On this episode of Our American Stories, 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 Surrat. 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):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Still do it today.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
And one day when I googled, this event popped up
and it was from the Sarat Museum in Clinton, Maryland,
and they were hosting a tour, a bus.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Tour to the eastern shore of Maryland.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
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
Sarat's former home in Clinton, Maryland, used to be called Surattsville,
and it's a house museum and has a research center.
(01:53):
And I started reading this story about Mary Sarat, and
I was shocked because I had gotten my PhD in
American history and I virtually knew nothing about Mary Sarat
and her involvement in the assassination plot that resulted in
the death of President Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
So I was really intrigued by.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
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. And
I was reading information on the website, and then I
went out on the internet and I read some more,
(02:36):
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
the ashes of her life. So I wrote up a
(02:57):
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
(03:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
So she was.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Born in eighteen twenty two in Prince George's County, Maryland,
that's in southern Maryland on the western Shore, and her
parents they were modest plantation owners and they had several
enslaved people, and.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
You know, they had a comfortable life. Mary had a
couple of brothers, but her father died when.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
She was a small child, leaving her mother. Elizabeth Jenkins
was their family name. She sent Mary away to boarding.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
School outside of Washington, d c. And Alexandria.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
She returned home in about eighteen thirty nine. She was
about seventeen years old, and she met a man by the.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Name of John Harrison Sarat, a local.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Man who was being raised by foster parents who were
related in some way.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
But it's kind of murky.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
He was several years older than her, and he was
having an affair with another woman in the community.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
And she bore his child.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
But Mary fell madly in love with him, and he
married her in 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
(05:02):
a son, John.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Sarat Junior, in eighteen forty four.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
John Sarat was a very heavy drinker and gambler, and
in eighteen fifty two he purchased land at a crossroads.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
About twelve miles south of Washington, d C. And it
was a.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
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. 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.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
On H Street that he leased out to other people
who ran it as boarding house.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
As one historian noted, John Sarat became the tavern's best customer.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
He drank heavily, he gambled heavily. These were things that
went on, and particularly in the South. Mary, in the meantime.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
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 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,
(06:24):
d C. And that allowed her to pay full time
attention to the tavern and the business.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
It became the local post.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Office, which was a big deal for a tavern to
be appointed a local post 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.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Food, they would have liquor.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
You know, it would just became an important, much more
important tavern site.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
So Mary was doing very very well and.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
You've been listening to author Kate Clifford Larson tell the
story of mes 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 bring
(07:32):
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 Sarat and The Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. It's
available on Amazon and all the usual suspects. Let's pick
up where we last left off. Here is Kate.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
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 enslaved about twelve people.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
And of course, in the.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Election of Lincoln in eighteen sixty he 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 Lincoln administration. But there
(09:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
And then that set.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
The stage 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.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Virginia, which was one of the Confederate states.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
And Mary and her family became involved in that sort
of spy network, 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
(10:16):
so inocuous.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
It's the post office.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
So messages could be brought back 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 the property for her
(10:44):
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, and
(11:05):
he's appointed, at eighteen years old, the new postmaster in
the tavern, and young John Sarat becomes heavily involved in
this rebel network, this courier system.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
But the United States Army.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Has posted soldiers throughout southern Maryland because they knew that
so many of those Southern Marylanders were communicating with and
aiding and abetting the Confederacy across the Potomac.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
So the army soldiers were there.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
So they threw young John in prison.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
So he signed an allegiance to the United States, promised
to behave, and they let him go.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
And of course he didn't behave continue his operations, but.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
They knew that it was too risky to manage it
through the surat tavern, so he became a personal courier
himself and got involved in some very sophisticated networks of
spies that traveled through Maryland into Pennsylvania.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
New York, all the northern states.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
And Mary, worried that her son's activities might put the
property at risk again, decided to lease the property to
a neighbor, John Lloyd.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
And she moved her daughter and a.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
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
to h Street in Washington, d c. To this boarding house.
But of course, because it was the seat of the
(12:56):
United States governments, there were lots of Confederate spies that
were trying to get there and get information and pass
information back and forth.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
So it sort of made.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Sense that Mary might find this advantageous for her son
as well. So the war is raging on. John Wilkes
Booth appears 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
(13:27):
a famous actor. He grew up in Maryland. He had
strong Southern sympathies. So he hatched this idea, and I
don't 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,
(13:50):
and they were imprisoned in northern prisons, and by eighteen
sixty four the Confederacy was struggling with recruits. Confederate soldiers
were 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
(14:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
So it's just amazing. This guy thought this plan would work.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
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
worked with other Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland. And Booth
wanted to acquire supporters, money and supplies. He needed horses,
(15:00):
he needed a wagon, He needed someone with a boat
to transport the kidnap president across the Potomac into Virginia,
where 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,
(15:24):
I'll row the boat, I will secure a carriage. Well,
at Christmas time in Washington, d c. Samuel Mudd, Doctor Mud,
traveled to the city with John Wilkes Booth with the
intention of introducing him to John Sarat and with the
idea that John was very well connected with these Confederate
(15:47):
spy networks and that he could help Booth. Mary Sarat
had leased one of her rooms to a young man
by the name of Lewis Weickman. And so just before Christmas,
John Sarat is walking down the street with Lewis Wyckman
and they quote unquote run into doctor Mudd and John
(16:10):
Wilkes Booth, and Doctor Mudd introduces them and they decide
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.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
On during the trial of the conspirators.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
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 talking about.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
But it wasn't like you couldn't hear what was going on.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
And Mud and Booth explained their plan to John Sarat
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 across the Potomac River
and into Virginia to ransom him for the freedom of
(17:02):
Confederate soldiers.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
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
(17:24):
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
(17:46):
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories,
(18:11):
and the story of Mary Sarat is told by Kate
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
(18:33):
War seriously damaged his business, especially when Maryland abolished slavery
in eighteen sixty four. Shortly thereafter, Doctor Mudd met with
the would be Lincoln assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Let's return
to Kate Clifford Larson with more of the story.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Well, John Saratt thought this was a great idea.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
But they don't bring in lou Wykeman. Even though lou
Wyckman hears.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
All the stuff that's going on, he sees what's happening,
they don't include him.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
I think they thought he was a bit of a wimp.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
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 going to do something. He starts spending more time
at the Sarat's boarding house, and the other Borders in
(19:42):
the house notice him coming frequently, and of course they're
all thrilled because he's like the most famous act in America.
And he's handsome and dashing. I remember there was the
director of the Sarat House Museum once said to me,
it's like having Tom Cruise come to your house all
the time. And this was years ago when he was,
(20:02):
you know, this big hot actor.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
He still is. Okay, I'll give you that.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
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 re elected, Booth is
furious and she's determined that they're going to prevent the
(20:27):
inauguration and that's going to happen on the fourth.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
But he can't.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
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 of the inauguration,
and some historians have identified Booth down there and he
had a pistol with him, and he later said he
(20:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
They're set there waiting.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
For the president's carriage to come. 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.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
That the President had canceled his trip for that day.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
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. 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
(21:42):
the plan is over and done with, but it's not.
Booth is so angry that his plan has failed that
now he's 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.
(22:03):
Mary becomes privy to these plans, and so do the
other co conspirators. So Mary gets heavily involved, and she
goes to her 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,
(22:26):
and I want you to be ready. Lewis Weikman is
privy to all of this because he takes her in
rented carriages down 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
(22:51):
takes Mary Sarat down there and she delivers a message
to John 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.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
And Washington d C.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
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 Appomatic Courthouse in Virginia, and
(23:41):
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 Wickman and Mary surat
are approaching the city and they see it all lit up.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Mary makes a.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Cryptic 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?
Speaker 3 (24:07):
So they get back to Washington, d C.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
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 door
with another woman who's boarding in the house and they
start walking, but it's raining and they decide not to go,
(24:30):
and they turn back and they go back into the house.
But as they're entering the house, a man approaches Mary
Surrut and his name is Richard Smoot, and he is
the person that the boat was being held for for
the first the kidnapping and now apparently.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
For Booth's escape.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
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 paid tonight. It's happening tonight.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Go away, Go away.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Won't be able to escape Washington, DC. Because he knows
something is going to happen.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
They're sitting in the boarding house and Mary is acting strangely,
and she gets irritated with everybody because after dinner, someone's
playing the piano, they're singing songs whatever.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
That evening, Abraham Lincoln had plans to go with his
wife and his son and 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
(26:05):
there and assassinate the president.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
And you've been listening to Kate Clifford Larsen tell one
heck of his 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
(26:29):
had 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. When
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
(27:12):
hanged by the United States government here on our American stories.
(27:37):
And we continue with our American stories. 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
(28:00):
to kill Abraham Lincoln. Here 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 seratouse,
but he's doing that.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
He had given orders to George.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Atsat to assassinate the vice president at the time. George
Astraat sat at a bar and got drunk and did
not assassinate the Vice president.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Booth did not know that at the time.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
And Louis Payne had been given the job of assassinating
William Henry Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State. 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
(29:00):
his wife went to visit their children instead. So Blewis
Pain goes to the Seward house, pretends he's.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
There with medication.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Because Secretary of State Seward had been terribly injured in
a carriage accident and had broken his jaw a few
days beforehand.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
And he's recuperating in his Washington, d c.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Home, and so there was a guard at the door,
but he convinced the guard to let him in and
delivered the medication. He goes upstairs sewards two 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
(29:44):
between the bed.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
And the wall.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Payne flees the house, having injured a bunch of people,
and he races away. And he goes to Mary Sarat's
house and it's eleven o'clock at night and he's racing there,
but in the meantime, Lincoln has been assassinated by John
(30:07):
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
of the.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Theater, and he races away.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
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 Mary Serat's house frequently. But they go
(30:42):
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 the house.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
While they're they're searching the.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
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 you know this man?
(31:23):
And she raises her hand and says, I swear to God,
I do not know this man.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
And they're thinking, really.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
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 Whitman gets
nervous and he goes to the police and tells them
he's been watching crazy things go on in the house
and he thinks this whole.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Plot has been going on.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
That a meeting in the house.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
So over the next couple of weeks they arrest all
of the co conspirators except for John Surratt Junior, who
just happened to be outside of the state at the time.
He's in Pennsylvania and New York. He hears what happens,
so he flees to Canada so they can't find him,
and Mary gets arrested and the rest is history. Because
(32:24):
she ends up being tried with all the other conspirators.
She's the only woman that's part of this conspiracy trial.
There are eight of them, seven of the co conspirators
and Mary Surat making eight of them.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
And the trial is the trial of the modern era,
it really is.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
It's made even more dramatic because the Pittman brothers, you
know shorthand Pittman shorthand 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
(33:06):
across the country have word for word testimony during the trial,
and it is sensational. She was found guilty and four
of them, including Mary, were sentenced to hang, and four
were sent to prison in the dry Totagas in Key West, Florida.
There's a famous prison there. There's a national park site.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Now.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
People pleaded for clemency for her. 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 3 (33:46):
She was forty two years.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Old, and it shocked the nation. Once she was hanged,
the nation turned against the government's decision to hang her,
and the pressified the decision even though they had vilified
her throughout the trial and made her to become this monster.
And John you know what a horrific son he was.
(34:10):
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 of him. She died protecting
(34:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
She died for him.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
Then he's it's crazy.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
And then he's recognized by someone who knew him and
they were in Rome and.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
They recognize him.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
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. He's put
on trial and it ends in a mistrial, a hung jury,
and then the government decides not to try him again,
(35:29):
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 administration and how stupid
they were and that they didn't know this was coming.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
And so he made a little bit of money, but
not much because audiences are like, oh, you know, go away.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
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 worked for a steamship
company in Baltimore, so John started working with him, and
they lived their lives in obscurity there in Baltimore. And
(36:15):
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 terrible thing that Mary
had participated in, and some people spent the rest of
their lives decades, decades trying to prove that she was
(36:36):
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 stories of women
can do bad things, they can be criminals too, and
so I just found it interesting the context.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
Of rewriting her history.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
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
assassins 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 or 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 Mary,
(37:55):
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
a piece of American history. 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 Surrat. 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):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Still do it today.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
And one day when I googled, this event popped up
and it was from the Sarat Museum in Clinton, Maryland,
and they were hosting a tour, a bus.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Tour to the eastern shore of Maryland.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
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
Sarat's former home in Clinton, Maryland, used to be called Surattsville,
and it's a house museum and has a research center.
(01:53):
And I started reading this story about Mary Sarat, and
I was shocked because I had gotten my PhD in
American history and I virtually knew nothing about Mary Sarat
and her involvement in the assassination plot that resulted in
the death of President Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
So I was really intrigued by.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
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. And
I was reading information on the website, and then I
went out on the internet and I read some more,
(02:36):
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
the ashes of her life. So I wrote up a
(02:57):
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
(03:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
So she was.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Born in eighteen twenty two in Prince George's County, Maryland,
that's in southern Maryland on the western Shore, and her
parents they were modest plantation owners and they had several
enslaved people, and.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
You know, they had a comfortable life. Mary had a
couple of brothers, but her father died when.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
She was a small child, leaving her mother. Elizabeth Jenkins
was their family name. She sent Mary away to boarding.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
School outside of Washington, d c. And Alexandria.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
She returned home in about eighteen thirty nine. She was
about seventeen years old, and she met a man by the.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Name of John Harrison Sarat, a local.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Man who was being raised by foster parents who were
related in some way.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
But it's kind of murky.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
He was several years older than her, and he was
having an affair with another woman in the community.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
And she bore his child.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
But Mary fell madly in love with him, and he
married her in 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
(05:02):
a son, John.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Sarat Junior, in eighteen forty four.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
John Sarat was a very heavy drinker and gambler, and
in eighteen fifty two he purchased land at a crossroads.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
About twelve miles south of Washington, d C. And it
was a.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
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. 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.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
On H Street that he leased out to other people
who ran it as boarding house.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
As one historian noted, John Sarat became the tavern's best customer.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
He drank heavily, he gambled heavily. These were things that
went on, and particularly in the South. Mary, in the meantime.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
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 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,
(06:24):
d C. And that allowed her to pay full time
attention to the tavern and the business.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
It became the local post.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Office, which was a big deal for a tavern to
be appointed a local post 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.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Food, they would have liquor.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
You know, it would just became an important, much more
important tavern site.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
So Mary was doing very very well and.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
You've been listening to author Kate Clifford Larson tell the
story of mes 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 bring
(07:32):
you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith and love.
Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to
be told that 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 Sarat and The Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. It's
available on Amazon and all the usual suspects. Let's pick
up where we last left off. Here is Kate.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
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 enslaved about twelve people.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
And of course, in the.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Election of Lincoln in eighteen sixty he 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 Lincoln administration. But there
(09:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
And then that set.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
The stage 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.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Virginia, which was one of the Confederate states.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
And Mary and her family became involved in that sort
of spy network, 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
(10:16):
so inocuous.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
It's the post office.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
So messages could be brought back 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 the property for her
(10:44):
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, and
(11:05):
he's appointed, at eighteen years old, the new postmaster in
the tavern, and young John Sarat becomes heavily involved in
this rebel network, this courier system.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
But the United States Army.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Has posted soldiers throughout southern Maryland because they knew that
so many of those Southern Marylanders were communicating with and
aiding and abetting the Confederacy across the Potomac.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
So the army soldiers were there.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
So they threw young John in prison.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
So he signed an allegiance to the United States, promised
to behave, and they let him go.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
And of course he didn't behave continue his operations, but.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
They knew that it was too risky to manage it
through the surat tavern, so he became a personal courier
himself and got involved in some very sophisticated networks of
spies that traveled through Maryland into Pennsylvania.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
New York, all the northern states.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
And Mary, worried that her son's activities might put the
property at risk again, decided to lease the property to
a neighbor, John Lloyd.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
And she moved her daughter and a.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
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
to h Street in Washington, d c. To this boarding house.
But of course, because it was the seat of the
(12:56):
United States governments, there were lots of Confederate spies that
were trying to get there and get information and pass
information back and forth.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
So it sort of made.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Sense that Mary might find this advantageous for her son
as well. So the war is raging on. John Wilkes
Booth appears 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
(13:27):
a famous actor. He grew up in Maryland. He had
strong Southern sympathies. So he hatched this idea, and I
don't 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,
(13:50):
and they were imprisoned in northern prisons, and by eighteen
sixty four the Confederacy was struggling with recruits. Confederate soldiers
were 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
(14:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
So it's just amazing. This guy thought this plan would work.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
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
worked with other Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland. And Booth
wanted to acquire supporters, money and supplies. He needed horses,
(15:00):
he needed a wagon, He needed someone with a boat
to transport the kidnap president across the Potomac into Virginia,
where 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,
(15:24):
I'll row the boat, I will secure a carriage. Well,
at Christmas time in Washington, d c. Samuel Mudd, Doctor Mud,
traveled to the city with John Wilkes Booth with the
intention of introducing him to John Sarat and with the
idea that John was very well connected with these Confederate
(15:47):
spy networks and that he could help Booth. Mary Sarat
had leased one of her rooms to a young man
by the name of Lewis Weickman. And so just before Christmas,
John Sarat is walking down the street with Lewis Wyckman
and they quote unquote run into doctor Mudd and John
(16:10):
Wilkes Booth, and Doctor Mudd introduces them and they decide
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.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
On during the trial of the conspirators.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
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 talking about.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
But it wasn't like you couldn't hear what was going on.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
And Mud and Booth explained their plan to John Sarat
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 across the Potomac River
and into Virginia to ransom him for the freedom of
(17:02):
Confederate soldiers.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
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
(17:24):
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
(17:46):
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories,
(18:11):
and the story of Mary Sarat is told by Kate
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
(18:33):
War seriously damaged his business, especially when Maryland abolished slavery
in eighteen sixty four. Shortly thereafter, Doctor Mudd met with
the would be Lincoln assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Let's return
to Kate Clifford Larson with more of the story.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Well, John Saratt thought this was a great idea.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
But they don't bring in lou Wykeman. Even though lou
Wyckman hears.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
All the stuff that's going on, he sees what's happening,
they don't include him.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
I think they thought he was a bit of a wimp.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
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 going to do something. He starts spending more time
at the Sarat's boarding house, and the other Borders in
(19:42):
the house notice him coming frequently, and of course they're
all thrilled because he's like the most famous act in America.
And he's handsome and dashing. I remember there was the
director of the Sarat House Museum once said to me,
it's like having Tom Cruise come to your house all
the time. And this was years ago when he was,
(20:02):
you know, this big hot actor.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
He still is. Okay, I'll give you that.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
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 re elected, Booth is
furious and she's determined that they're going to prevent the
(20:27):
inauguration and that's going to happen on the fourth.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
But he can't.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
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 of the inauguration,
and some historians have identified Booth down there and he
had a pistol with him, and he later said he
(20:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
They're set there waiting.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
For the president's carriage to come. 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.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
That the President had canceled his trip for that day.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
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. 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
(21:42):
the plan is over and done with, but it's not.
Booth is so angry that his plan has failed that
now he's 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.
(22:03):
Mary becomes privy to these plans, and so do the
other co conspirators. So Mary gets heavily involved, and she
goes to her 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,
(22:26):
and I want you to be ready. Lewis Weikman is
privy to all of this because he takes her in
rented carriages down 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
(22:51):
takes Mary Sarat down there and she delivers a message
to John 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.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
And Washington d C.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
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 Appomatic Courthouse in Virginia, and
(23:41):
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 Wickman and Mary surat
are approaching the city and they see it all lit up.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Mary makes a.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Cryptic 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?
Speaker 3 (24:07):
So they get back to Washington, d C.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
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 door
with another woman who's boarding in the house and they
start walking, but it's raining and they decide not to go,
(24:30):
and they turn back and they go back into the house.
But as they're entering the house, a man approaches Mary
Surrut and his name is Richard Smoot, and he is
the person that the boat was being held for for
the first the kidnapping and now apparently.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
For Booth's escape.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
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 paid tonight. It's happening tonight.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Go away, Go away.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Won't be able to escape Washington, DC. Because he knows
something is going to happen.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
They're sitting in the boarding house and Mary is acting strangely,
and she gets irritated with everybody because after dinner, someone's
playing the piano, they're singing songs whatever.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
That evening, Abraham Lincoln had plans to go with his
wife and his son and 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
(26:05):
there and assassinate the president.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
And you've been listening to Kate Clifford Larsen tell one
heck of his 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
(26:29):
had 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. When
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
(27:12):
hanged by the United States government here on our American stories.
(27:37):
And we continue with our American stories. 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
(28:00):
to kill Abraham Lincoln. Here 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 seratouse,
but he's doing that.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
He had given orders to George.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Atsat to assassinate the vice president at the time. George
Astraat sat at a bar and got drunk and did
not assassinate the Vice president.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Booth did not know that at the time.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
And Louis Payne had been given the job of assassinating
William Henry Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State. 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
(29:00):
his wife went to visit their children instead. So Blewis
Pain goes to the Seward house, pretends he's.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
There with medication.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Because Secretary of State Seward had been terribly injured in
a carriage accident and had broken his jaw a few
days beforehand.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
And he's recuperating in his Washington, d c.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Home, and so there was a guard at the door,
but he convinced the guard to let him in and
delivered the medication. He goes upstairs sewards two 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
(29:44):
between the bed.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
And the wall.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Payne flees the house, having injured a bunch of people,
and he races away. And he goes to Mary Sarat's
house and it's eleven o'clock at night and he's racing there,
but in the meantime, Lincoln has been assassinated by John
(30:07):
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
of the.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Theater, and he races away.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
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 Mary Serat's house frequently. But they go
(30:42):
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 the house.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
While they're they're searching the.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
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 you know this man?
(31:23):
And she raises her hand and says, I swear to God,
I do not know this man.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
And they're thinking, really.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
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 Whitman gets
nervous and he goes to the police and tells them
he's been watching crazy things go on in the house
and he thinks this whole.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Plot has been going on.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
That a meeting in the house.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
So over the next couple of weeks they arrest all
of the co conspirators except for John Surratt Junior, who
just happened to be outside of the state at the time.
He's in Pennsylvania and New York. He hears what happens,
so he flees to Canada so they can't find him,
and Mary gets arrested and the rest is history. Because
(32:24):
she ends up being tried with all the other conspirators.
She's the only woman that's part of this conspiracy trial.
There are eight of them, seven of the co conspirators
and Mary Surat making eight of them.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
And the trial is the trial of the modern era,
it really is.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
It's made even more dramatic because the Pittman brothers, you
know shorthand Pittman shorthand 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
(33:06):
across the country have word for word testimony during the trial,
and it is sensational. She was found guilty and four
of them, including Mary, were sentenced to hang, and four
were sent to prison in the dry Totagas in Key West, Florida.
There's a famous prison there. There's a national park site.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Now.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
People pleaded for clemency for her. 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 3 (33:46):
She was forty two years.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Old, and it shocked the nation. Once she was hanged,
the nation turned against the government's decision to hang her,
and the pressified the decision even though they had vilified
her throughout the trial and made her to become this monster.
And John you know what a horrific son he was.
(34:10):
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 of him. She died protecting
(34:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
She died for him.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
Then he's it's crazy.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
And then he's recognized by someone who knew him and
they were in Rome and.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
They recognize him.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
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. He's put
on trial and it ends in a mistrial, a hung jury,
and then the government decides not to try him again,
(35:29):
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 administration and how stupid
they were and that they didn't know this was coming.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
And so he made a little bit of money, but
not much because audiences are like, oh, you know, go away.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
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 worked for a steamship
company in Baltimore, so John started working with him, and
they lived their lives in obscurity there in Baltimore. And
(36:15):
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 terrible thing that Mary
had participated in, and some people spent the rest of
their lives decades, decades trying to prove that she was
(36:36):
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 stories of women
can do bad things, they can be criminals too, and
so I just found it interesting the context.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
Of rewriting her history.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
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
assassins 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 or 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 Mary,
(37:55):
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
a piece of American history. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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