On this episode of Our American Stories, (This Day in History: President Lincoln Died April 15) - John Wilkes Booth did not act alone; eight people were eventually indicted as co-conspirators in Lincoln's murder. One of them was a woman, Mary Surratt. Here to tell the story is Kate Clifford Larson, author of The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love to tell stories about history. One of
our favorite subjects Abraham Lincoln. We've told many great stories
about Lincoln. Go to our Americanstories dot com and hit
that search bar and type in the words Abraham Lincoln
(00:33):
and enjoy. John Wilkes Booth did not act alone. Eight
people were eventually indicted as co conspirators in Lincoln's murder.
One of them was a woman, Mary Surat. Here to
tell the story is Kate Clifford Larson, author of the
Assassin's Accomplice, Mary Surat and the Plot to kill Abraham Lincoln.
(00:57):
And we're telling this story because on this day in
eighteen sixty five, President Abraham Lincoln died. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
After I finished my Harriet Tubman book, which came out
in late two thousand and three, I started, you know,
looking around for another project. And every day I google
Harriet Tubman's name. I've done that since two thousand and
I still do it today. And one day when I googled,
this event popped up and it was from the Sarat
(01:29):
Museum in Clinton, Maryland, and they were hosting a tour,
a bus tour to the eastern shore of Maryland to
see sites related to Harriet Tubman. And I'm like, the
Sarat Museum, What is that? So I went to their
website and it was the Sarat Museum is Mary Serat's
(01:49):
former home in Clinton, Maryland, used to be called Surattsville.
And it's a house museum and it has a research center.
And I started reading this story about Mary Surat, and
I was shocked because I had gotten my PhD in
American history and I virtually knew nothing about Mary Surat
and her involvement in the assassination plot that resulted in
(02:14):
the death of President Abraham Lincoln. So I was really
intrigued by this woman who was accused of plotting with
John Wilkes Booth and who was tried and convicted and
hanged for her role in the assassination. And her story
had sort of been lost to me and to other people.
(02:36):
And I was reading information on the website, and then
I went out on the internet and I read some
more and it seemed to me that Mary Surat had
been wrongly accused, convicted, and wrongly hanged. And I thought, well,
I'm a woman's historian. I'm going to go and I'm
going to research her life, and I'm going to defend
her and tell the real story and resurrect her from
(02:59):
the ashes of her life. So I wrote up a
proposal and it was optioned by Basic Books, and I
started researching, and within a matter of a few short months,
I realized, Oops, she's guilty. And it didn't take long
to figure out that she was very, very complicit in
(03:23):
the assassination. But I knew as a historian, I had
to have some objectivity and I needed to show how
did she become involved in this a woman of her
stature at the time and place to become involved in
such a world changing event. So she was born in
eighteen twenty two in Prince George's County, Maryland, that's in
(03:47):
southern Maryland on the western Shore. And her parents they
were modest plantation owners and they had several enslaved people,
and you know, they had a comfortable life. Mary a
couple of brothers, but her father died when she was
a small child, leaving her mother. Elizabeth Jenkins was their
(04:08):
family name. She sent Mary away to boarding school outside
of Washington, d c in Alexandria. She returned home in
about eighteen thirty nine. She was about seventeen years old,
and she met a man by the name of John
(04:29):
Harrison Sarat, a local man who was being raised by
foster parents who were related in some way. But it's
kind of murky. He was several years older than her,
and he was having an affair with another woman in
the community, and she bore his child. But Mary fell
madly in love with him, and he married her in
(04:51):
eighteen forty and she was seventeen going on eighteen years old.
I don't know what happened to the other woman's child.
That sort of becomes murky too. In the historical record.
Mary had three children pretty quickly, Isaac and then followed
by a daughter, Anna, and then a son, John Sarat Junior,
in eighteen forty four. John Sarat was a very heavy
(05:15):
drinker and gambler, and in eighteen fifty two he purchased
land at a crossroads about twelve miles south of Washington,
d C. And it was a becoming a very busy
place because d C was growing. Of course, in the
first half of the nineteenth century, there was lots of commerce,
(05:35):
so he built a tavern and an inn and had
a two or three hundred acre farm there. He had
a blacksmith there, and he also purchased a boarding house
in Washington, d C. On H Street that he leased
out to other people who ran it as boarding house.
As one historian noted, John Sarat became the tavern's best customer.
(06:00):
He drank heavily, he gambled heavily. These were things that
went on in taverns, particularly in the South. Mary, in
the meantime, educated coming from a woman who was a
powerfully strong woman who knew how to manage property. Mary
sort of emulated her mother, and she managed the tavern
(06:20):
and the farm because her husband was drunk and gambling
all the time. She did it such a good job
that she could send her children to boarding schools in
and around Washington, d c. And that allowed her to
pay full time attention to the tavern and the business.
It became the local post office, which was a big
deal for a tavern to be appointed a local post
(06:42):
office by the United States government because that meant local
people had to go to that building to get their mail,
and if they went there, they would have food, they
would have liquor, you know, it would just became an important,
much more important tavern site. So Mary was doing very
very well.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you've been listening to author Kate Clifford Larson tell
the story of Mary Surat. When we come back, more
of the remarkable story of the woman who became the
first ever to be hanged by the US government. Here
on our American Stories. Here at our American Stories, we
(07:32):
bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith and love.
Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to
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we do, please go to our American Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot,
(07:53):
help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we continue with our American
Stories and author Kate Clifford Larson, author of The Assassin's Accomplice,
(08:17):
Mary Surat and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. It's
available on Amazon and all the usual suspects. And we're
telling this story because on this day in eighteen sixty five,
President Abraham Lincoln died let's pick up where we last
left off. Here is Kate.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
As the nation is heading towards this sectional crisis over
the issue of slavery. Abolition is really spreading. Anti slavery
movement is gaining speed, particularly in the North. Mary and
her neighbors are doubling down and more and more committed
to slave society. And she and slave about twelve people.
(09:02):
And of course, in the election of Lincoln in eighteen
sixty begins the powerful drum beat towards Civil War. And
in eighteen sixty one, thirteen Confederate states in the South
separate from the Union. Maryland stays in the Union, part
of it by strong arming on the part of the
(09:25):
Lincoln administration. But there was an appetite in Maryland to
not be part of this sectional crisis. But Mary and
her neighbors were all in with the Confederacy, but they
could not be part of the secession because Maryland was
staying in the Union. And then that set the stage
(09:45):
for a lot of spying, a lot of contrabrand networking,
running of munitions and information back and forth across the
Potomac River there to southern Maryland and over to Virginia,
which was one of the Confederate States, and Mary and
her family became involved in that sort of spy network,
(10:08):
the trader network, I like to call it, against the
United States. And as the post Office, they could do
a lot when it came to spying and helping rebel
couriers get through the countryside, because it seemed so inocuous.
It's the post office, so messages could be brought back
(10:28):
and forth and pretend or stuffed in regular mail, and
it's actually rebel information and intelligence. So but John Sarat
died suddenly of a heart attack in eighteen sixty two,
kind of throwing the whole operation in trouble because now
Mary has to fend off debtors and keep control of
(10:50):
the property for her children who are still in boarding schools,
so she calls them back. All of them have to
come back from boarding school. Isaac immediately, instead of helping
his mother, goes off and joins the Confederacy. He joins
a regiment in Virginia and is gone the entire Civil War.
Anna comes home to help her mother, and John does too,
(11:12):
and he's appointed at eighteen years old, the new postmaster
in the tavern, and young John Sarrat becomes heavily involved
in this rebel network, this courier system. But the United
States Army has posted soldiers throughout southern Maryland because they
(11:33):
knew that so many of those Southern Marylanders were communicating
with and aiding and abetting the Confederacy across the Potomac.
So the Army soldiers were there. They were watching the tavern,
and they recognized that there were spies going through there,
and there were secret messages being passed through the tavern.
(11:53):
So they threw young John in prison. So he signed
an allegiance to the United States, promised to behave, and
they let him go, and of course he didn't behave.
He continued his operations, but they knew that it was
too risky to manage it through the Surat tavern. So
(12:13):
he became a personal courier himself and got involved in
some very sophisticated networks of spies that traveled through Maryland
into Pennsylvania, New York, all the Northern states. And Mary,
worried that her son's activities might put the property at
risk again, decided to lease the property to a neighbor,
(12:37):
John Lloyd, and she moved her daughter and a couple
of the enslaved people that hadn't run away by that
time to Washington, d C. To the boarding house, and
she became a boarding house keeper. It could support her.
The tavern was leased. That was good, So they moved
(12:57):
to h Street in Washington, d C. To boarding house.
But of course, because it was the seat of the
United States governments, there were lots of Confederate spies that
were trying to get there and get information and pass
information back and forth. So it sort of made sense
that Mary might find this advantageous for her son as well.
So the war is raging on. John Wilkes Booth appears
(13:21):
on the scene. Now, John Wilkes Booth was one of
the most famous actors in America at the time. He
was born into an acting family. His father was a
famous actor. He grew up in Maryland. He had strong
Southern sympathies. So he hatched this idea, and I don't
(13:43):
know where it came from, that he would kidnap and
ransom President Lincoln. The Confederacy was losing a lot of
Confederate soldiers, not only by death but by capture, and
they were imprisoned in Northern prisons, and by eighteen sixty
four the Confederacy was struggling with recruits. Confederate soldiers were
(14:10):
running away a wall, they were abandoning their posts. They
could see that it was a desperate cause and it
wasn't working out for them so well. So Booth thought
if he could capture Lincoln and hold him hostage for
the release of Confederate soldiers, that would reinfuse the Confederacy
with soldiers again, and they would triumph over the United States.
(14:35):
So it's just amazing this guy thought this plan would work.
But he approached some Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland, including
a man by the name of doctor Mud, Samuel Mudd,
who was a physician there in southern Maryland, and he
(14:55):
worked with other Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland and wanted
to acquire supporters, money and supplies. He needed horses, he
needed a wagon. He needed someone with a boat to
transport the kidnap president across the Potomac into Virginia, where
(15:18):
he would be held hostage. So Samuel Mudd made these
connections in southern Maryland, and some people stepped forward and
offered a boat, and other people got involved and said
I'll row the boat, I will secure a carriage. Well.
At Christmas time in Washington, d C. Samuel Mudd, Doctor
(15:39):
Mud traveled to the city with John Wilkes Booth with
the intention of introducing him to John Surrat and with
the idea that John was very well connected with these
Confederate spy networks and that he could help Booth. Mary
(16:00):
had least one of her rooms to a young man
by the name of Lewis Wyckman. And so just before Christmas,
John Sarat is walking down the street with Lewis Weyckman
and they quote unquote run into doctor Mudd and John
Wilkes Booth, and Doctor Mudd introduces them and they decide
(16:22):
to go have drinks privately in a hotel room. So
they go up to this hotel room, and this is
all based on testimony by Lewis Wyckman later on during
the trial of the conspirators. And they asked Lewis to
sit on the other side of the room, that he
wasn't going to be part of this whatever they were
(16:42):
talking about, but it wasn't like he couldn't hear what
was going on. And Mud and Booth explained their plan
to John Surat about getting people and resources to capture
the president, kidnap him, take him down through southern Maryland
where all those friendly sympathizers were, and get him rowed
(17:03):
across the Potomac River and into Virginia to ransom him
for the freedom of Confederate soldiers.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
And you're listening to author Kate Clifford Larson tell one
heck of a story about Mary Sarat and about America
during the Civil War, and how complicated it was Mary
and her peers in Maryland, Well, they many of them
doubled down on slavery. That Mary also had a post
(17:31):
office inside her tavern. And then came her kids, and
some of them joined the cause too. One actually went
off to fight. Another actually was sent to jail for
aiding and abetting the Confederacy as a spy. When we
come back more of the remarkable story of Mary Sarat
and the American Civil War and Lincoln's assassination here on
(17:53):
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories,
and the story of Mary Sarat is told by Kate
(18:15):
Clifford Larson, whose book The Assassin's Accomplice, Mary Sarat and
the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln is available on Amazon
and all the usual suspects. Samuel Alexander Mudd worked as
a doctor and tobacco farmer in southern Maryland. The Civil
War seriously damaged his business, especially when Maryland abolished slavery
(18:38):
in eighteen sixty four. Shortly thereafter, doctor Mud met with
the would be Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. Let's return
to Kate Clifford Larson with more of the story.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Well, John Saratt thought this was a great idea. They
had maps and plans and it was all, you know,
this was really exciting, and so John agreed and he
set to work bringing in people that would help with
this plan. But they don't bring in lou Wyckman. Even
though lou Wyckman hears all the stuff that's going on,
(19:11):
he sees what's happening, they don't include him. I think
they thought he was a bit of a wimp. So
throughout the first couple of months of eighteen sixty five,
it's clear the end is coming and the Confederacy is losing,
and they're desperate, and John Wilkes Booth is becoming more
and more enraged and more and more determined that he's
(19:33):
going to do something. He starts spending more time at
the Sarat's boarding house, and the other borders in the
house notice him coming frequently, and of course they're all
thrilled because he's like the most famous actor in America
and he's handsome and dashing. I remember there was the
director of the Serat House Museum once said to me,
(19:56):
it's like having Tom Cruise come to your house all
the time. And this was years ago when he was,
you know, this big hot actor. He still is. Okay,
I'll give you that, but anyway, so you know, he's
just he's amazing, and everybody's like, wow, he goes to
this house. But he's planning with the co conspirators. They
tried to kidnap the president in March. Now he's been reelected,
(20:23):
Booth is furious and he's determined that they're going to
prevent the inauguration and that's going to happen on the fourth.
But he can't. He can't, he can't prevent the inauguration.
He reportedly is there at the inauguration in Washington, d C.
On March fourth, eighteen sixty five, and there are photographs
(20:45):
of the inauguration, and some historians have identified Booth down
there and he had a pistol with him, and he
later said he was almost close enough to shoot the
president right there at the inauguration, but he did not.
And so on March sixteenth, they're out on the road.
They're set there waiting for the president's carriage to come,
(21:07):
and the president did not travel with protection, which just
blows my mind that he did not, but he didn't.
And lo and behold, they had not heard that the
president had canceled his trip for that day. So they're
out on the road. Their plan is foiled. The boarding
house folks see them return to the boarding house. Everyone's furious, yelling.
(21:29):
They go up to room. They're upset, screaming. They're just
angry that this has failed. And Booth takes off and
so does John Sarat and it seems like the plan
is over and done with, but it's not. Booth is
so angry that his plan has failed that now he's
(21:51):
decided he's going to kill the president, and he reactivates
in early April this plan that he is going to
shoot the president when he's out in public. Mary becomes
privy to these plans, and so do the other co conspirators.
So Mary gets heavily involved, and she goes to her
(22:13):
tavern and she informs John Lloyd what She doesn't tell
him all the details apparently, but says, you be ready
and things are going to be happening, and I want
you to be ready. Lewis Weikman is privy to all
of this because he takes her in rented carriages down
(22:33):
to her tavern three times before April fourteenth, when Lincoln
is finally assassinated. On the final trip down to the
tavern on the day of the assassination, he takes Mary
Sarat down there and she delivers a message to John
(22:56):
Lloyd that he is to have some guns ready and
other supplies because her son John will be there and
others will be there that night to help. You know,
they're going to do something, and he has to be ready.
So they go back to Washington, d C. And Washington
(23:17):
d C. On the fourteenth is in jubilation. There are
fireworks going off. It is beautiful and exciting because that
is the day that the Confederate flag came down in
Charleston Harbor the end of the Civil War. A few
days prior to that, Lee had surrendered to Grant, an
(23:38):
appomatic Courthouse in Virginia and the final you know, raising
of the American United States flag in South Carolina on
the fourteenth was truly a day to celebrate. And as
Lou Weickman and Mary Surat are approaching the city and
they see it all lit up, Mary makes a cryptic
(23:58):
comment something to the effect of, you know, they're all
going to be sorry, and Lou Whiteman's like, you know,
what does that mean? So they get back to Washington,
d C. They have dinner, and then Mary decides to
go to church because it's Good Friday. She's a devout Catholic,
and there's an evening service. So she heads out the
(24:22):
door with another woman who's boarding in the house and
they start walking, but it's raining and they decide not
to go, and they turn back and they go back
into the house. But as they're entering the house, a
man approaches Mary Surut and his name is Richard Smoot,
and he is the person that the boat was being
(24:43):
held for for the first the kidnapping and now apparently
for Booth's escape. But he hadn't been paid and he
wanted to be paid, and he'd been asking for two
months to get paid, so he came to Mary and
he said, I want to get paid, And in the
doorway of the house, she turns to him and says,
go away. You can't be seen here. You will be
(25:04):
paid tonight. It's happening tonight. Go away, Go away. So
he freaks out and he races away, and he crosses
the bridge into Alexandria because he's afraid they're going to
close the bridges and he won't be able to escape Washington, DC.
Because he knows something is going to happen. They're sitting
in the boarding house and Mary is acting strangely, and
(25:28):
she gets irritated with everybody because after dinner, someone's playing
the piano, they're singing songs whatever. They're unaware of what
Mary knows is going to happen, and she sends them
all to bed. She says, everybody, just go just go
to bed. On go away. That evening, Abraham Lincoln had
plans to go with his wife and his son and
(25:49):
other people to Ford's Theater to watch the play our
American cousin, and Booth knew this because he's so connected
to the theater world. He knew that the president was going
to show up at the theater. That night, and he
made plans to go there and assassinate the president.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
And you've been listening to Kate Clifford Larsen tell one
heck of a story about Mary Sarat and in the end,
the story of the foiled kidnapping plan of Abraham Lincoln
and ultimately the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And we learned
in this particular segment about how that kidnapping plan had
(26:29):
been foiled, and it infuriated Booth, and he had one
option left, kill Lincoln, and he went and lobbied some
of his co conspirators who he had gotten together to
kidnap Lincoln. And then comes those final days April fourteenth,
the day the Confederate flag came down in Charleston and
(26:51):
led to a jubilant celebration in DC. The Illumination, it
was called, because the sky was so lit up. It
comes April fifteenth, Good Friday, and that's the day that
Lincoln is assassinated. When we come back more of the
remarkable story of Mary Sarat, the first woman ever hanged
(27:13):
by the United States government, the story of Abraham Lincoln,
who died on this day in eighteen sixty five. Here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories.
(27:41):
On the day of Abraham Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theater
in Washington, d C. John Wilkes Booth made sure his
second attempt to decapitate the Union would be successful. Let's
return to Kate Clifford Larson, author of the assassin's accomplice
Mary sarat and the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln. Here
(28:03):
again is Kate.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Earlier in the day, he had jury rigged the door
to the balcony where the president would sit, so that
he could get in there and hide, and then he
could shoot the president and then escape without being caught.
And so he was lurking around, not at the Saratouse,
but he's doing that. He had given orders to George
(28:26):
Atsat to assassinate the vice president at the time. George
Astat sat at a bar and got drunk and did
not assassinate the vice president. Booth did not know that
at the time, and Louis Payne had been given the
job of assassinating William Henry Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State.
(28:48):
Booth had hoped to decapitate the chain of command in
the US government. He had hoped also to assassinate General Grant,
who was supposed to attend the theater that night, but
he and his wife went to visit their children instead.
Blewis Pain goes to the Seward house, pretends he's there
(29:11):
with medication because Secretary of State Seward had been terribly
injured in a carriage accident and had broken his jaw
a few days beforehand, and he's recuperating in his Washington,
d c. Home and so there was a guard at
the door, but he convinced the guard to let him
in and deliver the medication. He goes upstairs Sewards two
(29:32):
sons are there. Payne pulls out a knife and starts
stabbing the suns, and then he goes and he starts
stabbing Seward, who falls off the bed and is protected
because the bed between the bed and the wall. Payne
flees the house, having injured a bunch of people, and
he races away, and he goes to Mary Sarat's house,
(29:57):
and it's eleven o'clock at night and he's racing there,
but in the meantime, Lincoln has been assassinated by John
Wilkes booth. He kills him, jumps off onto the stage.
The crowd is crazed. He runs off. He jumps on
a horse that's waiting for him in the back alley
(30:18):
of the theater and he races away. David Arnold, the
other co conspirator, is waiting for him outside a bridge
to get out of Washington, DC, and they escape together
into southern Maryland. I don't know how or who told
the police very quickly that Booth had been seen at
(30:38):
Mary Serat's house frequently. But they go there looking for Booth.
And it's about midnight or so and they knock on
the door of the police and they come in. They
wake everybody up, and they search the house looking for
John Wilkes Booth. They don't look for evidence, they just
look for Booth himself, and of course he's not in
(30:59):
the house. While they're they're searching the house, who comes
knocking on the door but Louis Payne, and he looks suspicious.
They're asking him, what are you doing here? And he says,
I'm here to dig a ditch tomorrow morning for Missus Sarat.
And they turn to Mary Surat and they say do
(31:23):
you know this man? And she raises her hand and says,
I swear to God, I do not know this man,
and they're thinking, really, you have to be that dramatic. Well,
eventually they arrest her and everybody else in the house.
Over the next couple of days, it becomes crazy and
Louis Weikman gets nervous and he goes to the police
(31:45):
and tells them he's been watching crazy things go on
in the house and he thinks this whole plot has
been going on. So they take his testimony and he
travels around to different places trying to find the co
conspirators with them. He tells them who these people are
that a been meeting in the house. So over the
next couple of weeks they arrest all of the co
(32:05):
conspirators except for John Surat Junior, who just happened to
be outside of the state at the time. He's in
Pennsylvania and New York. He hears what happened, so he
flees to Canada so they can't find him, and Mary
gets arrested and the rest is history. Because she ends
up being tried with all the other conspirators. She's the
(32:28):
only woman that's part of this conspiracy trial. There are
eight of them, seven of the co conspirators and Mary Sarat,
making eight of them, and the trial is the trial
of the modern era. It really is. It's made even
more dramatic because the Pittman brothers, you know, shorthand Pittman Shorthand.
(32:52):
It's just been created. And so there and there, and
people are in there taking testimony in shorthand and then
transcribing it and sending it over the wires that night,
so the next morning, the newspapers across the country have
word for word testimony during the trial, and it is sensational.
(33:13):
She was found guilty and four of them, including Mary,
were sentenced to hang, and four were sent to prison
in the dry Totegas in Key West, Florida. There's a
famous prison there. There's a national park site. Now. People
pleaded for clemency for her.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
They went to the president, the new president, Andrew Johnson,
and he said that he would not commute her sentence,
that she kept the nest that hatched the egg of
the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
She was forty two years old, and it shocked the nation.
Once she was hanged, the nation turned against the government's
decision to hang her, and the press the decision, even
though they had vilified her throughout the trial and made
her to become this monster. And John, you know what
(34:08):
a horrific son he was. He runs away. He knows
his mother's been arrested. He's watching from Afar. He's protected
in Canada by Jesuit priests, and he watched from Afar
his mother going through that trial and being vilified, and
then she's convicted and then she's hanged. She died because
(34:30):
of him. She died protecting her son. And I think
we need to acknowledge that she did do that for him.
She did not become a witness for the prosecution. She
died for him. He escapes to England, where he is spotted,
and then he races through Europe. He ends up in
Rome and he joins the Vatican, the Papal Guard, and
(34:55):
then he's it's crazy, and then he's recognized by someone
who knew him and they were in Rome and they
recognize him. So he escapes from the Vatican and it's
this mad cap thing and they you know, he's followed
to Alexandria in Egypt, where he is finally captured and
brought back to the United States in eighteen sixty seven.
(35:19):
He's put on trial and it ends in a mistrial,
a hung jury, and then the government decides not to
try him again, something about the statute of limitations. It
was some crazy thing, and they thought, you know, we're
trying to move on here, we're trying to rebuild the nation.
We don't need this trial again. So he's set free.
He goes on on the lecture circuit, ridiculing the Lincoln
(35:43):
administration and how stupid they were and that they didn't
know this was coming. And so he made a little
bit of money, but not much because audiences are like, oh,
you know, go away. And his brother Isaac, who survived
the war, came back after the war was over, after
his mother was hanged, and he set up a He
(36:05):
worked for a steamship company in Baltimore, so John started
working with him, and they lived their lives in obscurity
there in Baltimore. And Anna ended up marrying a young
man who fell in love with her during the trial,
and they got married and moved to Baltimore as well.
But you know, the legacy just lived on what a
(36:27):
terrible thing that Mary had participated in, And some people
spent the rest of their lives, decades, decades trying to
prove that she was innocent and to restore her good name.
And it worked right through most of the twentieth century.
So that's part and parcel of women's history, retelling the
(36:48):
stories of women can do bad things, they can be
criminals too, and so I just found it interesting the
context of rewriting her history. So it's just such a
curious thing to me. So anyway, there you have it,
Mary Sarat Guilty.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
And there you have it. Indeed, a terrific job on
the production, storytelling and editing by our own Greg Hengler.
A special thanks as always to Kate Clifford Larson, who's
done several stories for us. Terrific stories, this one the
assassin's accomplice Mary Sarat and the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln.
Go out and buy it. It's a terrific read. Go
(37:33):
to Amazon with the usual suspects and what a story
this is. Talk about the trial of the century. Forget
the oj trial or the leopoldon Loeb trial. Can you
imagine what this one was like with the telegraph and
all these newspapers hitting the line every day with court transcripts.
Four were sentenced to hang, and one of them was
(37:55):
Mary because she refused to give up her son and
turned state's evidence and become a witness for the prosecution.
The story of Mary Surat, The story of the Lincoln Assassination.
President Abraham Lincoln died on this day in eighteen sixty five.
Here on our American stories.
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love to tell stories about history. One of
our favorite subjects Abraham Lincoln. We've told many great stories
about Lincoln. Go to our Americanstories dot com and hit
that search bar and type in the words Abraham Lincoln
(00:33):
and enjoy. John Wilkes Booth did not act alone. Eight
people were eventually indicted as co conspirators in Lincoln's murder.
One of them was a woman, Mary Surat. Here to
tell the story is Kate Clifford Larson, author of the
Assassin's Accomplice, Mary Surat and the Plot to kill Abraham Lincoln.
(00:57):
And we're telling this story because on this day in
eighteen sixty five, President Abraham Lincoln died. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
After I finished my Harriet Tubman book, which came out
in late two thousand and three, I started, you know,
looking around for another project. And every day I google
Harriet Tubman's name. I've done that since two thousand and
I still do it today. And one day when I googled,
this event popped up and it was from the Sarat
(01:29):
Museum in Clinton, Maryland, and they were hosting a tour,
a bus tour to the eastern shore of Maryland to
see sites related to Harriet Tubman. And I'm like, the
Sarat Museum, What is that? So I went to their
website and it was the Sarat Museum is Mary Serat's
(01:49):
former home in Clinton, Maryland, used to be called Surattsville.
And it's a house museum and it has a research center.
And I started reading this story about Mary Surat, and
I was shocked because I had gotten my PhD in
American history and I virtually knew nothing about Mary Surat
and her involvement in the assassination plot that resulted in
(02:14):
the death of President Abraham Lincoln. So I was really
intrigued by this woman who was accused of plotting with
John Wilkes Booth and who was tried and convicted and
hanged for her role in the assassination. And her story
had sort of been lost to me and to other people.
(02:36):
And I was reading information on the website, and then
I went out on the internet and I read some
more and it seemed to me that Mary Surat had
been wrongly accused, convicted, and wrongly hanged. And I thought, well,
I'm a woman's historian. I'm going to go and I'm
going to research her life, and I'm going to defend
her and tell the real story and resurrect her from
(02:59):
the ashes of her life. So I wrote up a
proposal and it was optioned by Basic Books, and I
started researching, and within a matter of a few short months,
I realized, Oops, she's guilty. And it didn't take long
to figure out that she was very, very complicit in
(03:23):
the assassination. But I knew as a historian, I had
to have some objectivity and I needed to show how
did she become involved in this a woman of her
stature at the time and place to become involved in
such a world changing event. So she was born in
eighteen twenty two in Prince George's County, Maryland, that's in
(03:47):
southern Maryland on the western Shore. And her parents they
were modest plantation owners and they had several enslaved people,
and you know, they had a comfortable life. Mary a
couple of brothers, but her father died when she was
a small child, leaving her mother. Elizabeth Jenkins was their
(04:08):
family name. She sent Mary away to boarding school outside
of Washington, d c in Alexandria. She returned home in
about eighteen thirty nine. She was about seventeen years old,
and she met a man by the name of John
(04:29):
Harrison Sarat, a local man who was being raised by
foster parents who were related in some way. But it's
kind of murky. He was several years older than her,
and he was having an affair with another woman in
the community, and she bore his child. But Mary fell
madly in love with him, and he married her in
(04:51):
eighteen forty and she was seventeen going on eighteen years old.
I don't know what happened to the other woman's child.
That sort of becomes murky too. In the historical record.
Mary had three children pretty quickly, Isaac and then followed
by a daughter, Anna, and then a son, John Sarat Junior,
in eighteen forty four. John Sarat was a very heavy
(05:15):
drinker and gambler, and in eighteen fifty two he purchased
land at a crossroads about twelve miles south of Washington,
d C. And it was a becoming a very busy
place because d C was growing. Of course, in the
first half of the nineteenth century, there was lots of commerce,
(05:35):
so he built a tavern and an inn and had
a two or three hundred acre farm there. He had
a blacksmith there, and he also purchased a boarding house
in Washington, d C. On H Street that he leased
out to other people who ran it as boarding house.
As one historian noted, John Sarat became the tavern's best customer.
(06:00):
He drank heavily, he gambled heavily. These were things that
went on in taverns, particularly in the South. Mary, in
the meantime, educated coming from a woman who was a
powerfully strong woman who knew how to manage property. Mary
sort of emulated her mother, and she managed the tavern
(06:20):
and the farm because her husband was drunk and gambling
all the time. She did it such a good job
that she could send her children to boarding schools in
and around Washington, d c. And that allowed her to
pay full time attention to the tavern and the business.
It became the local post office, which was a big
deal for a tavern to be appointed a local post
(06:42):
office by the United States government because that meant local
people had to go to that building to get their mail,
and if they went there, they would have food, they
would have liquor, you know, it would just became an important,
much more important tavern site. So Mary was doing very
very well.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you've been listening to author Kate Clifford Larson tell
the story of Mary Surat. When we come back, more
of the remarkable story of the woman who became the
first ever to be hanged by the US government. Here
on our American Stories. Here at our American Stories, we
(07:32):
bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith and love.
Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to
be told. But we can't do it without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If you love our stories in America like
we do, please go to our American Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot,
(07:53):
help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we continue with our American
Stories and author Kate Clifford Larson, author of The Assassin's Accomplice,
(08:17):
Mary Surat and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. It's
available on Amazon and all the usual suspects. And we're
telling this story because on this day in eighteen sixty five,
President Abraham Lincoln died let's pick up where we last
left off. Here is Kate.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
As the nation is heading towards this sectional crisis over
the issue of slavery. Abolition is really spreading. Anti slavery
movement is gaining speed, particularly in the North. Mary and
her neighbors are doubling down and more and more committed
to slave society. And she and slave about twelve people.
(09:02):
And of course, in the election of Lincoln in eighteen
sixty begins the powerful drum beat towards Civil War. And
in eighteen sixty one, thirteen Confederate states in the South
separate from the Union. Maryland stays in the Union, part
of it by strong arming on the part of the
(09:25):
Lincoln administration. But there was an appetite in Maryland to
not be part of this sectional crisis. But Mary and
her neighbors were all in with the Confederacy, but they
could not be part of the secession because Maryland was
staying in the Union. And then that set the stage
(09:45):
for a lot of spying, a lot of contrabrand networking,
running of munitions and information back and forth across the
Potomac River there to southern Maryland and over to Virginia,
which was one of the Confederate States, and Mary and
her family became involved in that sort of spy network,
(10:08):
the trader network, I like to call it, against the
United States. And as the post Office, they could do
a lot when it came to spying and helping rebel
couriers get through the countryside, because it seemed so inocuous.
It's the post office, so messages could be brought back
(10:28):
and forth and pretend or stuffed in regular mail, and
it's actually rebel information and intelligence. So but John Sarat
died suddenly of a heart attack in eighteen sixty two,
kind of throwing the whole operation in trouble because now
Mary has to fend off debtors and keep control of
(10:50):
the property for her children who are still in boarding schools,
so she calls them back. All of them have to
come back from boarding school. Isaac immediately, instead of helping
his mother, goes off and joins the Confederacy. He joins
a regiment in Virginia and is gone the entire Civil War.
Anna comes home to help her mother, and John does too,
(11:12):
and he's appointed at eighteen years old, the new postmaster
in the tavern, and young John Sarrat becomes heavily involved
in this rebel network, this courier system. But the United
States Army has posted soldiers throughout southern Maryland because they
(11:33):
knew that so many of those Southern Marylanders were communicating
with and aiding and abetting the Confederacy across the Potomac.
So the Army soldiers were there. They were watching the tavern,
and they recognized that there were spies going through there,
and there were secret messages being passed through the tavern.
(11:53):
So they threw young John in prison. So he signed
an allegiance to the United States, promised to behave, and
they let him go, and of course he didn't behave.
He continued his operations, but they knew that it was
too risky to manage it through the Surat tavern. So
(12:13):
he became a personal courier himself and got involved in
some very sophisticated networks of spies that traveled through Maryland
into Pennsylvania, New York, all the Northern states. And Mary,
worried that her son's activities might put the property at
risk again, decided to lease the property to a neighbor,
(12:37):
John Lloyd, and she moved her daughter and a couple
of the enslaved people that hadn't run away by that
time to Washington, d C. To the boarding house, and
she became a boarding house keeper. It could support her.
The tavern was leased. That was good, So they moved
(12:57):
to h Street in Washington, d C. To boarding house.
But of course, because it was the seat of the
United States governments, there were lots of Confederate spies that
were trying to get there and get information and pass
information back and forth. So it sort of made sense
that Mary might find this advantageous for her son as well.
So the war is raging on. John Wilkes Booth appears
(13:21):
on the scene. Now, John Wilkes Booth was one of
the most famous actors in America at the time. He
was born into an acting family. His father was a
famous actor. He grew up in Maryland. He had strong
Southern sympathies. So he hatched this idea, and I don't
(13:43):
know where it came from, that he would kidnap and
ransom President Lincoln. The Confederacy was losing a lot of
Confederate soldiers, not only by death but by capture, and
they were imprisoned in Northern prisons, and by eighteen sixty
four the Confederacy was struggling with recruits. Confederate soldiers were
(14:10):
running away a wall, they were abandoning their posts. They
could see that it was a desperate cause and it
wasn't working out for them so well. So Booth thought
if he could capture Lincoln and hold him hostage for
the release of Confederate soldiers, that would reinfuse the Confederacy
with soldiers again, and they would triumph over the United States.
(14:35):
So it's just amazing this guy thought this plan would work.
But he approached some Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland, including
a man by the name of doctor Mud, Samuel Mudd,
who was a physician there in southern Maryland, and he
(14:55):
worked with other Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland and wanted
to acquire supporters, money and supplies. He needed horses, he
needed a wagon. He needed someone with a boat to
transport the kidnap president across the Potomac into Virginia, where
(15:18):
he would be held hostage. So Samuel Mudd made these
connections in southern Maryland, and some people stepped forward and
offered a boat, and other people got involved and said
I'll row the boat, I will secure a carriage. Well.
At Christmas time in Washington, d C. Samuel Mudd, Doctor
(15:39):
Mud traveled to the city with John Wilkes Booth with
the intention of introducing him to John Surrat and with
the idea that John was very well connected with these
Confederate spy networks and that he could help Booth. Mary
(16:00):
had least one of her rooms to a young man
by the name of Lewis Wyckman. And so just before Christmas,
John Sarat is walking down the street with Lewis Weyckman
and they quote unquote run into doctor Mudd and John
Wilkes Booth, and Doctor Mudd introduces them and they decide
(16:22):
to go have drinks privately in a hotel room. So
they go up to this hotel room, and this is
all based on testimony by Lewis Wyckman later on during
the trial of the conspirators. And they asked Lewis to
sit on the other side of the room, that he
wasn't going to be part of this whatever they were
(16:42):
talking about, but it wasn't like he couldn't hear what
was going on. And Mud and Booth explained their plan
to John Surat about getting people and resources to capture
the president, kidnap him, take him down through southern Maryland
where all those friendly sympathizers were, and get him rowed
(17:03):
across the Potomac River and into Virginia to ransom him
for the freedom of Confederate soldiers.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
And you're listening to author Kate Clifford Larson tell one
heck of a story about Mary Sarat and about America
during the Civil War, and how complicated it was Mary
and her peers in Maryland, Well, they many of them
doubled down on slavery. That Mary also had a post
(17:31):
office inside her tavern. And then came her kids, and
some of them joined the cause too. One actually went
off to fight. Another actually was sent to jail for
aiding and abetting the Confederacy as a spy. When we
come back more of the remarkable story of Mary Sarat
and the American Civil War and Lincoln's assassination here on
(17:53):
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories,
and the story of Mary Sarat is told by Kate
(18:15):
Clifford Larson, whose book The Assassin's Accomplice, Mary Sarat and
the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln is available on Amazon
and all the usual suspects. Samuel Alexander Mudd worked as
a doctor and tobacco farmer in southern Maryland. The Civil
War seriously damaged his business, especially when Maryland abolished slavery
(18:38):
in eighteen sixty four. Shortly thereafter, doctor Mud met with
the would be Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. Let's return
to Kate Clifford Larson with more of the story.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Well, John Saratt thought this was a great idea. They
had maps and plans and it was all, you know,
this was really exciting, and so John agreed and he
set to work bringing in people that would help with
this plan. But they don't bring in lou Wyckman. Even
though lou Wyckman hears all the stuff that's going on,
(19:11):
he sees what's happening, they don't include him. I think
they thought he was a bit of a wimp. So
throughout the first couple of months of eighteen sixty five,
it's clear the end is coming and the Confederacy is losing,
and they're desperate, and John Wilkes Booth is becoming more
and more enraged and more and more determined that he's
(19:33):
going to do something. He starts spending more time at
the Sarat's boarding house, and the other borders in the
house notice him coming frequently, and of course they're all
thrilled because he's like the most famous actor in America
and he's handsome and dashing. I remember there was the
director of the Serat House Museum once said to me,
(19:56):
it's like having Tom Cruise come to your house all
the time. And this was years ago when he was,
you know, this big hot actor. He still is. Okay,
I'll give you that, but anyway, so you know, he's
just he's amazing, and everybody's like, wow, he goes to
this house. But he's planning with the co conspirators. They
tried to kidnap the president in March. Now he's been reelected,
(20:23):
Booth is furious and he's determined that they're going to
prevent the inauguration and that's going to happen on the fourth.
But he can't. He can't, he can't prevent the inauguration.
He reportedly is there at the inauguration in Washington, d C.
On March fourth, eighteen sixty five, and there are photographs
(20:45):
of the inauguration, and some historians have identified Booth down
there and he had a pistol with him, and he
later said he was almost close enough to shoot the
president right there at the inauguration, but he did not.
And so on March sixteenth, they're out on the road.
They're set there waiting for the president's carriage to come,
(21:07):
and the president did not travel with protection, which just
blows my mind that he did not, but he didn't.
And lo and behold, they had not heard that the
president had canceled his trip for that day. So they're
out on the road. Their plan is foiled. The boarding
house folks see them return to the boarding house. Everyone's furious, yelling.
(21:29):
They go up to room. They're upset, screaming. They're just
angry that this has failed. And Booth takes off and
so does John Sarat and it seems like the plan
is over and done with, but it's not. Booth is
so angry that his plan has failed that now he's
(21:51):
decided he's going to kill the president, and he reactivates
in early April this plan that he is going to
shoot the president when he's out in public. Mary becomes
privy to these plans, and so do the other co conspirators.
So Mary gets heavily involved, and she goes to her
(22:13):
tavern and she informs John Lloyd what She doesn't tell
him all the details apparently, but says, you be ready
and things are going to be happening, and I want
you to be ready. Lewis Weikman is privy to all
of this because he takes her in rented carriages down
(22:33):
to her tavern three times before April fourteenth, when Lincoln
is finally assassinated. On the final trip down to the
tavern on the day of the assassination, he takes Mary
Sarat down there and she delivers a message to John
(22:56):
Lloyd that he is to have some guns ready and
other supplies because her son John will be there and
others will be there that night to help. You know,
they're going to do something, and he has to be ready.
So they go back to Washington, d C. And Washington
(23:17):
d C. On the fourteenth is in jubilation. There are
fireworks going off. It is beautiful and exciting because that
is the day that the Confederate flag came down in
Charleston Harbor the end of the Civil War. A few
days prior to that, Lee had surrendered to Grant, an
(23:38):
appomatic Courthouse in Virginia and the final you know, raising
of the American United States flag in South Carolina on
the fourteenth was truly a day to celebrate. And as
Lou Weickman and Mary Surat are approaching the city and
they see it all lit up, Mary makes a cryptic
(23:58):
comment something to the effect of, you know, they're all
going to be sorry, and Lou Whiteman's like, you know,
what does that mean? So they get back to Washington,
d C. They have dinner, and then Mary decides to
go to church because it's Good Friday. She's a devout Catholic,
and there's an evening service. So she heads out the
(24:22):
door with another woman who's boarding in the house and
they start walking, but it's raining and they decide not
to go, and they turn back and they go back
into the house. But as they're entering the house, a
man approaches Mary Surut and his name is Richard Smoot,
and he is the person that the boat was being
(24:43):
held for for the first the kidnapping and now apparently
for Booth's escape. But he hadn't been paid and he
wanted to be paid, and he'd been asking for two
months to get paid, so he came to Mary and
he said, I want to get paid, And in the
doorway of the house, she turns to him and says,
go away. You can't be seen here. You will be
(25:04):
paid tonight. It's happening tonight. Go away, Go away. So
he freaks out and he races away, and he crosses
the bridge into Alexandria because he's afraid they're going to
close the bridges and he won't be able to escape Washington, DC.
Because he knows something is going to happen. They're sitting
in the boarding house and Mary is acting strangely, and
(25:28):
she gets irritated with everybody because after dinner, someone's playing
the piano, they're singing songs whatever. They're unaware of what
Mary knows is going to happen, and she sends them
all to bed. She says, everybody, just go just go
to bed. On go away. That evening, Abraham Lincoln had
plans to go with his wife and his son and
(25:49):
other people to Ford's Theater to watch the play our
American cousin, and Booth knew this because he's so connected
to the theater world. He knew that the president was going
to show up at the theater. That night, and he
made plans to go there and assassinate the president.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
And you've been listening to Kate Clifford Larsen tell one
heck of a story about Mary Sarat and in the end,
the story of the foiled kidnapping plan of Abraham Lincoln
and ultimately the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And we learned
in this particular segment about how that kidnapping plan had
(26:29):
been foiled, and it infuriated Booth, and he had one
option left, kill Lincoln, and he went and lobbied some
of his co conspirators who he had gotten together to
kidnap Lincoln. And then comes those final days April fourteenth,
the day the Confederate flag came down in Charleston and
(26:51):
led to a jubilant celebration in DC. The Illumination, it
was called, because the sky was so lit up. It
comes April fifteenth, Good Friday, and that's the day that
Lincoln is assassinated. When we come back more of the
remarkable story of Mary Sarat, the first woman ever hanged
(27:13):
by the United States government, the story of Abraham Lincoln,
who died on this day in eighteen sixty five. Here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories.
(27:41):
On the day of Abraham Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theater
in Washington, d C. John Wilkes Booth made sure his
second attempt to decapitate the Union would be successful. Let's
return to Kate Clifford Larson, author of the assassin's accomplice
Mary sarat and the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln. Here
(28:03):
again is Kate.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Earlier in the day, he had jury rigged the door
to the balcony where the president would sit, so that
he could get in there and hide, and then he
could shoot the president and then escape without being caught.
And so he was lurking around, not at the Saratouse,
but he's doing that. He had given orders to George
(28:26):
Atsat to assassinate the vice president at the time. George
Astat sat at a bar and got drunk and did
not assassinate the vice president. Booth did not know that
at the time, and Louis Payne had been given the
job of assassinating William Henry Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State.
(28:48):
Booth had hoped to decapitate the chain of command in
the US government. He had hoped also to assassinate General Grant,
who was supposed to attend the theater that night, but
he and his wife went to visit their children instead.
Blewis Pain goes to the Seward house, pretends he's there
(29:11):
with medication because Secretary of State Seward had been terribly
injured in a carriage accident and had broken his jaw
a few days beforehand, and he's recuperating in his Washington,
d c. Home and so there was a guard at
the door, but he convinced the guard to let him
in and deliver the medication. He goes upstairs Sewards two
(29:32):
sons are there. Payne pulls out a knife and starts
stabbing the suns, and then he goes and he starts
stabbing Seward, who falls off the bed and is protected
because the bed between the bed and the wall. Payne
flees the house, having injured a bunch of people, and
he races away, and he goes to Mary Sarat's house,
(29:57):
and it's eleven o'clock at night and he's racing there,
but in the meantime, Lincoln has been assassinated by John
Wilkes booth. He kills him, jumps off onto the stage.
The crowd is crazed. He runs off. He jumps on
a horse that's waiting for him in the back alley
(30:18):
of the theater and he races away. David Arnold, the
other co conspirator, is waiting for him outside a bridge
to get out of Washington, DC, and they escape together
into southern Maryland. I don't know how or who told
the police very quickly that Booth had been seen at
(30:38):
Mary Serat's house frequently. But they go there looking for Booth.
And it's about midnight or so and they knock on
the door of the police and they come in. They
wake everybody up, and they search the house looking for
John Wilkes Booth. They don't look for evidence, they just
look for Booth himself, and of course he's not in
(30:59):
the house. While they're they're searching the house, who comes
knocking on the door but Louis Payne, and he looks suspicious.
They're asking him, what are you doing here? And he says,
I'm here to dig a ditch tomorrow morning for Missus Sarat.
And they turn to Mary Surat and they say do
(31:23):
you know this man? And she raises her hand and says,
I swear to God, I do not know this man,
and they're thinking, really, you have to be that dramatic. Well,
eventually they arrest her and everybody else in the house.
Over the next couple of days, it becomes crazy and
Louis Weikman gets nervous and he goes to the police
(31:45):
and tells them he's been watching crazy things go on
in the house and he thinks this whole plot has
been going on. So they take his testimony and he
travels around to different places trying to find the co
conspirators with them. He tells them who these people are
that a been meeting in the house. So over the
next couple of weeks they arrest all of the co
(32:05):
conspirators except for John Surat Junior, who just happened to
be outside of the state at the time. He's in
Pennsylvania and New York. He hears what happened, so he
flees to Canada so they can't find him, and Mary
gets arrested and the rest is history. Because she ends
up being tried with all the other conspirators. She's the
(32:28):
only woman that's part of this conspiracy trial. There are
eight of them, seven of the co conspirators and Mary Sarat,
making eight of them, and the trial is the trial
of the modern era. It really is. It's made even
more dramatic because the Pittman brothers, you know, shorthand Pittman Shorthand.
(32:52):
It's just been created. And so there and there, and
people are in there taking testimony in shorthand and then
transcribing it and sending it over the wires that night,
so the next morning, the newspapers across the country have
word for word testimony during the trial, and it is sensational.
(33:13):
She was found guilty and four of them, including Mary,
were sentenced to hang, and four were sent to prison
in the dry Totegas in Key West, Florida. There's a
famous prison there. There's a national park site. Now. People
pleaded for clemency for her.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
They went to the president, the new president, Andrew Johnson,
and he said that he would not commute her sentence,
that she kept the nest that hatched the egg of
the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
She was forty two years old, and it shocked the nation.
Once she was hanged, the nation turned against the government's
decision to hang her, and the press the decision, even
though they had vilified her throughout the trial and made
her to become this monster. And John, you know what
(34:08):
a horrific son he was. He runs away. He knows
his mother's been arrested. He's watching from Afar. He's protected
in Canada by Jesuit priests, and he watched from Afar
his mother going through that trial and being vilified, and
then she's convicted and then she's hanged. She died because
(34:30):
of him. She died protecting her son. And I think
we need to acknowledge that she did do that for him.
She did not become a witness for the prosecution. She
died for him. He escapes to England, where he is spotted,
and then he races through Europe. He ends up in
Rome and he joins the Vatican, the Papal Guard, and
(34:55):
then he's it's crazy, and then he's recognized by someone
who knew him and they were in Rome and they
recognize him. So he escapes from the Vatican and it's
this mad cap thing and they you know, he's followed
to Alexandria in Egypt, where he is finally captured and
brought back to the United States in eighteen sixty seven.
(35:19):
He's put on trial and it ends in a mistrial,
a hung jury, and then the government decides not to
try him again, something about the statute of limitations. It
was some crazy thing, and they thought, you know, we're
trying to move on here, we're trying to rebuild the nation.
We don't need this trial again. So he's set free.
He goes on on the lecture circuit, ridiculing the Lincoln
(35:43):
administration and how stupid they were and that they didn't
know this was coming. And so he made a little
bit of money, but not much because audiences are like, oh,
you know, go away. And his brother Isaac, who survived
the war, came back after the war was over, after
his mother was hanged, and he set up a He
(36:05):
worked for a steamship company in Baltimore, so John started
working with him, and they lived their lives in obscurity
there in Baltimore. And Anna ended up marrying a young
man who fell in love with her during the trial,
and they got married and moved to Baltimore as well.
But you know, the legacy just lived on what a
(36:27):
terrible thing that Mary had participated in, And some people
spent the rest of their lives, decades, decades trying to
prove that she was innocent and to restore her good name.
And it worked right through most of the twentieth century.
So that's part and parcel of women's history, retelling the
(36:48):
stories of women can do bad things, they can be
criminals too, and so I just found it interesting the
context of rewriting her history. So it's just such a
curious thing to me. So anyway, there you have it,
Mary Sarat Guilty.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
And there you have it. Indeed, a terrific job on
the production, storytelling and editing by our own Greg Hengler.
A special thanks as always to Kate Clifford Larson, who's
done several stories for us. Terrific stories, this one the
assassin's accomplice Mary Sarat and the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln.
Go out and buy it. It's a terrific read. Go
(37:33):
to Amazon with the usual suspects and what a story
this is. Talk about the trial of the century. Forget
the oj trial or the leopoldon Loeb trial. Can you
imagine what this one was like with the telegraph and
all these newspapers hitting the line every day with court transcripts.
Four were sentenced to hang, and one of them was
(37:55):
Mary because she refused to give up her son and
turned state's evidence and become a witness for the prosecution.
The story of Mary Surat, The story of the Lincoln Assassination.
President Abraham Lincoln died on this day in eighteen sixty five.
Here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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