Payne who had stayed at her house just a month before. In fact, she had seen him several times: he was the Mr. Asked to identify him, Mary swore she had never seen him before. As the party awaited transportation to Washington’s military headquarters, a man in grubby but well-made clothes turned up at the door with the unlikely excuse that he had come to dig a ditch for Mary the following morning. This time, they took Mary and all those staying with her at the time into custody. By the late evening of April 17, however, military authorities had acquired more evidence. They searched the house but left after finding no sign of Booth or John Surratt, who was suspected of the assault on Seward. Within hours of the assassination and the assault on Seward (who survived), police, tipped off that Booth had spent time at H Street, turned up at Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse. At about the same time, just blocks away, a powerfully built man forced his way into the home of the Secretary of State, William Seward, who was recovering from a carriage accident, and attacked him in his bed. Their scheme failed, but the next month, Booth changed history with a single Derringer shot at Ford’s Theater.
In fact, the men were plotting the kidnapping of President Lincoln. One boarder, John Surratt’s school chum Louis Weichmann, began to wonder just what was going on - and he wondered even more when, one day in March, John Surratt, Booth, and Payne, agitated and waving weapons about, stormed into the room Weichmann shared with Surratt, then abruptly adjourned to the privacy of the attic. A lady guest kept her face shielded by a veil. Another, whose German surname no one could pronounce, was scruffy and disreputable looking. He visited even when John Surratt was away from home.Īround the same time Booth began frequenting the boardinghouse, a stream of odd guests began to appear, staying for only a few nights at a time. Sometimes he would sit in the parlor and converse with the ladies other times he would confer with John Surratt privately. Soon Booth was stopping by the boardinghouse regularly. Then, early in 1865, John Surratt brought home a new acquaintance: actor John Wilkes Booth. John, too, served the Confederacy, but in a different way: making the dangerous trip across the Potomac River to carry clandestine messages from North to South.įor the rest of 1864, life went on in Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse no differently than it did in the many other small boardinghouses that dotted wartime Washington. Two of her grown children, John and Anna, came to Washington with her the third, Isaac, was serving in the Confederate army. Some years earlier, her husband had acquired a house there, and Mary decided to operate it as a boardinghouse.
Mary’s march to the scaffold began in the fall of 1864 when, saddled with debt from her alcoholic husband, who had died two years before, she leased out the tavern she operated in Prince George’s County, Maryland and moved to Washington, D.C. But even though a military tribunal had judged Mary Surratt to be complicit in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the debate about her guilt or innocence was only just beginning, On July 7, 1865, a middle-aged, middle-class widow, unremarkable in appearance, stepped onto the gallows and plummeted to her death, becoming the first woman to be hanged by the United States government. Mary Surratt awaits her execution (photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)
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