The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt

by David Miller DeWitt

The intermingling throng surges into the building from every quarter, and mounts guard at every exit. Not one of the company of actors is allowed to go out. The people seem to pause for a moment, as if awaiting from Heaven a retribution as sudden and awful as the crime.

All their joy is turned to grief in the twinkling of an eye. The rebellion they had too easily believed to be dead could still strike, it seemed, a fatal blow against the very life of the Republic. A panic seizes the multitude in and around the theatre, and from the theatre spreads, “like the Night,” over the whole city. And when the frightened citizens hear, as they immediately do, the story of the bloody massacre in the house of the Secretary of State, occurring at the same hour with the murder of the President, the panic swells into a reign of terror. The wildest stories find the quickest and most eager credence. Every member of the Cabinet and the General of the Army have been, or are about to be, killed; the government itself is at a standstill; and the lately discomfited rebels are soon to be in possession of the Capital. Patriotic people, delivering themselves over to a fear of they know not what, cry hoarsely for vengeance on they know not whom. The citizen upon whose past loyalty the slightest suspicion can be cast cowers for safety close to his hearth-stone. The terror-stricken multitude want but a leader cool and unscrupulous enough, to plunge into a promiscuous slaughter, such as stained the new-born revolution in France. A leader, indeed, they soon find, but he is not a Danton. He is a leader only in the sense that he has caught the same madness of terror and suspicion which has seized the people, that he holds high place, and that he has the power and is in a fit humor to pander to the panic.

Edwin M. Stanton was forced by the tremendous crisis up to the very top of affairs. Vice-President Johnson, in the harrowing novelty of his position, was for the time being awed into passive docility. The Secretary of State was doubly disabled, if not killed. The General of the Army was absent. The Secretary of War without hesitation grasped the helm thus thrust into his hand, but, alas! he immediately lost his head. His exasperation at the irony of fate, which could so ruthlessly and in a moment wither the triumph of a great cause by so unexpected and overwhelming a calamity, was so profound and intense, his desire for immediate and commensurate vengeance was so uncontrollable and unreasoning, as to distort his perception, unsettle his judgment, and thus cause him to form an estimate of the nature and extent of the impending danger as false and exaggerated as that of the most panic-stricken wretch in the streets. Personally, besides, he was unfitted in many respects for such an emergency. Though an able and, it may be, a great War-Minister, he exerted no control over his temper; he habitually identified a conciliatory and charitable disposition with active disloyalty; and, being unpopular with the people of Washington by reason of the gruffness of his ways and the inconsistencies of his past political career, he had reached the unalterable conviction that the Capital was a nest of sympathizers with the South, and that he was surrounded by enemies of himself and his country.

When, therefore, upon the crushing news that the President was slain, followed hard the announcement that another assassin had made a slaughter-house of the residence of the Minister’s own colleague, self-possession—the one supreme quality which was indispensable to a leader at such an awful juncture—forsook him and fled.

Before the breath was out of the body of the President, the Secretary had rushed to the conclusion, unsupported as yet by a shadow of testimony, that the acts of Booth and of the assailant of Seward (at the moment supposed to be John H. Surratt) were the outcome of a widespread, numerous and powerful conspiracy to kill, not only the President and the Secretary of State, but all the other heads of the Departments, the Vice-President and the General of the Army as well, and thus bring the government to an end; and that the primary moving power of the conspiracy was the defunct rebellion as represented by its titular President and his Cabinet, and its agents in Canada. This belief, embraced with so much precipitation, immediately became more than a belief; it became a fixed idea in his mind. He saw, heard, felt and cherished every thing that favored it. He would see nothing, would hear nothing, and hated every thing, that in the slightest degree militated against it. Upon this theory he began, and upon this theory he prosecuted to the end, every effort for the discovery, arrest, trial and punishment of the murderers.

He was seconded by a lieutenant well-fitted for such a purpose—General Lafayette C. Baker, Chief of the Detective Force. In one of the two minority reports presented to the House of Representatives by the Judiciary Committee, on the Impeachment Investigation of 1867, this man and his methods are thus delineated:

“The first witness examined was General Lafayette C. Baker, late chief of the detective police, and although examined on oath, time and again, and on various occasions, it is doubtful whether he has in any one thing told the truth, even by accident. In every important statement he is contradicted by witnesses of unquestioned credibility. And there can be no doubt that to his many previous outrages, entitling him to an unenviable immortality, he has added that of wilful and deliberate perjury; and we are glad to know that no one member of the committee deems any statement made by him as worthy of the slightest credit. What a blush of shame will tinge the cheek of the American student in future ages, when he reads that this miserable wretch for years held, as it were, in the hollow of his hand, the liberties of the American people. That, clothed with power by a reckless administration, and with his hordes of unprincipled tools and spies permeating the land everywhere, with uncounted thousands of the people’s money placed in his hands for his vile purposes, this creature not only had power to arrest without crime or writ, and imprison without limit, any citizen of the republic, but that he actually did so arrest thousands, all over the land, and filled the prisons of the country with the victims of his malice, or that of his masters.”

In this man’s hands Secretary Stanton placed all the resources of the War Department, in soldiers, detectives, material and money, and commanded him to push ahead and apprehend all persons suspected of complicity in the assumed conspiracy, and to conduct an investigation as to the origin and progress of the crime, upon the theory he had adopted and which, as much as any other, Baker was perfectly willing to accept and then, by his peculiar methods, establish. Forthwith was ushered in the grand carnival of detectives. Far and wide they sped. They had orders from Baker to do two things:

I.—To arrest all the “Suspect.” II.—By promises, rewards, threats, deceit, force, or any other effectual means, to extort confessions and procure testimony to establish the conspiracy whose existence had been postulated.

At two o’clock in the morning of Saturday, the fifteenth, they burst into the house of Mrs. Surratt and displaying the bloody collar of the coat of the dying Lincoln, demanded the whereabouts of Booth and Surratt. It being presently discovered that Booth had escaped on horseback across the Navy Yard Bridge with David Herold ten minutes in his rear, a dash was made upon the livery-stables of Washington, their proprietors taken into custody, and then the whole of lower Maryland was invaded, the soldiers declaring martial law as they progressed. Ford’s theatre was taken and held by an armed force, and the proprietor and employees were all swept into prison, including Edward Spangler, a scene-shifter, who had been a menial attendant of Booth’s. The superstitious notion prevailed that the inanimate edifice whose walls had suffered such a desecration was in some vague sense an accomplice; the Secretary swore that no dramatic performance should ever take place there again; and the suspicion was sedulously kept alive that the manager and the whole force of the company must have aided their favorite actor, or the crime could not have been so easily perpetrated and the assassin escaped.