MARY SURRATT AND THE PLOT TO KILL ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Basic Books, $26, 263 pages
REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES
Forgive me, but I have searched in vain for a story I read recently of another murder trial that took place Washington, D.C., in June 1865 at the same time Mary Surratt and the others were being tried by a military tribunal at the Arsenal Prison for plotting with John Wilkes Booth to murder Abraham Lincoln.
It seems a woman living in Cincinnati learned that her husband, a clerk at the Treasury Department here in Washington, was having an affair with another woman. She packed a pistol and took the train here, accosted her errant husband on the steps of the Treasury and shot him to death. She then calmly waited by the corpse until she was arrested.
She was acquitted by a D.C. jury that accepted her lawyer’s argument that, being like most women, the defendant was naturally highly emotional and had been driven mad by the shock of learning of her husband’s infidelity. You know how women are; fragile creatures at the best of times.
In “The Assassin’s Accomplice,” we confront the other half of that dichotomous 19th-century attitude toward women. Mary Surratt ran a boarding house at Fifth and H Streets, NW that became the planning base for Booth and his plotters. She became the first woman to be hanged by the federal government largely because she was tagged with the other vision of womankind — the cold, plotting, controlling, wily dominatrix who directed the loathsome conspiracy to kill Lincoln and other key officials in the last spasms of the Confederacy.
This is a good book for readers who are just dipping into the Civil War library, for author Kate Clifford Larson has done her research and has the time and context of those tumultuous weeks in 1865 well in hand. But it is an especially valuable read for those of us of a certain age who received their first Civil War lessons filtered through the mush of gallantries of The Lost Cause.
Early Lincoln assassination writers of the last century tended to flatten the story out of all recognition. John Wilkes Booth was by those lights a crazed lone villain who surrounded himself with a handful of second-raters in a scatter-brained plot that never could have succeeded in reversing the defeat of the Confederacy. In these versions Mary Surratt was a passive figure guilty of nothing more than being dazzled by a show business celebrity who used her home as a private sanctuary for his plotting. She was, after all, just a woman.
Ms. Larson, whose earlier biography of Harriet Tubman was much praised, confesses that she shared that presumption of innocence view when she began to dig into Mary Surratt’s story. But her research led her to a damning conclusion. It is not stretching her well written narrative too much to say that not only was Mary Surratt an active plotter with Booth in both an early attempt to kidnap Lincoln but she also was one of the important participants in the acts that led the assassin into the president’s box at Ford’s Theater on the night of April 14, 1865, to the murder that took place, and the elaborate escape plans that followed and almost succeeded.
One has to wonder, after reading this book, whether Booth could have even come close to killing the president, let alone foment attacks against Vice President Andrew Johnson (which failed), Secretary of State William Seward (which nearly succeeded), and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (who was out of town) if it had not been through the resources and help marshaled by Mary Surratt and her son, John, and their network of dedicated Confederate partisans around Clinton, (formerly Surrattsville) along the Charles County, Maryland shores of the Potomac.
Indeed it was John Surratt, a Confederate courier who shuttled secret communications between Richmond and rebel agents in Washington, New York, and Montreal, who recruited David Herold and George Atdzerodt from that area to be Booth’s guides during his escape. Later, Surratt also introduced Booth to Lewis Powell, aka Lewis Payne, and several other plotters based in Baltimore. Mary, for her part, not only opened her boarding house to Booth and the conspirators, but arranged to have weapons and other supplies the assassin would need hidden at the tavern she owned in Clinton. Herold, Atdzerodt and Powell-Payne jointed Mary on the scaffold and all three finally admitted their guilt and implicated her as well.
As for that other supposed innocent victim of coincidence, Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set Booth’s broken and sheltered him during this flight, Ms. Larson reveals that the doctor was a longtime friend of the actor and had actually introduced him to John Surratt in the autumn of 1864. And although the author plainly says there is no documentary proof that Jefferson Davis or any other Confederate official was involved in the scheme, the sheer amount of money spent and the widespread knowledge and support of the plot by the Maryland rebel network raises a question as to whether the Surratt family’s alliance with Booth was not part of a broader desperate scheme hatched in Richmond.
But where Ms. Larson’s research really shines is in the treatment of Mary Surratt herself. A devout Catholic and model of public rectitude, Mary was a widow clinging to a precarious hold on middle-class respectability and security that involved land holdings mired in debt, a dependency on slave labor as a subsidy and a way of life threatened by the seeming aggressions of Yankee abolitionists. She was one tough lady who, in the end, was her own worst enemy for her stoic behavior at trial merely inflamed a nation still in shock over Lincoln´s death.
The public treatment of Mary, and the manifestly unfair trial she underwent, all reflected her portrayal as one newspaper called her, “the materfamilias” of a nest of criminals. Newspapers ran ornate lithograph portraits of the accused plotters, often in a circle that featured Booth at the top of the oval but with Mary portrayed in a larger version in the center of the ring. Washington’s society ladies crowded the stuffy courtroom so they could make hate-filled remarks within Mary’s hearing.
Yet once she was hanged, public opinion reversed itself at once. President Andrew Johnson was rebuked for refusing pleas for clemency and Mary began to be accorded the kind of sympathetic treatment that freed the lady from Cincinnati. After all, she was just a woman caught up in an emotional thrall by the devilish actor.
This book gives us much new information about Mary and all the other plotters. It also reminds us that we still are ambivalent in our treatment of women brought before the law on serious, even capital, crimes. The trial and its aftermath have echoes over the still hot debate over the treatment of Ethel Rosenberg 90 years later. And the controversy over military tribunals used to prosecute civilian defendants is as fresh as today’s headlines. There is much food for thought here.
• Washington author James Srodes’ latest book is “Franklin: The Essential Founding Father.”
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