Was Mary Surratt’s Execution Legal?

“The Hanging”

Not un-like a lot of us, I recently viewed the recent (any time in 2011 is recent to me) movie feature about Mary Jenkins Surratt; it’s titled “The Conspirator” and is directed by Robert Redford. Although as movies go, it’s better than most, in this critique / post I humbly try to provide you with a few more details.

Born, Mary Jenkins, in Waterloo, Maryland and educated in a Catholic female seminary; at seventeen, she married John Surratt.    In 1853, the Surratts purchased 287 acres of property in Prince George's County, nearly a two-hour horse-back ride outside Washington DC.  After they built a tavern and a post office on the property the little community became known as Surrattsville.  The couple raised three children, Isaac, Anna, and John Junior who was the eldest.  Young John served in the Civil War as a Confederate Secret Agent and allegedly used the family tavern as a safe house for the Confederate underground network.

As you would expect John, Jr. duties or activities as a secret agent let him to acquiesces / friendships with other Southern sympathizers in the area, including (but not limited to) the actor John Wilkes Booth.

In 1864, two years after John Surratt, Senior died, Mary decided to move into a house she owned in Washington DC located at

541 High Street

which she soon converted to a Boarding House.  The family tavern in Surrattsville she decided to lease to a man named John Lloyd who was an ex-policeman; he later played a key role in her ultimate conviction for conspiracy regarding the assignation of President Lincoln.

Another man, Lewis Weichmann, who was a former college class mate of John, Sr.’s, was a border in the relatively new Surratt house; he perhaps un-wittingly assisted in Mary’s conviction as well.  Although he described her as “exemplary” in character and “lady-like in every particular,”, the testimony (Weichmann affidavit, 8/11/1865 ) that incriminated Mary Surratt stated that several hours after the president had been shot she exclaimed to her daughter, Anna,  “Anna, come what will, I am resigned.  I think J. Wilkes Booth was only an instrument in the hands of the Almighty to punish this proud and licentious (referring here to ‘wicked’ I think) people.”

John Lloyd told the Commission that five to six weeks prior to the assassination, John Surratt Jr., and two other men:  David Herold, and George Atzerodt came to the Surrattsville tavern to drop off two carbines, some ammunition, about twenty feet of rope, and what he called a monkey wrench.  He further claimed the men asked him (Lloyd) to conceal the items in a second-floor room, which he acknowledged doing. 

Lloyd additionally testified that only three days before the assassination, Mary Surratt told him that “the shooting irons” left at his place by the men weeks earlier would be needed soon.

Further more, he claimed that on the afternoon of  April, 14, 1865 (day of the assignation) Mrs. Surratt told him to have the shooting-irons ready that night as there  would be some ‘parties’ stopping by for them. She then allegedly gave him something wrapped in a piece of paper, which he took up stairs, and found to be a field-glass or a set of binoculars.  He also revealed that she instructed him to get two bottles of whisky ready, and the ‘things’ because they (the things) would be called for that very night.

Later that evening (around midnight) Lloyd continued, a man he knew to be David Herold (the same Herold who had accompanied John Junior a few weeks earlier with most of the items / ‘things’) and an unknown male, who remained out-side on horseback, appeared and proceeded to request the things he was holding … Lloyd said he gave him one of the two carbines, both bottles of whisky, and the field glass.

He kept the rope, one of the carbines, the monkey wrench, and I guess the ammunition.

Mary Surratt's attorney, Frederick Aiken, argued unsuccessfully that John Lloyd's testimony should not be believed because he was not only “a man addicted to the excessive use of intoxicating liquors” but he was also motivated to “exculpate (to clear) himself by placing blame” on Mary Surratt.

I suppose there is no sure way to determine whether or not Lloyd was a drunkard, but it does not take rocket science to recognize that there appears to have been an obvious effort to shift blame from him self.  

In a last-ditch effort to postpone Mary’s verdict, her attorney successfully obtained a writ of habeas corpus, (she had been tried in a Military Court rather than a Civilian Court) from a Federal Judge who had been appointed by Lincoln no less, which should have given her a new Civilian Court trial, but it failed when President Johnson declared the writ suspended for this case; Surratt was hanged on July 7, 1865 along with three other conspirators.  Surratt, in this way, became the first woman executed by the United States government.

On the other hand, Young John Surratt was captured a few years later (1867) in far away Alexandra, Egypt; he was subsequently returned and tried in a Maryland Civilian Court where he admitted he had participated in an unsuccessful plot to kid-nap President Lincoln but he denied participation in an murder plot. Following a full two months of testimony, he was released after a mistrial was declared; eight jurors had voted not guilty, four voted guilty. 

Sources …

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lincolnconspiracy/surrattm.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Surratt