The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt

by David Miller DeWitt

I. As to Arnold and O’Laughlin, it may be said in one emphatic word, that there was no evidence at all against them of complicity in the plot to kill. The letter of Arnold to Booth shows, when fairly construed, that, if the writer had conspired with the actor, he conspired to abduct; and, also, for the time being, even that conspiracy he had abandoned. He was at Fort Monroe for the two weeks prior to the assassination. His confession, used on the trial against himself not only but also against O’Laughlin because he was mentioned in it as present at a meeting of the conspirators, was a confession only of a conspiracy to abduct which had been given up. The condemnation of these two men was brought about by the conduct of Judge Bingham, to which we have drawn attention, in systematically shutting his eyes to the existence of any conspiracy to capture, and employing the letter and confession as proof that both these men were guilty of conspiracy to murder.

II. As to Dr. Mudd, the evidence leaves it doubtful whether or not he recognized Booth under his disguise on the night he set his broken leg, and therefore whether he may have been an accessory after the fact or not; but the testimony of the informer Weichman, by which chiefly if not solely the prosecution sought to implicate the doctor in the conspiracy to murder, was greatly damaged, if not completely broken down, by the proof on the part of the defense that Dr. Mudd had not been in Washington from November or December, 1864, until after the assassination.

III. As to Payne, his guilt of the assault on Seward in complicity with Booth was clear, and confessed by himself. He was but twenty years of age, of weak mind, entirely dominated by the superior intellect and will of Booth. He claimed he acted under the command of his captain. He was so stolidly indifferent during the trial as to raise suspicion of his sanity, and he repeatedly expressed his wish for the termination of the trial so that he might cease to live.

IV. As to the boy Herold, it was manifest that, as the mere tool and puppet of Booth, he was acquainted beforehand with the design of his master to kill the President, but there is no evidence that he aided or abetted Booth in the actual assassination in any way except to participate in his flight after he had got out of Washington.

V. As to Atzerodt, for whom there appears to have been no pity or sign of relenting, it is nevertheless a fact, that the testimony to his lying in wait for Andrew Johnson is so feeble as to be almost farcical. The poor German was a coward and never went near Johnson. There is no circumstance in the evidence inconsistent with his own confession, that he was in the plot to capture, knew nothing of the design to murder until 8 o’clock on the evening of the 14th, and then refused to enact the part assigned him by Booth.

Indeed, it would appear as if the Commission, by a sort of proleptic vision of the future course of the President in his desperate struggle with the Congress, in grim irony actually hung Atzerodt because he did not kill Andrew Johnson.

VI. And as to Mrs. Surratt, the only witnesses of importance against her are Weichman and Lloyd. Without their testimony the case for the prosecution could not stand for a moment. Weichman, a boarder and intimate in her house, the college chum of her son, and, equally with him, the associate of Payne, Atzerodt, Herold and Booth, who, frightened almost to death at the outlook, was swearing, under a desperate strain, to clear his own skirts from the conspiracy and thus save his threatened neck:—Weichman’s testimony before the Commission, even at such a pass, is for some reason quite vague and indefinite, and only becomes deadly when supplemented by Lloyd’s. This man Lloyd it was who, in fact, furnished the only bit of evidence directly connecting Mrs. Surratt with the crime. He testifies to two conversations he had with her—one on the 11th and the other on the 14th of April—when she alluded to the weapons left weeks before at the hotel at Surrattsville owned by her and kept by Lloyd—on the 11th, that the “shooting-irons” would be wanted soon; on the 14th, that they would be called for that night. Lloyd, himself, however, admits, and it is otherwise clearly shown, that on the 14th he was so drunk as hardly to be able to stand up. Lloyd, also, was deeply implicated in the conspiracy to capture if not to assassinate. He had aided the fugitive assassins to escape, had kept their weapons hidden in his house, and he had, for two days after his arrest, denied all knowledge of Booth and Herold’s stopping at his hotel at midnight after the murder. He had been placed in solitary confinement and threatened with death. His nervous system, undermined by debauchery, gave way; his terrors were startling to witness and drove him well-nigh mad, and, at last, in a moment of distraction, he turned against Mrs. Surratt and her son. Like Weichman’s, his, also, was the frenzied effort of a terror-stricken wretch to avoid impending death by pushing someone forward to take his place. Reverdy Johnson, at the close of his plea to the jurisdiction of the court, let fall the following words, no less weighty for their truth than their force:

“This conclusion in regard to these witnesses must be, in the minds of the Court, and is certainly strongly impressed upon my own, that, if the facts which they themselves state as to their connection and intimacy with Booth and Payne are true, their knowledge of the purpose to commit the crimes and their participation in them, is much more satisfactorily established than the alleged knowledge and participation of Mrs. Surratt.”

Moreover, the testimony of both these witnesses, suborned as they were alike by their terrors and their hopes, is perfectly reconcilable with the alternative hypothesis, either that the woman in what she did was an innocent dupe of the fascinating actor, or that she was unaware of the sudden transformation of the long-pending plot to capture, of which she might have been a tacit well-wisher, into an extemporaneous plot to kill.

Much stress was laid by Mr. Bingham on her solemn denial of any prior acquaintance with Payne when confronted with him on the night of her arrest. But it is more than probable that the non-recognition was unsimulated, because of the disguise and pitiable plight of the desperado, who had been hidden in the mud of the suburbs three days and three nights, and, also, because the non-recognition was shared with her by the other ladies of the house. Besides, that a woman, caught in the toils in which Booth and her own son had unwittingly involved her, under the terror of recent arrest and imminent imprisonment, should have shrunk from any acknowledgment of this midnight intruder, even to the extent of falsehood, certainly is in no wise incompatible with innocence.