Program 2010 - 2011
May 6	Susan Smith	Mary Surratt and son John: Retelling History, Updates and Questions Remaining
Jun 3	Cheryl Wells	The Coming of the Civil War
Sep 9	Paul Van Nest	Chickamauga
Oct 7	Robert May	The Lemmon Slave Case
Nov 4	TBA	TBA
Dec 2	Geoff Smith	Civil Liberties in Wartime: Lincoln and Dissent 1861-65
Jan 13	Members' Night	20 min presentations by Volker Gruetzner and others
Feb 3	Gord Sly	The Battle of Corinth
Mar 3	TBA	TBA
Apr 7	John Moyer	George Armstrong Custer
May 5	TBA	TBA
Jun 2	TBA	TBA

THE JUNE 3 PRESENTATION: “The Coming of the Civil War” Prof. Cheryl Wells.

LAST MONTH'S PRESENTATION: 6 May, 2010

The Civil War Round Table of Greater Kingston gathered on the evening of May 6, to hear a presentation by guest speaker Susan Smith on the topic of the Lincoln assassination. To be more specific, Susan made the conspirators behind the assassination the focus of her talk, in particular the Surratt family, whose matriarch, Mary Eugenia Surratt, may or may not have been a party to one of the darkest deeds in American history.

The Lincoln assassination occupies a special niche in Civil War history, with its own band of students, researchers, enthusiasts, special pleaders, and a few outright crackpots. As a prologue to her main presentation, Susan listed a number of the most prominent writers in this area along with their most recent or well known works on the subject. The best overall study of the Lincoln assassination, in Susan’s opinion, is Edward Steers’ Blood on the Moon, published in 2001. Recent works on the role of the Surratt family include Kate C. Larsen’s, The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln, Mary Surratt: An American Tragedy, by Elizabeth Trindal, and The Last Lincoln Conspirator: John Surratt’s Flight from the Gallows, by Andrew Jampoler.

The main driver behind the plot to assassinate President Lincoln was, of course, John Wilkes Booth, a member of the famous American acting dynasty. Born and raised in Maryland, Booth grew up as a supporter of slavery and the pseudo-genteel Southern plantation way of life. As the Union armies east and west continued to hammer their way towards Richmond during the early months of 1865, Booth cast himself in the role of the lone hero and champion of the South, the man who would carry out a grand eleventh-hour coup de main and become the instrument of salvation for the beleaguered Confederacy. Despite his drinking and delusional thinking, Booth was rational enough to perceive that the chief guiding spirit and intelligence behind the Northern war effort was Abraham Lincoln, and so the President became the main focus of Booth’s schemes.

Susan described how Booth’s plans changed in the weeks leading up to Lincoln’s fatal trip to Ford Theatre on the evening of April 14, 1865. Originally, the plan was to kidnap Lincoln and hold him for ransom until the North acknowledged Southern independence. This idea proved to be too complicated, however, and Booth eventually decided to kill the President and several other high-ranking officials in the Lincoln administration — Vice-President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward.

Booth had acquired a team of accomplices and Susan gave thumbnail biographical sketches of each of them — Samuel Arnold, George Atzerodt, David Herold, Michael O’Laughlin, Edman Spangler, and Lewis Powell (also known as Lewis Paine).

There was also John H. Surratt and his mother, Mary E. Surratt, the latter of whom ran a boarding house in Washington, D.C. that became headquarters of the conspirators. Mary Surratt was a 45 year old widow whose shiftless husband had obligingly drunk himself to death in 1862, leaving her in charge of a family consisting of herself, her two sons Isaac and John, and a daughter Anna. Originally from Maryland, where the family had operated a crossroads general store and tavern, the Surratts had been forced to move to Washington when the war and Union army occupation made their family business both dangerous and unprofitable.

The widow Surratt’s boardinghouse seems to have first attracted the attention of John Wilkes Booth in December of 1864, said Susan. Booth may have found its H Street address convenient to his plans, located as it was only a few blocks away from Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln was known to take in a play from time to time as a respite from the cares of office. Booth and his crew met often at the boarding house, where Mary’s youngest son John was often a part of their deliberations. Another individual on the fringe of the group was Dr. Samuel Mudd, a Maryland country doctor who was later to play a critical role in Booth’s escape following the assassination.

John Surratt, a 21-year-old former divinity student, was already involved in Confederate intelligence activities. Susan described how young Surratt acted as a spy and a courier, making clandestine trips between Richmond and Montreal to relay messages and gather information. Although much of the Surratt family background remains obscure, it is likely they were involved in underground activities with the Confederate secret service even before they moved to Washington.

Susan quickly summarized the events of the evening of April 14, 1865; how Booth succeeded in fatally shooting Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, how Lewis Powell nearly stabbed Secretary of State Seward to death, and how George Atzerodt lost his nerve and failed to carry out his assignment to kill Vice-President Johnson. Booth managed to stay on the run for twelve days until he was finally cornered on a farm in Virginia and shot dead in a barn. He had lived long enough to realize the futility of his actions: the Union government was not overthrown and the Confederacy remained defeated. Indeed, many Southerners understood that the murder of Abraham Lincoln meant they had lost the best friend they would have had in the post-war federal government.

The rest of Booth’s fellow conspirators were soon rounded up and quickly dealt with by the legal system. Eight of them stood trial—Mary Surratt, Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, Arnold, O’Laughlin, Spangler, and Dr. Mudd—with the proceedings beginning May 9, 1865 and being concluded three weeks later. Four of them were sentenced to death—Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt—and duly hanged on the 7th of July.

To Americans of the time, Mary Surratt was difficult to understand; she didn’t fall into any of the standard categories of Victorian womanhood. Susan described how newspaper accounts of her trial pictured her in grotesque terms, carefully examining every physical flaw in her appearance as being somehow indicative of her corrupt and villainous soul. Such was the enormity of her crimes that she became the first woman ever executed by the federal government. Once she was safely dead, however, a curious reaction set in. According to Susan, public sentiment began to drift in her favour, and people began to wonder if, perhaps, Mary Surratt had been innocent of her charges after all. It is a sentiment that still seems to linger, and Susan mentioned that there are still writers today who are willing to take another look at the evidence in an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Mary Surratt. Kate C. Larsen’s 2009 work, The Assassin’s Accomplice, for example, began as the author’s attempt to find the truth and exonerate her biographical subject, only to decide in the end that Mary Surratt could hardly not have known what Booth and his crew—including her own son—were up to in all their mysterious comings and goings and secret meetings at her boardinghouse.

But what of Mary Surratt’s dutiful son John and his whereabouts and activities while his mother was facing her trial and execution? As it happened, John Surratt was on another mission to Canada when he heard the news of Lincoln’s assassination. As Susan explained, as soon as he realized what Booth had done, Surratt knew he was in serious trouble. He went underground in Montreal and followed the events surrounding the capture and trial of his fellow conspirators in the newspapers. Surratt was to come in for criticism for hiding out in safety while his mother went to her death. He later claimed that his secret correspondents in Washington failed to alert him to his mother’s peril.

Susan then described Surratt’s own escape from American justice, which consisted of taking ship for Great Britain in September of 1865 and then continuing on to Rome where he sought to elude detection by enlisting in the Vatican’s Papal Zouaves. In April of 1866 Surratt was recognized by a fellow soldier and turned over to the authorities. Surratt managed to escape prison, however, and decided Italy was too hot for him. He passed himself off as a Canadian and boarded a ship for Egypt, but was captured in Alexandria by American authorities as soon as he landed.

Surratt’s next destination was Washington, D.C., where he arrived as a prisoner in February 1867. Unlike his mother and the other conspirators who were tried by military tribunal, Surratt was brought before a civil court and tried under criminal law. Although the prosecution was able to present witnesses who swore they had seen Surratt in Washington on the night of the assassination, the defence presented equally persuasive testimony from people who said that Surratt had been in Elmira, New York on April 14, 1865. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and Surratt went free.

Susan then described how Surratt was brought to trial again, this time being charged with treason and conspiracy rather than murder of the President. But the prosecution failed to carry out due diligence in preparing its paperwork, and discovered too late that the statute of limitations on such charges had expired. Surratt walked again, this time freed on a technicality. Despite his prominent role in Booth’s crime, there was little appetite for pursuing him further in the courts, and the public interest soon swiveled towards the big news story of the day, the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.

To cash in on his notoriety, Surratt went on a lecture tour, promising to give the inside story of Booth’s conspiracy but generally omitting details of his own involvement. Though perhaps some sort of survivor type of hero in his own eyes, most Americans felt nothing but mingled disgust and disdain for the former spy and intriguer who, in his haste to save his neck had left his own mother to swing . The lecture tour went bust before it ever began and Surratt lived on in relative obscurity until 1916, the last of the Lincoln conspirators.

As Susan’s references amply indicated, the story of the Lincoln assassination retains its fascination and the volume of print on the subject continues to gush. Part of the attraction of the subject lies in the lack of definite answers on such questions as: was Mary Surratt an innocent victim of American justice? Was Dr. Mudd a member of the plot? Was there a larger conspiracy behind Lincoln’s murder that still remains undetected? It is the hope of finding some crucial piece of missing information to complete the story of that April night in 1865 that still keeps a legion of devoted scholars sifting through the records a century-and-a-half later.

By Tom Brzezicki

THIS SPRING’S PRESENTATIONS:
June 3, Cheryl Wells, “The Coming of the Civil War.”

THE FALL PROGRAMS BEGIN ON SEPTEMBER 9:
Thursday, Sep 9: Paul Van Nest, “Chickamauga”.

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