Mary Surratt kept a boarding house in Washington and a country tavern in Maryland, and in 1865 she became the first woman put to death by the federal government of the United States. Whether she knew what was being planned in her house is still argued.
The Horror
Mary Surratt was born Mary Jenkins, in 1823 by most accounts, though some sources say 1820. Her husband John bought a townhouse at 541 H Street in Washington in 1853, an address later renumbered 604. He also built a tavern near a Maryland crossroads, and the surrounding settlement was named Surrattsville. Mary later leased the tavern to John Lloyd, a former Washington policeman, and in late 1864 moved into the H Street house, where she took in lodgers.
After John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, she was arrested with the others. She was tried by a military commission, not a civilian court, in a trial that ran from May 9 to June 28. Two witnesses carried the case against her. Lloyd testified that she had told him to have the “shooting irons” ready at the tavern. Louis Weichmann, a boarder, testified that he drove her to the tavern on April 11 and April 14 and saw Booth give her a package, which he said held binoculars. Weichmann’s evidence was also used to show how close she was to the other conspirators.
Her defenders then and since have argued that the evidence rested on two compromised witnesses. The commission found her guilty on all charges but two. Five of the nine judges signed a letter asking President Andrew Johnson to commute the sentence to life imprisonment because of her age and sex. Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt did not deliver it until July 5, two days before the hanging. Johnson later said he never saw the request. Holt said he showed it to Johnson, who refused to sign, and quoted him as saying she “kept the nest that hatched the egg”. The two accounts have never been reconciled.
On the morning of the execution a writ of habeas corpus was issued for her at 3 a.m. and served on General Winfield Scott Hancock, who was ordered to produce her by 10 a.m. Johnson cancelled the writ at 11:30 a.m. She was led to the scaffold in the yard of the Arsenal Penitentiary in a black dress, bonnet and veil. Her last recorded words, to a guard as he moved her to the drop, were “Please don’t let me fall”. Lewis Powell, hanged beside her, said from the scaffold, “Mrs. Surratt is innocent”. At the signal the drops fell. Surgeons later found no broken necks, and the bodies were cut down at 1:58 p.m.
Alexander Gardner photographed the hanging for the government. Her daughter Anna spent four years asking for her mother’s body. It was released to the family in February 1869, and Mary Surratt was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington.
The Legend
Several details in popular retellings are not confirmed by the sources consulted here. A story that a soldier held an umbrella over her on the scaffold is unconfirmed. So is a story that Hancock stationed couriers along the road to the White House in case of a reprieve. The record shows only that Hancock sent an aide to General Hartranft over the habeas corpus writ.
The Modern Relic
The H Street house, now 604 H Street NW, survives in Washington’s Chinatown. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009 and now houses a restaurant. The Surrattsville tavern stands in Clinton, Maryland, as the Surratt House Museum, which opened in 1976 and is devoted to mid-19th-century Maryland life and the Lincoln assassination. It is owned and operated by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, with the Surratt Society as supporter. Almost none of its furniture belonged to the Surratts apart from a writing desk owned by Mary.
The Arsenal where she died is now part of Fort McNair, which is closed to the public. The tribunal met in what is now Ulysses S. Grant Hall, which periodically holds public open houses. Gardner’s photographs are the reason the day is not an abstraction. Her guilt is still disputed.
