The Plot

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In 1863, a widow named Mary Surratt was running a tavern in a small town in Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. There was a post office in the same building. Her youngest son, John, was the postmaster. He was also a spy for the Confederate Army. How much did she know of what John was doing? Oh, I think she knew everything. This is historian Kate Clifford Barson. You know, some people say, oh, she couldn't have known what he was doing. Of course, he was like 18 years old. She knew everything he was doing. and she approved of it because she did not want the union to win. Mary grew up in Maryland on a tobacco farm where her family owned enslaved people. Her father died when she was two and after her mother ran the farm. She never remarried. Mary grew up Episcopalian but converted to Catholicism when she was a teenager. Mary met her husband, John Surratt, in 1839. They married the next year. They had three children. Her husband drank and gambled a lot. He racked up a lot of debt. But eventually he saved up enough money to build a tavern. So he opened this tavern and it became very busy very quickly. They had a wheel right that would take care of people's carriages and, you know, barns for horses. And so it was very, very successful, the bar and the inn itself. And sadly, John became the most frequent customer of the bar in the tavern. In 1862, John Surratt died. By that point, Mary was already doing most of the work, running the tavern. It was always busy, and often full of Confederate supporters who knew they were safe there. A family friend said that Mary earnestly and conscientiously defended and justified the Southern cause. What was it like in Maryland at that time during the Civil War? So Maryland stayed in the Union. There was a lot of negotiating to make that happen because Maryland was a slave state. now southern Maryland the part of Maryland that's closest to Washington D.C. had the most enslaved people out of any region of Maryland at the time so it was a mixed state northern Maryland, north of Baltimore had very few enslaved people more northern kind of sympathies and then southern Maryland had very strong confederate sympathies So the state was split, but Lincoln and his administration were able to keep it in the Union. But that didn't mean that people with Confederate sympathies were not trying to thwart the efforts of Lincoln and his administration during the war. The Surrattes had also owned enslaved people. One of them had allegedly burned down the Surrattes' house and then ran away. Several of them fled the tavern and took off. So that was very upsetting to Mary. As a white woman, she had more status than an enslaved person or a free black person. And she liked that. She was a racist and she was a Confederate. She wanted slavery to continue. In 1862, Mary's oldest son, Isaac, left to join the Confederate Army. and her younger son, John, started delivering messages for the Confederacy. John used his position at the post office to move coded messages that were sent to him there. When he got certain letters, he would take out a hidden envelope and bring it to the person it was for. Sometimes he would hide messages between the wooden boards of his carriage, other times in the heel of his boot. He'd sneak out to Confederate boats on the Potomac River with information about where the Union Army was going. The Union could not patrol, you know, 24 hours a day every mile of that river all the time. So people had a great business taking Confederate sympathizers, spies, etc., back and forth across the Potomac and the other rivers. So, you know, it was wartime. It was difficult to watch everybody and keep an eye on everybody. But one day in November 1863, John was caught by federal investigators. He was fired from his job as postmaster for disloyalty. He spent a few days in jail, but was released. A new postmaster was hired, who was not a Confederate supporter. John decided to start carrying the secret letters himself, full-time, bypassing the post office. He would travel to the Confederate capital in Richmond, pick up messages, and then take them north to Canada, where the Confederacy had established a base. Spies like John had coded messages and photographs in buttons, shoes, and clothing in case they were searched. In 1864, Mary decided to move with John and her daughter Anna to Washington, D.C., where they owned a townhouse. She started renting out rooms. I think it was a strategic move on her part, and they could have boarders and look like a respectable house, and she would be the woman running the boarding house. And I think it made it easier for John to go back and forth and connect with people in Washington, D.C., who were spies, who were in government. There were Confederate spies who had jobs in the government, and they were sending information to Richmond, Virginia. So I think it worked out for him very nicely that they moved into Washington, D.C. Soon the boarding house became a meeting place for John and his friends, some of whom he had met through his work delivering messages. One man started coming over a lot and became friends with Mary, too. His name was John Wilkes Booth. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. John Wilkes Booth was born in Maryland. He came from a family of actors. His father, Junius, and two of his brothers were also actors. John made his own stage debut when he was 17 years old, after his father died. His brother, Edwin, was known as the more precise actor in the family, but John was considered the more passionate one. One actress said, He has the fire, the dash, the touch of strangeness. He was called by some the handsomest man in Washington. Walt Whitman wrote of his acting, I thought of real genius. How famous is John Wilkes Booth at this point? He is so famous. He's like the most famous actor in the country at the time. He had started acting in the early 1850s. He wasn't very notable at the time, but he really worked on his craft and he became quite skilled and he was dashing and handsome and really that he was a public person. And so he really developed a tremendous following. In April 1861, when the Civil War began, John Wilkes Booth was performing in Albany. He called the Confederates attacking Fort Sumter, quote, heroic. He did not believe in equality. He thought that African Americans were supposed to be slaves. He was devoted to that concept, which is kind of odd because his family hadn't been that strongly committed. Particularly one of his brothers was more of a northern sympathizer, a union sympathizer. But he was obsessed. He really was obsessed. He had promised his mother that he would not enlist in the Confederate Army. But by 1864, he wanted to do more. John Wilkes Booth is becoming more and more furious and frustrated, and he wants the Union to lose, he wants the Confederacy to win. So he starts kind of dreaming up this scheme of how they're going to get a group of people together to help him execute on this plan to kidnap Abraham Lincoln. What did they think they were going to get out of kidnapping Lincoln? They were going to ransom him for the freedom of all the Confederate soldiers in northern prisons. And they thought that that would rejuvenate the failing Confederacy at the time. Because there were, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of Confederate prisoners. I mean, it was kind of a wacky plan, but they were devoted to it. They thought it would work. it certainly would have shocked the nation. John Wilkes Booth's plan was to kidnap President Lincoln in Washington and smuggle him through Maryland to the Potomac River. Then he and several conspirators would put him on a boat They knew that Lincoln was a tall guy They needed a few guys to help them get him into a boat and get him across to Virginia and then ransom him John Wilkes Booth started spending a lot of time in southern Maryland meeting with Confederate spies and looking for places that could be safe houses along the way to the Potomac He learned that the Surratt's Tavern was known as a safe place for Confederates. A mutual friend introduced him to John Surratt. It was December of 1864 that John Surratt Jr. met John Wilkes Booth in Washington, D.C. It was around Christmas time. And from then on, the plan really took off rather quickly. John Wilkes Booth brought in a couple of his friends from childhood. John Surratt brought in some of his friends from childhood. The people that they brought in had no experience really with firearms or planning kidnappings. They didn't have much money. which now when you think about it is kind of ridiculous, but these are the people that they trusted and they brought in. This is how the plans started to grow. Soon, John Wilkes Booth began arranging for people to stay at the Surratt's boarding house in Washington as they made plans. Some of them stayed for just a night and others for weeks. One of John Surratt's childhood friends, who also lived at the boarding house, a man named Lewis Weichman, asked Mary who all these new people were. She told him that John was hiring them for dirty work. When asked what she meant, she said, to clean his horses. Kate Clifford Larson says that John Wilkes Booth came to the boarding house almost every day. If John Surratt wasn't home, he would sit with Mary. One of the boarders in the house said that Mary Surratt and John Wilkes Booth would talk for hours together. Mary's daughter, Anna, kept a photo of Booth. Her brother complained that when Booth came to visit, he would always hear the women scampering to get ready. It's kind of remarkable when you think about it. the most famous actor in the country, is showing up at this boarding house in Washington, D.C. And, you know, it's just everybody, the boarders in the house, and not all of them were Confederate sympathizers in the house, but they just, they loved him and they thought, this is the coolest thing that John Wilkes Booth is coming and having dinner with us and entertaining us. At the beginning of 1865, John Wilkes Booth started tracking President Lincoln's schedule. President Lincoln often went to see plays, especially at Ford's Theater. John Wilkes Booth had performed there many times, and he asked the owner to let him in to look around. He proposed kidnapping Lincoln the next time he went to see a show there. But two of his friends didn't like the idea. They said it could not be done without someone getting killed. On March 16th, John Wilkes Booth heard from a friend that President Lincoln was going to see a show the next day at an army hospital. Booth planned to intercept Lincoln's carriage. John Surratt would take over and drive it to Maryland. Kate says on the 17th of March, everyone met at Mary's boarding house. And John Wilkes Booth told them where to go and what to do once they had captured Lincoln. So Booth and his co-conspirators set themselves up along this road on the day that Lincoln was supposed to be there. And it turns out that at the last minute, Lincoln changed his mind and didn't go. And it just infuriated the co-conspirators, but particularly John Wilkes Booth himself. When John Surratt Jr. came home, he went to his friend Louis Weichmann, who lived at the boarding house. Louis Weichmann said that John was waving a gun around and told him, I will shoot anyone that comes into this room. My prospect is gone. My hopes are blighted. Fifteen minutes later, John Wilkes Booth came in looking for John Surratt. They went into another room to talk. Lewis Weichmann said that's when he began to suspect that they had, quote, some hidden purpose John Wilkes Booth stayed in Washington for one more day He was scheduled to perform the next day at Ford's Theater After the show, he left for New York City But he hadn't given up on trying to help the Confederacy which was about to lose the war He just was in a complete panic and so angry that he'd started planning and scheming what his next step was going to be. And that turned out to be a plan to assassinate Lincoln, and it involved getting Mary to help. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, subscribe to Criminal Plus. Support for Criminal comes from Quince. 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Historian Kate Clifford Larson says when John Wilkes Booth came back to Washington, D.C., he began gathering supplies for his new plan to assassinate the president. John Wilkes Booth decided he needed spy glasses, and he wanted liquor, money, and food, and things like that, and more weapons stored at the Surratt Tavern for the evening when he decided he was going to assassinate Lincoln. John Surratt had gone to Canada. Before he left, he'd taken weapons and ammunition to his family's tavern in Maryland. He hid them in the walls and under the floorboards. Mary started making lots of trips to the tavern, too. One she asked her son's friend, Louis Weichmann, who also lived at the boarding house, to take her there. She told him she was going to collect on a loan to a neighbor. But on the way, they stopped on a road just outside of town to talk to a man named John Lloyd. He had rented the tavern from Mary when she moved to Washington. Mary asked John Lloyd about the weapons hidden at the tavern and told him someone would be coming to get them soon and then on April 14th John Wilkes Booth went to pick up his mail at Ford's Theater and he heard that President Lincoln would be attending a play there that night John Wilkes Booth met with two other men to go over their plans Part of the conspiracy was to kill Lincoln, his vice president, Andrew Johnson, Secretary William Henry Seward, and then General Grant. He wanted to make sure that the leadership of the union was completely decimated. And on that day, where was Mary Surratt? She was busy trying to help. She went to the tavern to deliver the last items that Booth needed. Booth did come by and see her at least once during that day, and then he took off. He was busy making plans throughout the day with people at Ford's Theater who didn't know what he was planning on doing. But he was such a famous actor, and he could go in and out of the theater and do whatever he wanted and talk to whoever he wanted to because he was so famous. That night, one of the men working with John Wilkes Booth, a man who went by the name Louis Payne, went to Secretary of State William Henry Seward's house. Seward was recovering from a horrific carriage accident, and he had broken his shoulder and his jaw, so he was bedridden. and Louis Payne appeared at the door claiming that he was a delivery person from the pharmacy with medication for the secretary and the servants there in the house and Seward's sons were there and they didn't want Payne to come in but he pushed his way through. He stabbed a few people and then he got into Seward's bedroom and started attacking him. But Seward fell off the bed between the bed and the wall, and it was difficult for Payne to keep attacking him. And the brace he had this large metal brace around his head and neck and shoulder to keep it all in place because he had broken so many bones That prevented the blade from the knife that Payne was using from penetrating him enough to kill him So Payne, thinking he had killed Seward, fled the house and went to hide in a cemetery until things had calmed down. Another man was supposed to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson. It also didn't go as planned. That co-conspirator got drunk at the bar and didn't wait around to try to kill the vice president who was staying at a local hotel. When John Wilkes Booth arrived at Ford's Theater, a stagehand held his horse for him. Booth goes in the theater as the performance is going on, and he goes up to the private box where Lincoln and his wife and other people are seated watching the play. And he sneaks in and starts attacking the president, shoots him in the head. And then he yells out to the audience and he leaps from the box and jumps down to the stage. Now, he had spurs on his boot, and it caught the American flag decoration that was spread across the box, and he crashed sort of on the stage. And, you know, everyone is in shock. They're not sure what's happening. Booth broke his leg, but he limps off. He goes behind and out into the alley, and Booth jumps on his horse and races away. and inside they realize that Lincoln has been shot and other people have been hurt. Lincoln was badly wounded. Doctors took him to a boarding house across the street from the theater to treat him. That night, Mary Surratt was at home. Some of the boarders noticed she seemed nervous. She just seems odd and she says strange things And finally, she tells everybody they must go back to their rooms, that she needs quiet. So they all go to bed. Now, once Lincoln has been shot, the police are out looking for any clues on who these people were that caused this. And where's John Wilkes Booth? Because people did recognize him when he jumped down on the stage. so the police actually come to her door at about 11.30 that night and ask to search the house because they had heard that Booth had visited the house and that there might be other co-conspirators there but they found nothing so they left but the next day Mary's boarder, Louis Weichmann who had begun to suspect something strange about her friendship with John Wilkes Booth decided to go to the police Lewis Weichmann realized, uh-oh, this is more serious. And the following morning, Saturday morning, Lincoln had just died, and he went and reported what he knew. He told police all about the visitors to the Surratt's boarding house, including John Wilkes Booth and Lewis Payne. Two days later, the police came back to the boarding house. and they start inquiring, you know, what was going on here? Who were these people? And she kept saying that she didn't know anything. Well, then there's a knock on the door and it's like 11 o'clock at night. So one of the detectives opens the door and there's Louis Payne. And he had been hiding out in the cemetery since his attack on Seward two nights before. And they said to him, who are you and what are you here for? And he tried to lie. He said that he was there to check with Mrs. Surratt because he had been hired to do some yard work for her. And so he thought he'd get an early start. And of course, the detectives are like, early start, it's like 1130 at night, what are you doing? So they make him come in the house and they bring Mary Surratt over into the hallway and they ask her, does she know him? And she very dramatically raises up her arm and her hand and says, I swear to God that I do not know who this person is. And the detectives thought that that was so bizarre, her behavior, they knew immediately that she knew who the guy was and she was lying. We'll be right back. Thank you. 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Shopify is used by millions of businesses around the world, from household names to brands just getting started. You can choose from hundreds of ready-to-use templates to make a beautiful online store. Then you can turn it into an efficient business with helpful AI tools. They can help you write product descriptions and page headlines and make your photos look even better. Shopify can also help you create simple marketing campaigns so you can connect with your customers. And if you need advice, they offer 24-7 customer support. It's time to turn those what-ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash criminal. Go to shopify.com slash criminal. That's shopify.com slash criminal. Police took Mary Surrod, her daughter Anna, and Louis Payne to the police station for questioning. When they took Mary in for questioning, what did she say? She was very defiant and haughty, and she was trying to protect her son, so she had no concern that she would be in trouble. So she obfuscated and she just danced around and that, of course, infuriated some of the police detectives. But, you know, they just felt the answers weren't adequate. The police asked her about John Wilkes Booth's visits. She said he didn't discuss politics much. She said she was shocked by his attack on President Lincoln. While she was being interviewed, the police searched Louis Payne. They found bloodstains on his clothing, and that he was wearing boots with the name John Wilkes Booth inside. The police brought a servant from Secretary of State William Seward's house to the station. He sees pain, and he says, that's the man, that's the man who attacked Secretary Seward. So it just started snowballing from there. Mary Surratt was arrested and jailed at a prison at the old Capitol building. It had been used for military prisoners during the Civil War. The police had arrested six people involved in John Wilkes Booth's conspiracy. They couldn't find John Surratt Jr. He was in Canada. John Wilkes Booth had been on the run since he shot Lincoln. He had stopped at Mary Surratt's tavern and picked up a bottle of whiskey, spy glasses, and guns. He reportedly said, I am pretty certain that we've assassinated the president. Almost two weeks later, on April 26th, he was discovered hiding in a tobacco barn in Virginia. He was quickly surrounded by federal detectives and a cavalry regiment from New York. After two hours, one of the detectives decided to light the barn on fire. Soon after, a soldier shot him. He died a few hours later. Three days later, the government announced that they were going to indict eight people for conspiracy to assassinate the president. Mary Surratt was one of them. They would be tried together by a military tribunal. And the argument that the government made was that the war wasn't over. Even though Lee had surrendered, there was still fighting going on in Texas and other Western states. And so the government used that as an excuse not to have the trial become a civilian trial, that we were still at war, they said, and so it should be a military trial. Now, military trials are very different than civilian trials. The protections for the defendant are not the same. They're not quite as rarest. And at that time, defendants still had a tough time, whether it was a civilian court or not. But there were protections for civilian defendants. But in a military tribunal, it's the judges and the jury are all the same people. The trial was held at Fort McNair in Washington. In court, Mary wore a black veil over her face. with the different images of the conspirators, the men, but she was center of this drawing. And it was very surprising because she didn't plan everything. She was not the center of the conspiracy, but the press made it sound like she was. Mary was seated away from the rest of the male defendants She didn say anything during the proceedings At that time defendants weren allowed to testify in their own trials Sometimes Mary had to remove her veil so that a witness could identify her. A reporter said that her expression, for the several hours she was under her eyes, was that of a deeply somber gentleness. She is doing her best to make a favorable impression by dress and aspect upon her judges. But one newspaper called her a tigress, and another said that there was something repulsive about her. People in the courtroom were heard saying, she looks like a devil. One woman said, I hope they'll hang her. What is Mary's defense strategy? That she didn't know anything. She didn't know that Booth was going to assassinate the president. And Mary was kind of haughty because she expected that her Victorian womanhood and her deep Catholic faith would protect her. That there was no way people would believe that she was involved in a plot to assassinate the president. Lewis Weichmann, Mary's boarder and John Surratt's friend, was one of the first witnesses called to testify. He described Mary as sweet and caring, and someone he was fond of. He said he didn't understand why she was friends with John Wilkes Booth. He testified that he'd seen several of the arrested conspirators at the boarding house, and that he'd been with Mary when she went to the tavern in the days before the assassination. Mary's lawyers weren't able to explain what Mary was doing in the week leading up to the assassination. They also said that Mary had bad eyesight. That was why she hadn't recognized Louis Payne, the man who had tried to kill the Secretary of State when he showed up at the boarding house. But Mary's boarders testified that Mary didn't seem to have any problems with recognizing people by the dim gas lamps in the parlor. The prosecution brought several witnesses who remembered how often John Wilkes Booth came to visit Mary, and had seen Mary delivering messages and supplies for Booth. The man who ran the tavern in Maryland for Mary testified that she had asked him to get the weapons hidden in the tavern, ready to be picked up. Anna Surat was called to the stand to testify for her mother's defense. Afterward, she fainted. She attended every day of the trial after that. The newspapers reported that she had had a cheering effect on Mary. Later, Mary's health started to decline, and the court let Anna stay with Mary in her cell during the day. In their closing arguments, Mary's lawyers called Mary widowed of her natural protectors, and that her son John was really the one who had been involved. They also argued that the military trial was unconstitutional. Two days later, the commission decided that all eight defendants were guilty. Four were sentenced to prison, and the rest were given a death sentence. Mary Surratt was one of them. Five of the commissioners from the trial wrote in their decision that they thought Mary's sentence should be commuted to life in prison because of her sex and age. She was 42. Their recommendation went to President Andrew Johnson, who had the final say in approving the sentences. On July 5th, Andrew Johnson approved the execution of Mary Seurat. He said that Mary's sex did not make her any the less guilty, and that she kept the nest that hatched the egg. The execution was scheduled for two days later. Do you think Mary ever thought that she would get a death sentence? I think Mary never thought in a million years that she would get a death sentence. I think she thought she might get a couple years in prison and that's it. Mary's lawyer said, So sudden was the shock, so unexpected the result, we hardly knew how to proceed. They went to the White House to try to speak with President Johnson. He wouldn't see them. They brought Anna Surratt to see one of the President's military advisors to see if he would talk to the President. Later that morning, he told them he had tried, but the President would not change his mind. He said, I can do nothing. On July 7th, thousands of people came to Washington for the execution. Mary was being hanged with three other men. When the executioner put the noose around Mary's neck, some people in the crowd got upset. It was the first time a woman had been executed by the federal government. Oddly, as soon as the hanging happened, within a couple of days, the public sort of soured on the idea. And I think it's sort of like trauma from the Civil War to begin with. They were just tired of all of this, and they wanted to move on as a country and to put everything behind them. And everyone was uncomfortable with the hanging of a woman, particularly because there were photographs available of the hanging. And for the people who saw them, it was shocking. People began to say that Louis Weichmann had lied on the stand, that he was actually part of the assassination conspiracy. Two weeks after her execution, one newspaper reported, President Johnson was later criticized for signing off on Mary's death sentence. There was so much drama, I think, that the newspapers loved printing it all. And so they just kept feeding into this idea that the government had hanged this innocent woman. And the images are just so appalling that people bought into it. Mary's son, John Seurat Jr., had been in hiding in Canada during his mother's trial. After her execution, he went to Europe. He goes to France and then Italy. He joins the Papal Guards. He's traveling through Europe trying to escape federal detectives. They're getting clues from different people that he's in England. Then he's in Paris. He's in France and Italy. And then he goes to Egypt, and eventually he does get captured and brought back to the United States in 1867. John Surratt Jr. was tried for treason, but his case ended in a mistrial. In 1868, the charges were dropped. He began touring the country, giving lectures about his mother's innocence. And those who supported Mary, I mean, they kept campaigning for 40 years until they ended up all dying of old age, etc., to convince the world that she was innocent and to have her pardoned posthumously. which she never was. And some of them had the evidence, but they just would not accept that Mary as a woman was involved. Historians have debated about what Mary Surratt did or did not do for over 100 years. Kate Clifford Larson says she's looked at the documents from the trial and at interviews from witnesses and the conspirators. There's no way that a person can come away thinking she was not informed, that she was not a co-conspirator, that she couldn't have helped John Wilkes Booth. After Mary's execution, the New York Times wrote that she had paid the penalty of her crime, and the wisest thing is to let her name be as far forgotten as the magnitude of that crime will allow. I think, you know, when it comes to the story of Lincoln and Booth, it's such a neat story. This handsome, wonderful actor loses his mind over losing to the Union, and he kills Lincoln, and that's it. It's kind of a complicated story when you realize how many Confederate spies there were, and how many co-conspirators were there, and how many people hated Abraham Lincoln, who becomes this martyr figure for all of us. and then to have a woman be part of it. It's such a complicated story, but I think everyone should know about Mary Surratt. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Cicicco, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. 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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Thank you.