last chair on the right side of the platform, just a few feet away from the door through which prisoners were brought from their cells every morning at precisely nine o’clock. There were two small field tables directly in front of the makeshift dock around which the seven defense attorneys sat. In the middle of the chamber were two long conference tables, one of which was occupied by the members of the Commission, with the other reserved for the official reporters. The witness stand was located in dead center between two of the three pillars that supported the room’s eleven-foot ceiling. The walls had been freshly white-washed and cocoa-nut matting had been spread over the stone floor.

As soon as all the defendants were represented by counsel, they were given permission to withdraw their “Not Guilty” pleas and attack the Commission’s jurisdiction. Each prisoner took the position that, since they were all civilians and there were appropriate Washington civil courts available to try them, the Military Commission did not have any power over them. The Judge Advocate answered this by claiming unequivocally that “this Commission has jurisdiction in the premises.” Hunter, who was very much Stanton’s man, went through the formality of clearing the courtroom, and then announced that the prisoners’ pleas were over-ruled. After a motion for separate trials had suffered the same fate, all of the defendants then reaffirmed their innocence.

As it put in its case against the eight defendants, the prosecution digressed for hours attempting to prove that Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders had been responsible for Lincoln’s murder. In fact, Holt and his aides were determined to show that the assassination plot had been connected with Southern guerilla warfare in New York and Vermont as well as with the maltreatment of Union captives at Andersonville and other rebel prisons. Although, the evidence hardly supported their grandiose thesis, they succeeded in creating an illusion that the prisoners in the dock were part of a gigantic plot in which the President’s death was only one of many factors.

Late on the afternoon of May 13th, the Provost Marshal escorted Lou Weichmann to the tri-railed witness stand. Weichmann stated that he had first met John Surratt in the Fall of 1859 at St. Charles College in Maryland. Because of this friendship, he had moved to the H Street boarding house on November 1, 1864. He remembered that his landlady had requested him to visit John Wilkes Booth at the National Hotel twelve days before the President’s murder “and say that she wished to see him on ‘private business’.” Later that same evening, Booth had come to the house and closeted himself with Mrs. Surratt for more than an hour.

On April 11th, Mrs. Surratt had asked her boarder to see whether the actor would lend her his buggy for a trip to Surrattsville, which was some ten miles southeast of the capital. Booth informed Weichmann that he had just sold his vehicle, but gave him ten dollars “that I might hire one.” Weichmann had rented a surrey at Howard’s Stables and then driven Mrs. Surratt to Surrattsville “for the purpose of seeing Mr. Nothey, who owed her some money.” The couple had returned to Washington late that afternoon.

After lunch on Good Friday, Mrs. Surratt had again asked Weichmann to drive her into the country because, she told him, she had received a letter “in regard to that money Mr. Nothey owed her.” She had given him a ten-dollar bill with which to hire another rig. “We took with us only two packages; one was a package of papers about her property at Surrattsville; and another package done up in paper, about six inches, I should think in diameter. It looked to me like perhaps two or three saucers wrapped up. This package was deposited in the bottom of the buggy and taken out by Mrs. Surratt when we arrived at Surrattsville.” As soon as they reached Lloyd’s tavern at 4:30, Lou had headed for the taproom while his passenger went into the parlor. When he called for her at six o’clock, he had noticed that Booth was with her and that the two were in deep conversation.

Before John Surratt left Washington early in April, Booth had been a frequent visitor at 541 H Street. Whenever he called, he had always asked for young Surratt or his mother. “Sometimes,” Weichmann recalled, “when engaged in general conversations, Booth would say, ‘John, can you go upstairs and spare me a word?’ They would then go upstairs and engage in private conversation which would sometime last two or three hours. The same thing would sometimes occur with Mrs. Surratt.”

The witness had first seen Lewis Payne at the boardinghouse early in March. The defendant, who had been introduced to Weichmann as Wood, had arrived with no luggage and remained overnight. The next morning, Payne had taken the early train to Baltimore. He had returned three weeks later, this time dressed as a Baptist preacher, and said that he had just finished a seven-day term in a Baltimore prison but that the experience had taught him a lesson. “He had taken the oath of allegiance, and was now going to become a good and loyal citizen.”

From the first time he saw Payne, he was convinced that the latter was up to no good. One day, he had found a black false mustache “of medium size” on the table in his room. “When I found it, I thought it rather queer that a Baptist preacher should use a mustache. I took it and locked it up because I did not care to have a false mustache lying round on my table.” Later, he used to entertain his fellow clerks in the office of the Commissary-General of Prisoners with “a pair of spectacles and the mustache.”

One evening, he had returned to the house to find Payne and Johnny Surratt “playing with bowie knives” in his room. He also saw two Navy revolvers and four sets of new spurs on the bed. Just after the assassination, the Metropolitan Police had found one of these spurs in Atzerodt’s room at the Kirkwood House. Weichmann had seen Atzerodt, whom the ladies at Mrs. Surratt’s called Port Tobacco, “at the house, ten or fifteen times.” Like Booth, the carriage-maker had always asked for John Surratt or his mother.

Although Weichmann had never seen Arnold or McLaughlin before, he had met Dr. Mudd walking with Booth on Seventh Street on January 15, 1865. The actor had invited him to join them for a glass of wine in his room at the National. There, Booth and Mudd had had a private conversation in the hallway, a discussion which Weichmann was told had to do with the contemplated purchase of the physician’s farm by Booth. “Dr. Mudd apologized to me for his private conversation and stated ... that Booth wished to purchase his farm, but that he did not care about selling it, as Booth was not willing to give him enough.” It was after this meeting, that Booth had begun to show up frequently at the boardinghouse.

Herold had been at H Street once. But Weichmann had also seen him at Surrattsville in the summer of 1863. The only other time that he had met him was in March of ’65 when Booth, who was playing the part of Pescara in _The Apostate_, had given Surratt and himself two complimentary tickets. On the way to the theatre, the two young men had met Atzerodt and Herold, who were also going to the play. After the final curtain, the witness “found Atzerodt and Herold in the restaurant adjoining the theatre, talking very confidentially to Booth.” When the Judge Advocate asked him to identify Herold, Weichmann pointed to the defendant. Benn Pitman, using his brother’s new shorthand system, noted that Herold “smiled and nodded in recognition.”

Senator Johnson took over the brunt of the cross-examination. Weichmann admitted that Mrs. Surratt, whom he had met through her son, was a “member of the Catholic Church and a regular attendant upon its services.” In fact, he had usually accompanied her to church on Sunday mornings. Yes, he was on friendly terms with her son, John, who had never intimated to him that there was a plot afoot to kill the President. The only thing young Surratt had told him about Booth was that he hoped to go on the stage with him in Richmond after the war.

No, there was nothing suspicious about Mrs. Surratt’s April 11th visit to Surrattsville. A John Nothey had owed her $479.00 for more than thirteen years and she had decided to see him personally about it. She had met Nothey early that afternoon in the parlor of a tavern she had leased to a retired Washington policeman by the name of John M. Lloyd, for fifty dollars a month, just before she moved to the H Street house in the Spring of ’64. Her second visit, three days later, had been motivated by a letter she had received from George H. Calvert, Jr., “urging the settlement of the claim of my late father’s estate.” When her husband died in 1862, he had still owed Calvert Senior part of the purchase price of the Maryland property.

When Johnson sat down, young Clampitt took over. He wanted to know whether Weichmann had heard Booth or Mudd discuss anything subversive when he saw them at the National Hotel in January. The witness had not. As for the ten dollars which Booth had given him to hire a buggy for Mrs. Surratt, “I thought at the time that it was nothing more than an act of friendship. I said to Booth, ‘I am come with an order for that buggy that Mrs. Surratt asked you for last evening.’ He said, ‘I have sold my buggy, but here are ten dollars, and you go and hire one.’” No, he had never told Mary Eugenia about that. A few minutes later, he told Aiken that he had written a letter for his landlady to Mr. Nothey, threatening him with a law suit if he did not pay what he owed her at once. He remembered that he had helped her to calculate the interest on “the sum of $479 for thirteen years.”

When Weichmann stepped down late in the afternoon, Hunter adjourned for the day. Since the next day--May 14th--was a Sunday, the commission did not reconvene until the fifteenth. The first witness called on Monday was Mrs. Surratt’s tenant, John M. Lloyd. He recalled that Herold, Atzerodt and John Surratt had come to his house some five or six weeks before the assassination. They had brought with them “two carbines with ammunition ... a rope from sixteen to twenty feet in length, and a monkey wrench.” Surratt had asked him to hide these articles and even showed him a secret hiding place “underneath the joists of the second floor of the main buildings.” On April 11th, he had met Mrs. Surratt on the road at Uniontown. “When she first broached the subject to me about the articles at my place, I did not know what she had reference to. Then she came out plainer, and asked me about the ‘shooting irons.’... Her language was indistinct, as if she wanted to draw my attention to something, so no one else would understand. Finally, she came out bolder with it, and said that they would be wanted soon.”

Three days later, when he returned from watching a trial in Marlboro, he had found Mrs. Surratt in his backyard. “She met me by the wood-pile as I drove in with some fish and oysters in my buggy. She told me to have those shooting irons ready that night, there would be some parties who would call for them. She gave me something wrapped in a piece of paper which I took upstairs, and found to be a fieldglass. She told me to get two bottles of whiskey ready, and that these things were to be called for that night.”

At midnight, Herold had woken him up and said, “Lloyd for God’s sake, make haste and get those things.” The tavern owner had immediately gone to the place where he had hidden the carbines and given them to Herold. For some reason, he did not turn over the rope and the monkey wrench. Herold had taken the bottle of whiskey which Lloyd gave him and offered it to a man who was sitting on a light-colored horse in front of the tavern. In the bright moonlight, the tavern keeper had watched this man, who “was a stranger to me,” put the bottle to his lips and drink deeply. The two men had stayed for only five minutes before riding off in the direction of Tee Bee, a hamlet a few miles to the south. Just as they were about to leave, the man who was with Herold had said, “I will tell you some news, if you want to hear it. I am pretty certain that we have assassinated the President and Secretary Seward.” As they rode off, only Herold took a carbine with him. The other man “said he could not take his because his leg was broken.”

Whether it was the unseasonably hot weather or a monumental case of stage fright, Lloyd had wilted fast as the long morning wore on. By the time the prosecution let him go, he was on the verge of collapse. As Colonel John A. Bingham, Holt’s chief assistant, put him through his paces, the ex-policeman’s back country drawl frequently became so low that even the members of the Commission who were sitting directly in front of him had difficulty in hearing him. Both Aiken and Clampitt were constantly imploring Hunter to instruct the whispering witness to raise his voice, requests that the presiding officer consistently ignored.

On cross-examination, Aiken couldn’t shake Lloyd’s story. But he did get him to admit that there might have been a witness present at the April 14th conversation with Mrs. Surratt about the “shooting irons.”

Q. Are you positive again that Mrs. Surratt told you at that time that the shooting irons would be called for that night?

A. I am very positive.

Q. Was there any other persons present during the interview?

A. Mrs. Offutt, my sister-in-law, was, I believe, in the yard; but whether she heard the conversation or not I do not know.

But he couldn’t remember whether or not he had told “these circumstances” to Mrs. Offutt.

As for the package which Mrs. Surratt had brought to the tavern with her on Tuesday, the 11th, he had taken it upstairs at once.

Q. Did you undo it immediately when you got upstairs?

A. As soon as I got upstairs, I saw what it was.

Q. Did you lay the package down and leave it anywhere before you went upstairs?

A. No, sir.

He was sure that he had told Mrs. Offutt, shortly after Mrs. Surratt had started back to Washington, “that it was a fieldglass she had brought.”

He had gone to bed early on Good Friday because “I was right smart in liquor that afternoon and after night I got more so.” He had been sleeping soundly when Booth and Herold arrived. As soon as they had ridden off, Lloyd went back to bed. When he awoke the next morning, his yard was being picked over by Union soldiers who had traced Booth and Herold there. He was asked whether he “had seen two men pass that way in the morning.” He had replied that he had not. “That is the only thing I blame myself,” he remorsefully told the Commission. “If I had given the information they asked of me, I should have been perfectly easy regarding it. That is the only thing I am sorry I did not do.” In fact, it was not until the middle of the next week that he had decided to tell Captain George Cottingham, who had locked him in Roby’s Post Office in Surrattsville for safekeeping, that Booth and Herold had been at the tavern at midnight on April 14th.

As Lloyd rushed out of the hearing room, obviously destined for the first bar he could find, Holt recalled Weichmann. Outside of some elaboration of his previous testimony about the strange goings-on at chez Surratt, he contributed nothing further to the case against Mary Eugenia. He conceded that he had not heard the conversation between his landlady and Lloyd at Uniontown. It seemed that “Mrs. Surratt leaned sideways in the buggy and whispered, as it were, in Mr. Lloyd’s ear.” When Aiken asked him why he hadn’t told somebody about the suspicious circumstances at the house on H Street, he insisted that “my suspicions were not of a fixed or definite character.” Besides, when he had tried to tell Captain Gleason of the War Department about some peculiar remarks he had heard Booth utter about kidnapping the President, the officer had “laughed and hooted at the idea.”

After Lloyd was brought back to explain that he now wasn’t sure where he had taken the package which Mrs. Surratt had brought to the tavern on Friday, April 14th, Emma Offutt took the stand. She had been in the carriage with Lloyd when they had met Mrs. Surratt near Uniontown three days before the assassination. No, she hadn’t heard a word of the conversation because her brother-in-law had gotten out of the buggy to talk to Mrs. Surratt and “I was some distance off.” As far as Good Friday was concerned, she hadn’t heard anything that was said between Lloyd and Mary Eugenia in the tavern’s backyard. Mrs. Offutt had spoken to Mrs. Surratt shortly after the latter’s arrival that afternoon but she “gave me no charge in reference to her business, only concerning her farm, and she gave me no packages.”

Major H. W. Smith had been in charge of the troops who had arrested Mrs. Surratt on the night of April 17th. “While we were there, Payne came to the house. I questioned him in regard to his occupation, and what business he had at the house that time of night. He stated that he was a laborer, and had come there to dig a gutter at the request of Mrs. Surratt.” Major Smith had asked Mrs. Surratt, who was sitting in the parlor, whether she had hired Payne. She had stepped out into the vestibule and, from a distance of three feet, taken a long look at the man. “Before God, sir,” she had told Smith, “I do not know this man, and have never seen him, and I did not hire him to dig a gutter for me.”

When Holt showed the witness a brown and white coat, he promptly identified it as the coat that Payne had been wearing that April night. Ten minutes later, when William E. Doster, Payne’s attorney, asked him whether he was sure that the brown and white coat had been worn by the defendant, he repeated that “I am certain that this is the coat.” Seconds after the words had left his mouth, Major Smith was busy eating them. Doster shoved a drab-gray coat under his nose and asked him whether he didn’t want to change his mind. He did. “The coat now shown me is the one worn by Payne on the night of his arrest,” he conceded. It was very difficult, he explained, in the poor light of Mrs. Surratt’s vestibule to tell one coat from another. But now he was certain that “the coat just shown me is the one.”

Both Smith and R. C. Morgan, who had been sent to H Street to superintend “the seizing of papers”, had found photographs of such Confederate leaders as Beauregard, Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens. Lieutenant John W. Dempsey, the officer in charge of the search party, had turned up a rotogravure of John Wilkes Booth hidden behind a small framed lithograph entitled _Morning, Noon and Night_ which hung in Mrs. Surratt’s first floor bedroom. But Captain W. M. Wermerskirch, Smith’s executive officer, swore that he had also seen a photograph of Union General George McClellan in the parlor.

Weichmann had testified that the H Street boardinghouse had been a beehive of activity during March and early April of ’65. On May 22nd, Holt called Honora Fitzpatrick, one of Mrs. Surratt’s more attractive boarders. Miss Fitzpatrick was a very definite young lady. “During the month of March last,” she said, “I saw John Wilkes Booth and John H. Surratt there.” Payne and Atzerodt had also dropped in but only once or twice. Early in March, Payne and Surratt had taken her to a performance at Ford’s Theatre. “I do not know what box we occupied, but I think it was an upper box. John Wilkes Booth came into the box while we were there.”

On May 23rd, the Judge Advocate called it a day and Messrs. Johnson, Aiken and Clampitt began their labors on behalf of Mrs. Surratt. Their first witness was George Cottingham, the special officer who had arrested John Lloyd on April 15th. For two solid days, he had urged his prisoner to tell what he knew about Booth and Herold. Finally, Lloyd had broken down and sobbed, “O, my God, if I was to make a confession, they would murder me.” When Cottingham had asked him who had designs on his life, he was informed that it was “these parties that are in this conspiracy.”

Then the dam had burst. The conscience-stricken Lloyd had told Cottingham everything. “He stated to me that Mrs. Surratt had come down to his place on Friday between 4 and 5 o’clock; that she told him to have the fire-arms ready; that two men would call for them at 12 o’clock....” The two men had turned out to be Booth and Herold, who showed up at midnight and picked up a carbine and some whiskey. As he had unburdened himself to Cottingham, he began to cry out, “O, Mrs. Surratt, that vile woman, she has ruined me! I am to be shot! I am to be shot!”

Cottingham had obviously caught the defense by surprise. Aiken had interviewed him in the bar of the Metropolitan Hotel on May 20th and, at that time, Cottingham had told the lawyer that Lloyd had not mentioned Mrs. Surratt. But, he insisted, “I had an object in that answer. He wanted to pick facts out of me in the case, but that is not my business; I am an officer and I did not want to let him know anything either way. I wanted to come here to the Court and state everything that I knew.”

Q. Did I ask you if Mr. Lloyd, in his confession, said anything at all in reference to Mrs. Surratt?

A. That question you put to me, and I answered; I said, “No.”

Q. That Mr. Lloyd did not say so?

A. I did say so. I do not deny that.

Q. Then you gave me to understand, and you are ready now to swear to it, that you told me a lie?

A. Undoubtedly, I told you a lie there; for I thought you had no business to ask me.

Q. No business! As my witness, had I not a right to have the truth from you?

A. I told you you might call me into court; and I state here that I did lie to you; but when put on my oath, I will tell the truth.

The fact that the Commissioners of Prince George’s County had offered a $2000.00 reward for information leading to the arrest of “anybody connected with the assassination” had had absolutely nothing to do with this fine distinction!

At this juncture, the defense introduced two letters which it claimed would satisfactorily explain Mrs. Surratt’s April 14th trip to Surrattsville. The first was signed by George H. Calvert, Jr., and was dated April 12th. When Mr. Calvert took the stand, he identified his letter which insisted that Mary Eugenia “pay the balance remaining due on the land purchased by your late husband.” The second communication, which had been written by the defendant to John Nothey from Surrattsville on April 14th, demanded that he settle his debt to her “within the next ten days” or she would “settle with Mr. Calvert and bring suit against you immediately.” B. F. Gwynn, who had read this note to the illiterate Mr. Nothey, said he had received it from Mrs. Surratt at the tavern on the afternoon of the 14th.

Lloyd had previously testified that he had been “right smart in liquor” on that fateful Good Friday. The defense team saw nothing to be lost by exploiting this admission to the fullest. Gwynn had seen him on the Marlboro road at 4:30 that afternoon and “he had been drinking right smartly.” Joe Nott, the bartender at Lloyd’s tavern, claimed that his employer “had been drinking a good deal; nearly every day and night, too, he was pretty tight. At times, he had the appearance of an insane man from drink.” As far as the 14th was concerned, “he was pretty tight that evening.”

Zad Jenkins, Mrs. Surratt’s brother, thought that Lloyd “was very much intoxicated at the time.” Richard Sweeney, who had run into the tavern owner on the Marlboro road, remembered that “he was considerably under the influence of liquor and he drank on the road.” James Lusby had ridden back to Surrattsville with him, and said he was “very drunk on that occasion.” Mrs. Offutt thought that her brother-in-law was “very much in liquor, more so than I have ever seen him in my life.” So much so, in fact, that he had become deathly ill shortly after returning from Marlboro and had to lie down. But Lloyd was evidently a man of great recuperative powers, because she had seen him heading back to the barroom a few minutes later.

As the trial dragged on, it was obvious that the Judge Advocate was relying heavily on Mrs. Surratt’s refusal (as he called it) to recognize Payne in the vestibule of her house on the night of April 17th. But Zad Jenkins swore that her “eyesight is defective,” while her daughter, Anna, testified that “my mother’s eyesight is very bad, and she has often failed to recognize her friends.” It was only her vanity, Anna said, that kept her from wearing glasses. Honora Fitzpatrick, who shared Mrs. Surratt’s room, said that her landlady had “complained that she could not read or sew at night, on account of her sight. I have known of her passing her friend, Mrs. Kirby, on the same side of the street, and not seeing her at all.” Honora had also been unable to identify Payne that night until “the skull-cap was taken off his head.” Mrs. Eliza Holahan, another boarder, knew that “Mrs. Surratt’s eyesight was defective.” Anna Ward, an old friend, stated that the defendant had frequently “failed to recognize me on the street”

The rest of the case for Mrs. Surratt consisted of evidence of her good character and loyalty to the Union. Anna Ward knew her as “a perfect lady and a Christian,” while four Catholic priests attested to her religious devotion. Her brother recalled that she frequently gave “milk, tea and such refreshments as she had in her house to Union troops when they were passing.” Rachel Semus, whom, Pitman noted, was “colored”, had been the Surratt cook for six years. She remembered that her employer had “fed Union soldiers at her house, sometimes a good many of them; and I know that she always tried to do the best for them that she could, because I always cooked for them.” Rev. E. F. Wiget, the president of Gonzaga College, had “always heard everyone speak very highly of her character.” John and Bill Hoxton, Surrattsville neighbors, had “never heard her utter a disloyal word.”

On June 13th, the defense suddenly recalled Mrs. Offutt. As she took the stand, Aiken told the Commission “that at the time Mrs. Offutt gave her testimony before, she came here very unwell. If I have been correctly informed, she had been suffering severely from sickness, and had taken considerable laudanum. Her mind was considerably confused at the time, and she now wished to correct her testimony in an important particular.” Colonel Bingham was on his feet in a flash.

Q. Is it something you swore to here in court?

A. Of course, I took the oath when I appeared here.

Q. Do you want to correct anything you have sworn to here in court?

A. Yes, sir, I should like to do so.

There wasn’t much Bingham could do with an obviously determined lady, and he sat down as abruptly as he had gotten up.

Mrs. Offutt reminded Hunter and his colleagues that when she had testified on May 17th, the Judge Advocate had asked her whether Mrs. Surratt had handed her a package at Lloyd’s tavern on April 14th, and her answer had been “No.” Now, she remembered that “she did hand me a package and said she requested to leave it there.” Later on, she had seen it “lying on the sofa in the parlor.” After Mrs. Surratt had left for Washington, the witness had noticed that Lloyd went into the parlor and “had a package in his hand.” She thought that “after the package was handed to me, it might have been taken by Mrs. Surratt and handed to Lloyd, but I did not see her give it to him.”

As Clampitt reminded the Commission, “Mr. Lloyd, under oath, swore that he received a package from Mrs. Surratt. We wish to show that a package was received of Mrs. Surratt by Mrs. Offutt. We wish to show in this connection that it was the same package that Mr. Lloyd swore to. If we can show that this was the identical package that Mr. Lloyd swore to receiving, we can show that his testimony is not worth the snap of a finger.” But Mrs. Offutt did not know what was in the package; all she remembered was that Mrs. Surratt had given it to her around 5:30 that afternoon and she had “laid it down” on the parlor sofa. She had no idea of what had happened to it after that, except that she had seen a package in her brother-in-law’s hands when he entered the house a few minutes later.

When the defense rested on June 13th, the government trotted out John Ryan, Frank Smith, James P. Young and P. T. Ransford, all of whom swore that Lou Weichmann, its witness-in-chief, was a very trustworthy fellow indeed. But only one--Young--had known him for any length of time. John T. Holohan, who had occupied a second-floor room at Mrs. Surratt’s in early 1865, swore that he had never heard anyone mention his landlady’s bad eyesight. With the testimony of six Prince George’s County neighbors that Zad Jenkins was, among other things, “one of the most disloyal men in the country,” the prosecution had shot its wad as far as Mrs. Surratt was concerned.

The closing arguments began on June 16th and continued for twelve days. While they droned on, John Clampitt tried to introduce the joint affidavit of Louis Carland and John P. Brophy, two friends of Weichmann, who swore that he had told them that he had perjured himself during the trial. He, and not Mrs. Surratt, had suggested that he try to borrow Booth’s buggy for the April 11th trip to Surrattsville. He had also informed Carland and Brophy that he had told a fellow clerk in the War Department all about the kidnap plot as early as February, and that Stanton had forced him to testify against Mrs. Surratt despite the fact that Lou thought she was innocent. But he had played along with the Secretary of War because “I didn’t want to hang.”

But Holt wasn’t going to let a piece of notarized paper spring Mary Eugenia. He rejected it as hearsay and, when Clampitt offered to produce Brophy in person, the Judge Advocate thumbed down his request on the ground that it was too late to call another witness. But on June 27th, eleven days after the prosecution had closed its case, Holt called one John Cantlin to testify to an anonymous advertisement printed in the _Selma_ (Alabama) _Dispatch_ on December 1, 1864, offering to kill Lincoln, Seward, and Johnson, for one million dollars. Brophy felt so strongly about the rejection of his affidavit that he tried to see Andrew Johnson about it but the President was incommunicado as far as the trial was concerned.

In his closing argument, Reverdy Johnson pointed out that the Military Commission lacked the power to try Mrs. Surratt. “As counsel for one of the parties,” he told its members, “I should esteem myself dishonored if I attempted to rescue my client from a proper trial for the offense charged against her, by denying the jurisdiction of the Commission, upon grounds that I did not conscientiously believe to be sound. And, in what I have done, I have not more had in view the defense of Mrs. Surratt, than of the Constitution and the laws. In my view, in this respect, her cause is the cause of every citizen. And let it not be supposed that I am seeking to secure impunity to any one who may have been guilty of the horrid crimes of the night of the 14th of April. Over these, the civil courts of this District have ample jurisdiction, and will faithfully exercise it if the cases are remitted to them, and guilt is legally established, and will surely award the punishment known to the laws.”

Johnson left it to his youthful associates to discuss the substantive case against Mrs. Surratt and young Aiken did his best. What had “two months of patient and unwearying investigation, and the most thorough search for evidence that was probably ever made” developed insofar as his client was concerned? Only that she knew Booth (and who in Washington did not?), that she had taken a message to Lloyd (so had a hundred others), and that she had failed to recognize Payne (bad eyes in a dim light). The chief witnesses against her--the unreliable Weichmann and the drunken Lloyd--were both trying to save their own skins. He ended in a blaze of rhetoric, asking the Commission’s members to disregard “suspicion fastened and fed upon the facts of acquaintance and mere fortuitous intercourse with that man in whose name so many miseries gather, the assassinator of the President.”

Colonel Bingham, who summed up for the prosecution, ended his two-day presentation with the observation that Mrs. Surratt was “as surely in the conspiracy to murder the President as was John Wilkes Booth himself.” After all, wasn’t her house the headquarters of the conspirators? And didn’t she deliver a fieldglass to Lloyd and instruct him to have the carbines ready? Would an innocent woman fail to recognize a man who had been her boarder? If she wasn’t involved in the plot against the President, why did Booth always ask for her when he visited H Street? As far as the Special Judge Advocate was concerned, the questions answered themselves.

When he sat down late in the afternoon of June 28th, the court was cleared for the last time and the Commission began its deliberation. It took only minutes for it to decide that Payne, Herold and Atzerodt should hang. Dr. Mudd, Mike O’Laughlin and Sam Arnold were sentenced to “hard labor for life,” while Ed Spangler drew six years. But the Commission couldn’t make up its collective mind about Mrs. Surratt. On its first ballot, only four of its members voted to execute her. The other five could not be convinced that the evidence had disclosed that she was guilty of anything more than running a boardinghouse that catered to a mighty strange lot of roomers.

But two days of Washington’s heat did what all of the Judge Advocate’s arguments had failed to accomplish. At noon, on June 30th, the five recalcitrants voted that “the said Mary E. Surratt be hanged by the neck until she be dead, at such time and place as the President of the United States shall direct.” However, they insisted on appending a petition for commutation of the “sentence of death ... to imprisonment for life” to the record of the case which Holt was to submit to Johnson. On July 5th, the President formally approved the Commission’s sentences and ordered that Herold, Atzerodt, Payne and Mrs. Surratt be executed “on the seventh day of July, 1865, between the hours of ten o’clock a.m. and two o’clock p.m. of that day.” Whether he ever saw the recommendation for mercy or not, no one could say.

But Clampitt and Aiken weren’t ready to call it quits yet. At two o’clock on the morning of July 7th, the two young men persuaded Andrew Wylie, one of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, to issue a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that prosecution by the Military Commission had deprived Mary Eugenia of her right to trial by jury. Major General W. S. Hancock, the commander of the Middle Military District, was ordered “to produce ... the body of your said petitioner” at ten o’clock the next morning. But Stanton had an ace up his sleeve. When Hancock, accompanied by Attorney General James Speed, walked into Judge Wylie’s courtroom, almost two hours after the time specified in the writ, he did not have Mrs. Surratt with him. What he did have was a message from the President, declaring that “I do hereby especially suspend this writ.” Judge Wylie had no choice--he yielded to the suspension.

The scaffold had been built in the courtyard of the Old Penitentiary Building. Just as General Hancock was presenting Johnson’s suspension order to Judge Wylie, Captain Christian Rath, the officer in charge of the execution, approved the drop. Four graves had been dug to the left of the gallows near the prison wall. At the side of each one was a pine box containing glass bottles in which the name of each defendant had been placed. Shortly before two o’clock, Mrs. Surratt, despite Payne’s last minute statement that she “was innocent of the murder of the President,” was led from her cell. Accompanied by two priests, she climbed the fifteen steps to the gallow’s platform where she sat in an armchair while an officer read the sentences aloud. Five minutes later, with her hands tied behind her back and her face covered by a white hood, she dropped into eternity.

On July 15th, the four surviving defendants, who had begun serving their terms in the Albany Penitentiary, were re-sentenced to “hard labor in the military prison at Dry Tortugas, Florida.” In 1867, O’Laughlin died of yellow fever, but Mudd was pardoned in 1868, and Spangler and Arnold one year later. In 1867, John Harrison Surratt, whom spectator Walt Whitman described as “very young ... with sharp eyes,” was tried by a Washington civil court for his part in the conspiracy. The jury voted eight-to-four for acquittal and the government decided to call it a day and dropped the charges against him. By this time, everyone knew that Stanton had suppressed Booth’s captured diary which contained an entry for April 14th, clearly indicating that it had not been until that very day that the actor had decided to kill rather than kidnap the President. Mary Eugenia had never had even a fighting chance.

2

_Atlanta’s Northern Jew_

The State of Georgia

_versus_

Leo M. Frank