Here’s Where the Lincoln Co-Conspirators Were Hanged in DC 150 Years Ago [160 Now]

Tennis courts now mark the spot where 4 of John Wilkes Booth's comrades died 150 years ago.

The crowd watches on as Mary Surratt (left), Lewis Powell, David Herold and George Atzerodt hang from the gallows at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary. Photograph by Alexander Gardner/via Library of Congress.

On July 7, 1865, shortly after 1 PM, three men and one woman were lead to the gallows in the prison yard of the Old Arsenal Penitentiary, on the shores of where the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers meet. It was hot that day, reportedly a hundred degrees. Sweat surely dripped down the accused’s faces as they passed by the cheap pine coffins and shallow graves that had been dug for them.

The doomed were Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt, four of the co-conspirators in the plot to assassinate officers of the federal government. Their sentence had come after a seven-week trial that had found them guilty of “treasonable conspiracy.” While the group, along with five others that were either already dead or had been given less severe sentences, had been successful in one part of their plan—the murder of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth—they had failed at the other two. Powell attacked Secretary of State William Seward at his home, but managed only to injure him. Seward would eventually recover and purchase Alaska for the United States. Herold guided Powell to Seward’s house and, after abandoning Powell when it was clear the plan had gone astray, aided Booth in his attempts to evade authorities after his escape from Ford’s Theater. Azterodt had been assigned the task of assassinating Vice-President Johnson, but he didn’t going through with it. Instead, Azterodt got drunk and wandered the streets mumbling. He was soon arrested for suspicious behavior. During the trial, witnesses would call him a “notorious coward.”

Surratt faced a more tenuous case. Her son, John Surratt Jr., was a Confederate spy who had befriended Booth, a famed actor and Southern sympathizer. He often had Booth over to his mother’s tavern and boarding house for conversations and drinks. Soon, those conversations turned into conspiracy. It’s often been debated what and how much Mary Surratt knew about what went on in her place of business. Today, historians believe there was no way that Surratt was clueless about the plot. During the trial, the landowner who leased the property to Surratt testified about her knowledge of weapons being stored at the house. When reviewing the death sentence given to Surratt, President Johnson reportedly said, “She kept the nest that hatched the egg.”

The four were forced to climb the hastily built gallows that they had heard being tested the night before from their prison cells. A crowd of nearly thousand had come with their exclusive tickets to see this execution. Nooses were placed around the accused’s necks and hoods placed over their heads. Ever since the sentences had been handed down a week ago, Surratt’s lawyers and her daughter Anna had been fighting and pleading for her death sentence to be changed. In fact, many in attendance thought that Surratt would be saved from the gallows at the last minute. It was not to be.

After last rites and shortly after 1:30 PM, the trap door was opened and all four fell. It was reported that Atzerodt yelled at this very last moment, “May we meet in another world.” Within minutes, they were all dead. The bodies continued to hang and swing for another 25 minutes before they were cut down.

Today, Fort McNair sits on the land where the Old Arsenal Penitentiary once was. Tennis courts occupy the exact location of the Lincoln co-conspirators’ hanging.

Great grandfather ran the investigation and served as Special Judge Advocate during the trial. These are his memories of the evidence against Mrs Surratt.

THE EVIDENCE AGAINST MRS SURRATT

“Anyone who looks into the evidence will find out that for some weeks before the assassination, Mrs Surratt was holding frequent private interviews with Wilkes Booth; and was also on terms of intimate communication in her own house with Lewis Payne, alias Wood, alias Powell, who attempted the life of Mr Seward. Some weeks before the assassination, John H. Surratt, David E. Herold, and George A. Atzerodt left at the house of a Mr Floyd, near Washington, two carbines, ammunition, and a rope sixteen to twenty feet long, which were laid away under a joist until they should be wanted.

“On the Monday preceding the assassination, Mrs Surratt came to Floyd’s house and inquired about the ‘shooting irons’, and told Floyd ‘they would be wanted soon.’ On the very day of the assassination, Mrs Surratt was at Floyd’s house again and told him ‘to have the shooting-irons ready for that night.’ She then gave Mr Floyd a field-glass and asked him to have all the things ready, with two bottles of whiskey, for the parties who would call for them in the night, and left.”

“True to her prediction, at about a quarter past twelve o’clock the same night, Booth and Herold came to Floyd’s and called for the carbines, field-glass and whiskey, which Floyd delivered to them according to Mrs Surratt’s directions. Herold took his carbine, but Booth was unable to carry his, having a broken leg, and so left it behind. The assassins were at Floyd’s house about five minutes. Booth said, as they rode off: ‘I will tell you some news. I am pretty certain we have assassinated the President and Secretary Seward.’

About midnight on the 17th of April 1865, the third day after the assassination, Payne, who till then had secreted himself, came disguised to Mrs Surratt’s house and was arrested by soldiers then in possession of it. He said Mrs Surratt had sent for him to dig a ditch.

Mrs Surratt, though she knew him well, denied she ever saw him. Her words were, ‘Before God, I do not know this man, and have never seen him.’

“It is not for us to pass upon the guilt of Mrs Surratt. We would prefer to behold her pure and stainless, ‘as the angels in heaven.’

“But whomever indulges in wide-mouthed proclamations, or pronounces her conviction ‘an inhuman crime’, unsupported by evidence, betrays an animus, to say the least, not overcareful of the truth. The same malevolent animus which, in defiance of all truth, calls General Hanock her murderer, also denounces him for having been a Union solder, and for not resigning his commission, and for all the gallant service he has rendered to his country.

“’Cease, viper: you bite a file!’”

Hancock Of General Hanock’s connection with the trial and the habeas corpus proceedings, in an interview published in the New York World, August 5, 1880, after his nomination for the presidency by the Democratic party, although I was a Republican and voted against him, I took occasion to say:

“I do not think that anybody who ever examined the case fairly could impute the least blame to General Hancock. I think from first to last he only performed what was his strict military duty.” After citing the record: “Thus you see that General Hancock fully respected the writ of habeas corpus and made a proper and respectful return to it, pleading a higher authority for not obeying it by producing the body of Mrs Surratt... Any attempt to cast blame on General Hancock for his action in connection with these events I feel confident must fail. He simply performed his duty like a good soldier.”

MILITARY OR CIVIL
This paper is too long to present here, but I will give only a few extracts showing General Hancock’s views of his relation to the habeas corpus episode and Mrs. Surratt’s connection with the conspiracy. I quote from the paper as follows:

“After the nomination of General Hancock for the presidency in 1880 by the Democratic party, at the request of the editor of the North American Review, Mr Speed, Mr Lincoln’s Attorney-General, prepared a paper for that periodical on the trial of Mrs Surratt. In that article, among other things, in speaking of the military commission and the fairness of her trial, he said:

“The military commission which tried the assassins of the President was carefully selected. It was composed of men taught by experience and habit to maintain coolness and equanimity in thr midst of the most exciting scenes. If it was possible at that period and at that place to have secured a fair trial, the method adopted was the most certain to secure it. That commission certainly had no desire to wantonly and recklessly inflict punishment upon a woman. It patiently investigated the case. If Mrs Surratt had not been guilty — if there had been any reasonable doubt of her guilt — she would have been acquitted, as some of the other accused persons were.

“The Government never showed any disposition to deal severely with any of those guilty of crimes connected with the rebellion. Its military power was exercised mildly and humanely. It was only in a few instances of absolutely hideous crimes that the perpetrators suffered the extreme penalty.

“There is no ground for the complaint that the military court was harsh, or unjust, or cruel. There is every ground for the conclusion that it did its duty with judicial calmness and perfect conscientious impartiality. It found the proofs of guilt clear and incontestable, and rendered judgment accordingly... There was an additional guarantee of fairness of the proceedings against the assassins of the President in the fact that General Hancock, a disciplined, trained and accomplished soldier, was in command at Washington at the time. His calmness and equipose in the midst of excitement, cultivated by familiarity with scenes of carnage in the whirlwind of scores of terrific conflicts, would naturally inspire calmness in others.

“Had the assassins been turned over to the civil courts for trial, the result would doubtless have been the same; and, in that case, we would have heard a more just complaint, perhaps, that instead of a trial by an impartial military tribunal, they were remanded to the mercies of an angry and revengeful mob of passionate civilians, from whom it was impossible to obtain a fair jury.”

This was the calm judgement on this trial and the justice of Mrs Surratt’s conviction of one of the purest of men — one of the ablest lawyers of his time — after the thought and reflection of fifteen years.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.