On this date, July 7,
1865, The Four conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln were
hanged.
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This Picture is a
correct Photograph from live, of Conspirator on trial, and the only original
one. Taken June 5th, 1865, by special permission of Maj. Gens. Hunter and
Hartrauft, at the Court Room in Arsenal Building, Washington D.C.
In the foreground may be seen Judges Holt and Bigelow, Maj. Gens. Hunter and Hartrauft, and other members of the Military Commission. Also, on the table of manuscripts, may be distictly seen the identical hat worn by President Lincoln on the night of his assassination, and near it on the same table, the basket of pistols and bowie knives which were furnished Booth and his companions by Mrs. Surratt. NAMES OF CONSPIRATORS. No. 1. Surratt, Mrs. Mary E.; No 2. Harrold, David E.; No. 3. Payne, Lewis.; No. 4. Atzeroth, George A.; No. 5. O'Laughlin Michael.; No. 6. Spangler Edward. No. 7. Mudd, Dr. Samuel A.; No. 8. Arnold Samuel Duplicates furnished by the hundred or thousand. A.E. ALDEN, Photographer, No. 65 Arcade, Providence, R.I. |
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.executedtoday.com/2008/07/07/1865-abraham-lincoln-assassination-mary-surratt/
1865:
Four for Abraham Lincoln’s assassination
On
a sweltering July 7, 1865, a mere 12 weeks after Abraham
Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater, four of his assassin’s accomplices were
hanged in the courtyard of the District of Columbia’s Washington Arsenal —
present-day Fort McNair, and specifically its
tennis courts.
The
exact nature of the
conspiracy against the man who had seen the North to victory in the Civil
War has been debated ever since actor John Wilkes Booth lodged a ball from his
one-shot Derringer behind Honest Abe’s ear. But it was a conspiracy
— an astoundingly bold one.
Simultaneous
with Booth’s successful attack upon Lincoln, there was an unsuccessful attempt
to kill Secretary of State William Seward; it would emerge in the investigation
that another man had been detailed to murder Vice President Andrew Johnson, but
got drunk and chickened out. The apparent upshot: with the President and Vice
President dead, new national elections would be required to replace the Senator
who would become acting president — and with the Secretary of State dead too,
there’d be nobody to implement them. Booth was trying to paralyze the North
with its own constitutional machinery in some desperate hope of reviving the
defeated South.
Ten
Against D.C.
Hundreds
were detained in the stunning assassination’s immediate aftermath, but ten
would ultimately be the federals’ targets. A massive manhunt pursued Booth
through southern Maryland and into Virginia, where he was killed in a shootout.
John
Surratt, who had conspired with Booth in an earlier plot to kidnap
the president — that failed plot had been reconfigured into the assassination —
escaped from the country.
The
other eight were rounded up and stashed at the Arsenal to face a military
tribunal. It was a highly controversial arrangement: the war had entered a gray
area — Robert E. Lee’s surrender just days before the murder had effectively
ended the war, but when the trial opened in May Confederate President Jefferson
Davis was still at large, and the last Southern general wouldn’t lay down his
arms until late June. The District of Columbia was still technically under
martial law … so would it do to use a military court?
Military
Tribunal
So
the government asked itself: government, would you rather have looser
evidentiary rules and a lower bar of conviction than you would have in civil
court? The government duly produced for the government an opinion that the
military characteristic of the assassination — that is, to help whatever
southern war effort still obtained — licensed the government to use the
military courts.
That
didn’t sit well with everyone. One former Attorney General griped:
If the offenders are done to death by that tribunal, however truly guilty, they will pass for martyrs with half the world.
Indeed,
a year later, the Supreme Court’s landmark ex parte Milligan ruling would forbid
the use of military courts where civilian courts are open — which they were in
Washington, D.C.
That,
of course, was too late to help Booth’s comrades. It would be a military trial,
with a majority vote needed for conviction and no right of appeal but to the
president for the most infamous crime of the Republic. Everyone had a pretty
good idea what the results would be.
Rogues’
Gallery
Two
of the four today were doomed from the outset under any juridical arrangement
imaginable: Lewis Powell (also known as Lewis Paine or Lewis Payne) had made
the attempt on Secretary of State Seward; David Herold had guided him there
with the getaway horse, and later escaped along with Booth. They were in way
past their eyeballs. George Atzerodt, the schmo who couldn’t rise to the
occasion of popping Andrew Johnson, looks a bit more peripheral from the
distance of a century and a half, but in the weeks following the assassination
he was much too close to the action to have any hope. All received death
sentences.
Two
others — Michael O’Laughlen and Samuel Arnold — had been involved in Booth’s
earlier scheme to kidnap the president, but didn’t seem to have much to do with
the murder. Still another two — Ned Spangler and Dr. Samuel Mudd* — were lesser
participants. They all received long prison sentences for their pains, and the
three of them still surviving were pardoned by Andrew Johnson as he left the
presidency in 1869.
That
left Mary Surratt,
mother of the fugitive John and the only woman in the dock, the focus of
attention and controversy. The 42-year-old widow owned a downtown
boardinghouse, plus a tavern of sufficient importance at a Prince George’s
County, Maryland, crossroads, that its community was called Surrattsville.**
The
conspirators met frequently in her lodgings; Surratt maintained her innocence
beyond that, but evidence and witness testimony began to pile up heavily
against her … especially when Seward assailant Lewis Powell wandered into her
place looking for refuge right while the police were questioning her. Booth and
Herold turned out to have made a pit stop at her Surrattsville tavern to pick
up a package of guns that Mary had prepared for them.
Though
Surratt’s avowal of ignorance was not widely believed, a gesture of
presidential mercy was anticipated — many thought (and think) she went on trial
as a virtual hostage for her absconded son, who declined to take the bait.
Strangely, five members of the nine-judge panel who condemned Mary Surratt
turned around and asked President Johnson for clemency. Johnson claimed never
to have seen the memo, but his mind seemed pretty made up — when Surratt won a habeas
corpus stay on the morning of her scheduled hanging, he promptly
“specially-suspended” the writ specifically to hang her:
I, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States do hereby declare that the writ of habeas corpus had been heretofore suspended in such cases as this; and I do hereby specially-suspend this writ, and direct that you proceed to execute the order heretofore given upon the judgment of the Military Commission.
Harsh
treatment, and possibly well-deserved, for the first woman executed by the U.S.
government. Even so, it does seem a curious thing when all is said and done
that the mother of “the nest that hatched the egg” was worth a special
suspension of the Great Writ, and even the stagehand who just held Booth’s
horse for him caught six years, but old Jeff Davis — who apart from having
figureheaded a treasonous four-year insurrection was implicated for giving
Booth’s kidnapping plot official
Confederate sanction — got to retire to write his memoirs.
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Walk of the damned: The condemned Lincoln
conspirators can be seen on the scaffold at Fort McNair in Washington with
officers on July 7, 1865, following the assassination of President Abraham
Lincoln
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Long drop and sudden stop: The bodies of the
four conspirators were hanged for around 25 minutes before being cut down
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Bearing witness: Around 1,000 people gathered
in the scorching Washington heat to watch the four conspirators hanged to
death; reporters and military personnel can be seen in the background
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A grave matter: The pine coffins and open
graves await the bodies of the condemned; volunteers were asked to dig the
shallow graves
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Fine
pages on the Lincoln assassination are here,
here and here. There are also contemporary newspaper
accounts posted online as filed for The Boston Post and The New York Herald.
The
Surratt houses, by the way, are still standing. The Maryland tavern is kept as
the Surratt
House Museum by the Surratt Society. The downtown boarding house is
a Chinese restaurant … marked with a plaque remembering more momentous doings
than bubble tea.
*
The panel voted 5-4 to hang Mudd, a Maryland doctor who not only set the leg
Booth broke when he leaped onto the stage after shooting Lincoln, but then
misdirected Booth’s pursuers. However, the rules for the trial said a
two-thirds majority was required for execution.
**
They changed the name after the unpleasantness. Today, it’s Clinton, Maryland.
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