A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (9 page)

“That, sir, is because they are just as ignorant of my character as yourself,” the prisoner responded, his considerable self-regard still very much intact. “But, General, I do have a proposition to make. Draw your soldiers up in a hollow square tomorrow morning, and announce to them that Vallandigham desires to vindicate himself, and I will guarantee that when they have heard me through they will be more willing to tear Lincoln and yourself to pieces than they will Vallandigham.”

The exile received a mixed reception in the South. Many welcomed him for what he represented. “The Government in Richmond saw it as a promise of counter-revolution in the North,” wrote Nicolay and Hay, “and some of the Confederate generals built upon it the rosiest hopes for future campaigns.” But because Vallandigham maintained his allegiance to the United States and his desire for reunion, some viewed him as an enemy of Southern independence who had no place in their midst. “Unless he intends to renounce his allegiance to our enemies,” wrote one editor of the Richmond
Sentinel,
“he owes it to himself and us not to stay here.”

As it turned out, Vallandigham had no intention of staying. When Confederate president Jefferson Davis requested a formal statement of his “guest's” intent and status, Vallandigham replied that he was in the South under compulsion and wished to leave. “My most earnest desire is for a passport, if necessary, and permission to leave as soon as possible through some Confederate port…for Canada, where I can see my family, and as far as possible, transact my business unmolested.” His wish was granted; after just twenty-four days in the Confederacy, he was on a ship that managed to avoid a Union blockade and take him to Bermuda. From there he sailed to Canada.

While Vallandigham was maneuvering his way out of the South, in the North Lincoln continued to face hostile Democrats and even some loyal Republicans. It was an era when presidents, by tradition, did not directly court public opinion, but, writes historian David Herbert Donald, “by mid-summer of 1863, it was desperately important that the administration's policies should be understood. On no issue was this need so great as on the abrogation of civil liberties.” The president had been waiting for an appropriate time to address his critics, and found it when a group of New York Democrats sent him a series of stinging resolutions they had adopted in Albany that strongly condemned the treatment of Vallandigham. It was, they declared, a “blow…against the spirit of our law and Constitution” and an assault on “the liberty of speech and of the press, the right of trial by jury, the law of evidence, and the privilege of habeas corpus.”

Lincoln's response, which he considered the best state paper he had written up to that time, was sent on June 12, 1863, with a copy delivered to the influential
New York Tribune
so that the nation at large could read what he had to say. The president began on a cordial note, thanking the Albany protesters for their “eminently patriotic” resolve “to maintain our common government and country, despite the folly and wickedness, as they may conceive, of any administration.” He then went on to explain that the suspension of certain liberties guaranteed in the Constitution during times of peace was vitally necessary in this time of peril, when those who wished to destroy the Union would use those very liberties “to keep on foot amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors of their cause in a thousand different ways.”

Furthermore, he argued, the Constitution itself provided for the suspension of habeas corpus “in cases of Rebellion or Invasion, [when] the public Safety may require it.” This, he wrote, “is precisely our present case.” Lincoln rejected the argument that the measures taken in this time of war might continue after peace was restored, suggesting that it would be akin to saying “that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life.”

As for the specific charges the Albany protesters made in regard to Vallandigham, the president emphasized that he was not arrested for criticizing the administration, “but because he was damaging the army, upon the existence and vigor of which the nation depends.” Lincoln reminded the petitioners that he had the right and the duty to sustain the armies by punishing deserters, and then poignantly asked them, “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?” Having presented his defense of the actions taken against Vallandigham, the president made a rather remarkable concession to fallibility:

Lincoln's letter, reprinted and read by an estimated ten million Americans, received an enthusiastic response in many circles. “The right word has at last been spoken by the right man, at the right time, and from the right place,” wrote John W. Forney of the
Washington Chronicle
. “It will thrill the whole land.” But many Democrats, including the Albany protesters, were decidedly unimpressed, and their attacks on the administration continued unabated. Less than one month after the missive was printed, former president Franklin Pierce weighed in at a rally in New Hampshire: “Here in these free states it is made criminal for that noble martyr of free speech, Mr. Vallandigham, to discuss public affairs in Ohio—ay, even here, in time of war the mere arbitrary will of the president takes the place of the Constitution, and the president himself announces to us that it is treasonable to speak or to write otherwise than he may prescribe.”

Copperheads in Ohio had already shown their contempt for the administration by nominating Vallandigham, still exiled in Canada, as the Democratic candidate for governor. It was a worrisome turn of events for the president. Though he found it difficult to believe that “one genuine American would, or could, be induced to, vote for such a man as Vallandigham,” he nevertheless understood that the Ohio gubernatorial election could be used by his enemies as a means to repudiate him. Therefore, as he told Gideon Welles, he watched it with “more anxiety…than he had in 1860 when he was chosen.”

Prominent supporters of the president were sent to Ohio to rally around the Republican candidate, John Brough, in the exceedingly nasty race, while Vallandigham did his best to inspire his adherents from his base in exile at Windsor, Ontario. In one typically grandiose letter, dated July 15, 1863, the Copperhead candidate addressed the faithful: “Six weeks ago, when just going into banishment, because an audacious but mostly cowardly despotism compelled it, I addressed you as a fellow-citizen. Today and from the very place then selected by me, but after wearisome and most perilous journeyings for more than four thousand miles by land and upon the sea—still in exile, though almost in sight of my native state—I greet you as your representative.”

Lincoln was elated when Vallandigham lost the key election in a landslide. It had been a referendum on his administration, and he had been vindicated. “Glory to God in the highest,” he reportedly telegraphed John Brough. “Ohio has saved the Nation.” As far as the president was concerned, the Copperhead had essentially been defanged. Indeed, Vallandigham had become so inconsequential that Lincoln barely reacted the next year when he learned that his nemesis had, in disguise, quietly slipped back to the United States. Carl Sandburg recounted the rather ignoble return:

Though he continued to agitate against Lincoln and the war after his return, it was apparent that Vallandigham had lost most of his luster. A secret Democratic order known as the Sons of Liberty did draft him as their “Grand Commander.” But considering its membership was drawn from what one editor described as an “an assorted lot of ninny-hammers and zanies…whose heads are emptier than an idiot's skull,” it was hardly a crowning achievement. Plus, their silly rituals annoyed and embarrassed their chosen leader. Vallandigham was further humiliated at the 1864 Democratic National Convention in Chicago when the peace platform he put forth was virtually ignored by the party's nominee for president, General George McClellan. And Lincoln's sweeping victory in the election that followed left the nation's leading Copperhead with little to do but slither back to his law practice in Dayton. Seven years later, while defending a client on murder charges, he accidentally shot himself dead as he demonstrated to the jury how the murder weapon might have been used.

Vallandigham always believed that history would vindicate him and hold him in high regard, but it was his enemy, “King Lincoln,” who remains enshrined in the nation's consciousness. Still, “the wily agitator” did leave a legacy of sorts, serving as the inspiration for Edward Everett Hale's 1863 classic short story “The Man Without a Country.”

It was July 7, 1865. Mary Surratt was led to the gallows of the Washington Arsenal Penitentiary. Debilitated by fear and barely able to walk, she was practically carried up the steps to the scaffold. There, gently swaying in the hot breeze, four ropes awaited her and the three men who were also condemned. As the noose was adjusted around her neck, she could see her own coffin and a freshly dug hole in the ground yawning to greet her. She swooned at the sight and begged her captors, “Don't let me fall,” just before the floor dropped from beneath her and the rope snapped her neck.

 

It is said that a person who dies violently under the shadow of unresolved circumstances is remanded to a certain purgatory—a disturbed spirit in the realm of the living, waiting for a time when the truth behind his or her death is revealed. If so, Mary Surratt qualifies as a ghost of exceeding prominence.

She was the first woman executed by the U.S. government, a forty-three-year-old widow hanged as a conspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Yet nearly a century and a half after her death, proof of her guilt or innocence remains stubbornly elusive. And, some say, her spirit is restless. There have been numerous reported sightings of her ghost, including at her execution site in Washington, D.C., where a black-clad figure, bound hand-and-foot as Mrs. Surratt was at her death, now moves effortlessly, her hooded head drooping unnaturally close to her shoulder.

The portraits of a stern, hardened woman in the few photographs of Mrs. Surratt known to exist seem to reflect her character—a person who had lived a difficult life and who thought in extremes. Sent as a young, fatherless girl to be educated by the Sisters of Charity in Alexandria, Virginia, she became a convert and a relentless Roman Catholic proselytizer. She also had an abiding kinship with the South all of her adult life—an association that, justly or not, would lead to the noose.

At age seventeen she married John Harrison Surratt, a rabid secessionist and debt-ridden drunk. They purchased 287 acres in Prince George's County, Maryland, and built a home they also used as a tavern, a hostel, a post office, and a polling place in a town that would become known as Surrattsville (now Clinton). Located in a county with deep-seated Southern sentiments (Lincoln received just one vote there in the 1860 election), and with John Surratt's vocal opposition to Union policies (he owned seven slaves), the establishment became a speakeasy for those sharing similar attitudes. There is also ample evidence that the Surratt residence, just twelve miles outside the nation's capital, became a safe house for the flourishing Confederate underground.

When John Surratt died in 1862, his wife was left with the burdens of an encumbered farm and other legacies of her ne'er-do-well husband. With her elder son, Isaac, serving in the Confederate Army, and with John Surratt Jr. occupied as a Confederate courier, it proved nearly impossible for Mary to keep the family business afloat. She decided to rent the Surrattsville property to a former D.C. policeman, John Lloyd, and move to a boardinghouse in Washington that had been acquired by her husband years earlier. It was a fateful move.

John Wilkes Booth was a frequent visitor at Mrs. Surratt's. The impassioned, secessionist actor had allied himself with John Surratt Jr., and they set about forming a plot to kidnap the president. The boardinghouse became a meeting place for those recruited to carry out the plan they hoped would effect a better settlement for the South near the end of the Civil War. The kidnapping scheme, a rather inept effort, failed miserably, and Booth's intentions soon turned to murder. It was carried out on the night of April 14, 1865, as President and Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed a performance of
Our American Cousin
at Ford's Theatre.

The recently unified nation—North and South—was stunned by the assassination, and an immediate restoration of stability was the paramount goal of Secretary of State Edwin Stanton. He sought swift justice for the ghastly crime. Booth, the lead actor, was already dead—shot in a barn by Union troops who had tracked him down to Bowling Green, Virginia, after his dramatic escape from Ford's Theatre. The government quickly pressed its case against the supporting cast.

By some accounts Mary Surratt was a bit player swept up in the frenzy. To others, however, she was the “mother of conspirators,” as one newspaper called her. According to Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, who served as the lead government prosecutor, she was “the master spirit among them all.” Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, declared that she had “kept the nest that hatched the egg” of murderous conspiracy. And the military tribunal he ordered to try Mrs. Surratt and seven others ensured that his view would prevail.

The trial opened on May 8, 1865, less than a month after Lincoln died. A quick, decisive resolution appeared to be its primary concern; a fair hearing trial for the defendants certainly wasn't. “Here the government made its own rules,” writes historian Michael W. Kauffman, “shared them with no one, and changed them as it saw fit.” For example, Joseph Holt, who served as legal adviser to the commission in addition to his role as lead prosecutor, recommended that the trial begin in secret, whether or not the defendants had representation. They had to scramble for lawyers, and Mary Surratt was stuck with a pair of neophytes who harmed her case immeasurably.

The testimony against her was damning, particularly that of John Lloyd, the former policeman who rented her property in Surrattsville, and Louis J. Weichmann, a tenant at her Washington boardinghouse. Lloyd testified that Mary had come to Surrattsville on the day of the assassination, delivered a pair of field glasses, and told him to have them ready, along with some guns previously hidden at the property, as they would be called for that night. Sure enough, Booth and coconspirator David Herold came to Surrattsville for the supplies after Lincoln's murder, just as she had said they would. Weichmann testified that a number of the accused conspirators met frequently at Mrs. Surratt's Washington boardinghouse, which was just a few blocks away from Ford's Theatre, and were warmly welcomed there. He also claimed that after she returned from Surrattsville, she and Booth conferred privately in her living room only hours before the assassination.

Lawyers more experienced than Mrs. Surratt's might have effectively argued that both Lloyd and Weichmann were suspects in the plot to kill Lincoln, and that their testimony was perhaps prompted by an effort to save their own skins. But as it stood, her attorneys bungled their way through the whole trial. Prosecutors openly ridiculed them and lectured them on their inadequacies. On one occasion, when Mrs. Surratt's lawyer Frederick Aiken asked for some leeway on a particular point by arguing that he hadn't objected to other issues as he could have, prosecutor Henry Burnett lacerated him:

“It is certainly a very weak argument for counsel to say that he permitted illegitimate matter, and therefore illegitimate matter should be permitted for him. It is his duty, under his oath, to see that his client has the rights of law, and it is an admission that I certainly would not make to the court, that I had not maintained the rights of my client. He is to blame, and no one else, if such has been the case.”

Inept lawyers aside, the hasty trial was indisputably biased in favor of the prosecution, which sought to link the defendants inexorably with the crimes of the Confederacy. “If ever Justice sat with unbandaged, blood-shot eyes, she did so on this occasion,” said trial witness Henry Kyd Douglas, author of
I Rode with Stonewall
. Mary Surratt, along with three of her codefendants, was convicted and sentenced to hang. (The four other defendants were given life sentences.) Though few at the time doubted her guilt, almost no one believed she would actually die on the gallows given her sex and age. It was a surprise, then, that President Johnson's expected commutation of her sentence never came—even after the filing of a writ of habeas corpus and a clemency petition signed by five members of the military tribunal that had convicted her. Johnson later claimed he never saw the petition, and Holt was accused of withholding it from him—a charge he vigorously denied.

The trial left unanswered many questions that a more judicious, accountable proceeding might have resolved: Was Mrs. Surratt really an active participant, or merely at the periphery of the plot? If she was involved in the abortive kidnapping scheme, did that make her liable for Booth's subsequent decision to murder? Could it be that she was charmed by the handsome actor, a genuine superstar in his day, and unwittingly assisted him? Did she meet with some of the conspirators with malicious intent, or, as some supporters have claimed, simply as a gracious hostess to associates of her son's who were guests in her home? Lewis Powell, the Booth cohort who grievously wounded Secretary of State William Seward in an attempt to kill him on the night of Lincoln's assassination, attested to her innocence. On the other hand, George Atzerodt, who was supposed to kill Vice President Johnson that night, stated that she was fully involved. Both hanged with her.

And what of those accused conspirators who escaped the noose? Was Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set Booth's broken leg, really less culpable than Mary Surratt? He was given a life sentence and pardoned four years later. John Surratt Jr., a prime mover in the kidnapping plot, escaped to Canada after the assassination and was later captured in Egypt. He was tried and acquitted in a civilian court on charges nearly identical to his mother's. Then there was John Lloyd, the prime witness against Mrs. Surratt. Why wasn't he charged in the plot? After all, he provided Booth with guns and other supplies during his escape.

Mary Surratt's guilt or innocence still preoccupies historians and other interested folk. “It's addictive,” said Laurie Verge, a historian for the Maryland-National Park and Planning Commission, which oversees the restored Surratt home and business in Clinton. “Everyone is looking for that one bit of evidence that will settle once and for all the big question.”

In the meantime, the ghost smolders.