... And Justice for All

A few minutes after eight o’clock on the morning of Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee sat down at a field table and wrote a note to General Grant, requesting an interview “with reference to the surrender of this army.” That afternoon, at the McLean farmhouse on the edge of Appomattox village, the fifty-eight-year-old Lee turned over the Army of Northern Virginia to its embarrassed conqueror. The brief surrender document was written out in pencil by Grant at a table in the McLean living room and corrected by Lee who, resplendent in dress uniform sat across the room from the somewhat disheveled Union commander. At 3:45 p.m., the Confederate general signed his acceptance of Grant’s rather generous terms and went out to explain to his incredulous troops what he had done.

Even though Joe Johnston and Kirby Smith were still at large in the deep South, the Civil War was all but over. Two days after Appomattox, Grant and his wife arrived in Washington where the general was promptly lionized by a city gone wild after more than four nerve-wracking years of being a front line capital. In honor of the couple, Mrs. Lincoln had done her part by inviting them to a theatre party at Ford’s Opera House on the evening of Good Friday, April 14th. Our American Cousin, a new comedy with the incomparable Laura Keene, had been playing to enthusiastic audiences throughout the North and, although the President wasn’t particularly overjoyed at the prospect of sitting through a late-evening play, he knew better than to obstruct Mary’s plans. However, at the last moment the Grants begged off, primarily because the general had little stomach for what he termed “show business.”

At nine o’clock on Good Friday evening, coachman Francis Burns stopped the White House carriage in front of Ford’s between E and F on Tenth Street. Outside of the Lincolns, his only other passengers were Major Henry Reed Rathbone and Clara Harris, an engaged couple who were filling in for the Grants. When the quartet entered the Presidential box, Major Rathbone and Miss Harris took the two seats nearest the stage with their hosts sitting behind them. Lincoln sprawled in a haircloth rocking chair directly in front of a door that opened on a narrow hallway. Sometime during the afternoon, a small hole had been bored in the door, through which it was possible to observe the box’s occupants from the corridor.

Shortly after the Lincoln party had entered the box, John F. Parker, a perennially thirsty patrolman who had been assigned by the Metropolitan Police to guard the President, decided to leave his post in the hallway and look for a nearby bar. At 10:15, just as, on stage, Harry Hawk was referring to Mrs. Mountchessington as “you sockdologizing old mantrap,” actor John Wilkes Booth opened the now unguarded door and put a bullet into the head of the dozing man in the rocker. The rest was for the chroniclers--the leap to the stage, the broken shinbone, the mad dash across the Navy Yard Bridge, the frenzied manhunt through the woods and swamps of Northern Virginia, and the end of the trail in a burning barn on Garrett’s farm just south of Port Royal.

The self-styled avenger, who believed that “God ... made me the instrument of his punishment,” was destined to die just before sunrise on April 26th on the front porch of a Virginia tobacco farm. The cause of death--a bullet wound in the neck. Whether Booth shot himself, as Colonel Everton Conger, the leader of the cavalry patrol which had run him to earth, believed, or was killed by fanatical Sergeant Boston Corbett who claimed that God had been looking over his shoulder when he squeezed the trigger, didn’t change the essential fact that the assassin was as dead as he was ever going to be. The troopers who searched his body found a small diary and the daguerrotypes of five women in his pockets.

Seconds after Booth’s one-shot derringer had earned him a sizeable place in the history books, a wild-eyed young man on a bay horse pulled up in front of Secretary of State William H. Seward’s mansion on Lafayette Square. Pretending to be a messenger sent by Seward’s physician, he broke into the Secretary’s bedroom where he stabbed him three times. Only a steel frame which the victim had been wearing to support a fractured jaw saved him from death. The intruder then fought his way out of the house, seriously wounding four other people in the process, and rode off toward the east.

Meanwhile, four Pennsylvania artillerymen carried the President’s unconscious form across Tenth Street to William Peterson’s house. There he was placed on a walnut cot in the first floor bedroom of William Clark, one of Peterson’s boarders. He lingered during the night, but it was soon obvious to the six physicians in the room, who could do little more than remove the pressure-causing blood clots that continuously formed at the entrance to the wound, that their illustrious patient would never see another day. By dawn, his breath had become stertorous and labored and, at 7:22 a.m., Surgeon-General Joseph K. Barnes, recorded the last heartbeat. “Now,” Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was supposed to have said, as he closed the dead man’s eyes, “he belongs to the ages.”

Some four hours earlier, a Metropolitan Police squad, headed by a detective named Clarvoe, had arrived at a small boardinghouse at 541 H Street, which was owned by one Mary Eugenia Surratt, a widow who had come to Washington from Surrattville, Maryland, in the Spring of ’64. They were looking for Mrs. Surratt’s son, John, who, Clarvoe told her, had just murdered Secretary Seward. When Mrs. Surratt informed them that John had left for Canada when Richmond fell on April 3rd, the squad searched the eight-room brick building from cellar to attic. After ordering Louis J. Weichmann, one of Mrs. Surratt’s borders, to report to headquarters the next morning, the policemen left the house.

As soon as Lincoln died, Stanton, to whom one cause was as good as another so long as he remained primus motor, announced that he would not rest until he had found and prosecuted everybody who had anything to do with what his reward circulars referred to as “the stain of innocent blood.” Booth and David E. Herold, a slow-witted youth whose only redeeming feature was his devotion to the actor, had been identified as soon as they fled across the Navy Yard Bridge, minutes after the murder. Herold had been captured by Colonel Conger’s cavalry patrol just before it set fire to the barn in which the two men were hiding.

By that time, Stanton had rounded up seven other persons whom he accused of conspiring to kill the President. There was Lewis Payne, a Confederate deserter and the son of a Florida minister, who had created the havoc at the Seward house. Payne and George A. Atzerodt, a carriage-maker from Port Tobacco, had both boarded at Mrs. Surratt’s prior to the assassination. Atzerodt, who, with Herold’s help, was supposed to kill Vice-President Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood House, had lost his nerve and spent the night of April 14th wandering aimlessly around the streets of Washington. He was finally captured on April 20th at his cousin’s farm in nearby Germantown. Payne was picked up when he showed up at the H Street boardinghouse at midnight on April 17th, with his head wrapped in a bloody shirtsleeve, just as Major H. W. Smith was in the process of arresting Mrs. Surratt.

Edward Spangler, the cantankerous stage carpenter at Ford’s had held Booth’s horse while the actor was about his murderous business in the President’s box. Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlin, both of whom had known Booth since childhood, had been persuaded by him to help out in an abortive 1864 scheme to abduct Lincoln and hold him a hostage until the North came to terms with the Confederacy. After almost a year of fruitless discussions with Booth about ways and means, both men had withdrawn from the project. On the night of the President’s murder, O’Laughlin had been on a drinking bout in Washington with three friends while Arnold was working for a sutler at Fortress Monroe near Baltimore. Lastly, there was Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, the Maryland physician who had set the murderer’s broken leg the morning after the shooting.

By the end of April, Stanton had everybody he wanted. Herold was brought back to Washington on the same steamboat as his master’s blanket-wrapped corpse, and incarcerated with the other prisoners in the brigs of some gunboats moored near the Navy Yard. All that remained was the selection of a court. The Secretary of War was determined not to let his prizes enjoy the benefits of a civil trial and urged the new President to appoint a military commission to try them. Johnson agreed and, on May 1st, named a commission composed of seven generals and two colonels “for the trial of David E. Herold, George A. Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, Michael O’Laughlin, Edward Spangler, Samuel Arnold, Mary E. Surratt, Samuel A. Mudd ... implicated in the murder of the late President, Abraham Lincoln, and the attempted assassination of William H. Seward, Secretary of State, and in an alleged conspiracy to assassinate other officers of the Federal Government at Washington City.” The main charge--“maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously murdering the said Abraham Lincoln, then President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

As far as Mrs. Surratt was concerned, Brigadier-General Joseph Holt, the Judge Advocate General, didn’t mince words. She did, he said, “receive, entertain, harbor and conceal, aid and assist, the said John Wilkes Booth, David E. Herold, Lewis Payne, John H. Surratt, Michael O’Laughlin, George A. Atzerodt, Samuel Arnold and their confederates, with the knowledge of the murderous and traitorous conspiracy ... with intent to aid, abet and assist them in the execution thereof, and in escaping from justice after the murder of the said Abraham Lincoln, as aforesaid.” On March 10th, Mrs. Surratt and the seven other defendants pleaded, “Not Guilty.”

Their trial, which began officially at ten a.m. on May 10th, was held in a large room on the third floor of the Old Penitentiary. Several days earlier, the defendants had been transferred from their nautical prisons to cells in the same building where they were kept in solitary confinement. Even their guards were forbidden by Stanton to utter a word to them. Shortly after their arrival at the Penitentiary, the male prisoners’ heads were encased in heavy canvas sacks which were slit in the vicinity of their mouths. Payne’s attempted suicide by butting his head against his cell’s stone wall had alerted the Secretary of War to the possibility that some of his birds might succeed in beating their brains out before he could properly hang them. When General Hartranft, the Special Provost Marshal assigned to the commission, suggested the hoods, Stanton was quick to order them.

The trial had been scheduled to get underway on Tuesday, May 9th, but since the defendants all asked for time in which to find lawyers, General David Hunter, the President of the Commission, postponed it twenty-four hours. The next morning, Mrs. Surratt applied for permission, as Benn Pitman, the chief court stenographer recorded it, “to introduce Frederick Aiken, Esq. and John W. Clampitt, Esq., as her counsel, which applications were granted.” Dr. Mudd was the only other defendant to have drummed up a lawyer, and Hunter adjourned the Commission to the next day “to allow further time for the accused to secure the attendance of counsel.”