Fates and Traitors (55 page)

Mary listened with increasing trepidation as her lawyer questioned a number of Surrattsville neighbors and police officers in an attempt to discredit John Lloyd and cast suspicion on him, but the defense witnesses did not testify as expected and only made her seem more deeply involved in the plot. George Calvert and John Nothey were called to the stand, and they confirmed that Mary had legitimate business with them to account for her numerous trips to Surrattsville, but Mary could not
imagine how that small verification of her claims could possibly undo the damage the other witnesses had inflicted.

In the days that followed, her lawyers produced other witnesses to speak in her defense—the Confederate spy and blockade-runner Augustus Howell to discredit Louis Weichmann's testimony, Mary's brother John Jenkins to vouch for her character—but very little went in her favor. Every day, Mary's hopes and fortitude diminished as her own attorneys inadvertently strengthened the prosecution's case. From time to time, the other defense attorneys called to the stand witnesses in support of their own clients, but whenever Mary's lawyers presented their case, they seemed caught off guard by their own witnesses' testimony. Instead of exonerating Mary, their sworn assertions cast doubt upon her real reasons for going to Surrattsville on the day of the assassination.

And then they called Anna to the stand.

Mary caught only a glimpse of her daughter as she was escorted into the courtroom and up to the witness stand, and soon even that was denied her. One of the guards quickly shifted to stand in front of her, ordered to block her from Anna's view to prevent them from communicating through secret signals. As far as Mary could tell, Anna had not spotted her at all.

They had not seen each other in more than a month, but despite her heavy black veil Mary could not mistake her precious child's dreadful condition—she was thin and pallid, her eyes hollow and shadowed, her once glossy hair dull and limp. Mary pressed her lips together to hold back a sob, squeezing her eyes shut against tears. Anna had nothing to do with any conspiracy, and she never should have been forced to endure such terrible treatment.

Mr. Aiken, one of Mary's lawyers, began questioning Anna, and it was evident to Mary that she had thought carefully about what she might be asked and had rehearsed her answers. She replied clearly and concisely when Mr. Aiken queried her about Louis Weichmann and those among the conspirators who had visited the boardinghouse. She was quite successful, Mary thought, in drawing suspicion down upon Weichmann, whom Anna strongly suggested was the real conspirator within the household. Her mother had made it clear to Mr. Atzerodt that he was not welcome in the house, Anna affirmed, but they had treated him with politeness, as they did every visitor. It was Mr.
Weichmann that Mr. Atzerodt came to see when he called at the boardinghouse, and it was Mr. Weichmann who had brought Mr. Payne to the house the first time. Yes, Anna had met Mr. Booth, but he never stayed long when he visited.

Mr. Aiken questioned Anna about Junior's acquaintance with Mr. Booth, and then, after digressing into a few questions about Junior's education, he abruptly changed course. “Miss Surratt,” he said, “did you at your mother's house, at any time or any occasion, ever hear a word breathed about any plot, or plan, or conspiracy in existence to assassinate the president of the United States?”

“No, sir,” replied Anna.

“Did you ever hear it discussed by any member of the family to capture the president of the United States?”

“No, sir,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “Where is Mama?”

Mr. Aiken hesitated for the barest of moments. “What year did your brother leave college?”

“In 1861 or 1862, the year my father died.” Anna's voice had become shrill, panicky. “Where is Mama?”

A stir went through the courtroom. Mary craned her neck, but the little she could see told her only that Anna glanced repeatedly toward the prisoners' dock, and there was a faint, quick sound as if she nervously tapped her foot. Mr. Aiken continued to question her, but Anna asked for her mother after every reply, increasingly frantic. Before long one of the judges interrupted the questioning and told Anna that she was dismissed. “Where is Mama?” she demanded as she stood, looking wildly about the courtroom as an officer hurried to the witness stand.

“You will see your mama soon,” Mr. Aiken replied soothingly as the officer led her into the adjacent anteroom. Anna departed so willingly that Mary knew she assumed she was being escorted to her mother, and her heart ached as she imagined her nervous, distraught child's reaction when she realized she had been deceived.

“No cross-examination?” a man inquired. Mary could not discern who had spoken, for her gaze was riveted on the door through which Anna had departed. Oh, her poor darling. What she would not give to hold her, to comfort her.

“No,” answered one of the judges. “It would have been cruel. The girl has a greater load of sorrow upon her than she can bear.”

At that, the composure Mary had desperately held in place from the first day of the trial shattered, and she broke down in tears.

Later, as she was escorted back to her cell, she was told that when Anna had entered the anteroom, one of the officers had told her about the scheme to conceal Mary from her view, and Anna had immediately fainted. Cold water had been splashed in her face to revive her, and when she had come to, she had become hysterical, tearing frantically at her hair and clothing until a doctor sedated her.

Alone in her cell, Mary wept until she collapsed onto her cot and slept from sheer exhaustion. The next morning, her lawyers informed her that Anna had been released from prison the night before. “Was that her reward for enduring such torment in the courtroom?” Mary demanded, but she dried her eyes and composed herself when Mr. Aiken said that Anna would be permitted to visit her that day—for poor Anna's sake, not her own.

Thenceforth, as the trial continued, Anna was allowed to sit near her in the courtroom, although they were not allowed to speak or to touch. Thus it was from her lawyers and not Anna that Mary learned that the government had seized the boardinghouse, and since Anna had no money, she was living with sympathetic friends elsewhere in the city.

Although at first Anna's presence heartened Mary, the emotional strain of the dismal proceedings and the weeks spent in the sweltering, malodorous courtroom relentlessly eroded her strength, and the rest of the trial passed in a sickening blur. New witnesses appeared, old witnesses returned to the stand, but every statement anyone made on her behalf diminished her credibility and made her seem guiltier than before. On June 13, her lawyers rested her defense, and soon thereafter, the other lawyers finished presenting their clients' cases.

On June 19, Mary's long-absent lead attorney suddenly resurfaced, just in time for closing arguments. He did not appear in court himself, but instead submitted a lengthy document to one of her other lawyers to present to the court. His summation took hours to read and was devoted almost entirely to insisting that the tribunal was unconstitutional and therefore the entire trial was illegal, an argument that had been overruled and dismissed early in the trial. He mentioned Mary only
very briefly, in the last few sentences, but even there he neglected to argue for her innocence.

As the hours passed and the summation unfolded, Mary had listened with steadily increasing horror, stunned, bewildered, dismayed, hopeless. “‘As far, gentlemen, as I am concerned,'” her lawyer read, his tone conveying that he had reached the end, “‘her case is now in your hands.'”

That could not be all, Mary thought, her head spinning. Hours and hours spent upon nothing in her defense. That could not be all.

A wave of nausea seized her, and she took violently ill. As gasps of alarm rose from those seated nearest her, two guards swiftly appeared and escorted her from the courtroom. After that, in consideration of Mary's health, Anna was allowed to remain with her in her cell during the day.

Two days later, Mr. Aiken made his own closing argument on Mary's behalf, and he argued determinedly for acquittal on the grounds of reasonable doubt, the standard of the civil court, where her case should have been tried. He argued that all the evidence presented against her was tenuous and circumstantial. He attempted to shift the blame to Junior, which nearly caused Mary to faint from terror, and he emphasized her devotion to her children, her piety, and her womanly virtues.

It was a fair argument, but Mary despaired of its power to erase from the judges' memories all that had been said against her throughout the trial, said and repeated and emphasized over and over, often by those brought forward to testify on her behalf.

In the week that followed, the other defendants' attorneys presented their closing arguments, but Mary did not hear them. Her spirit shattered, her health failing, she was too ill to attend the final days of the trial.

On June 28, the trial concluded and the twelve commissioners withdrew to deliberate in complete isolation. In two days they reached a verdict for each of the eight defendants, but President Johnson was ill and unable to review the court's decision. The verdict would remain sealed until he could attend to it.

Thus it was not until the afternoon of July 6 that two generals, commanders of the prison, came to Mary's cell and gravely informed her
that she had been found guilty, and the next day, she would be hanged by the neck until dead.

•   •   •

O
n the morning of July 7, Mary Ann heard newsboys shouting up and down Nineteenth Street before she went down to breakfast, and although she could not discern their words at such a distance, the shrill excitement in their treble voices told her the commission in Washington City had reached its verdict.

Apprehension slowed her pace as she descended the stairs and walked down the hallway to the dining room where her children waited. Rosalie, seated in her customary place, murmured a soft greeting when she entered, and Mary Ann paused behind her chair to rest her hand on her shoulder and kiss her brow.

“Good morning, Mother,” said Joseph, rising from his chair on the other side of the table, home at last from California. He had set out from San Francisco aboard the
Moses Taylor
on April 13 and had learned about the assassination while crossing the Isthmus of Panama. Alerted to his travels by the ship's crew and suspicious of the timing, the authorities had arrested him at the dock upon his arrival in New York. Major General John A. Dix had subjected him to a grueling interrogation, but after concluding that Joseph knew nothing about his brother's plot, the general had released him. Joseph had come immediately to Edwin's house and there he had remained.

June was at the table too, painfully gaunt and hollow-eyed from his weeks in prison. He had been released on June 22 and had immediately gone to Asia's home in Philadelphia, where Mary Ann, Rosalie, and Edwin had met him. The pained look June gave her as she kissed him good morning told her that he wished he could spare her all the troubles and grief the day was sure to bring.

At that moment Edwin came in from the street, newspapers tucked under his arm. “
Times
,
Herald
, or
Tribune
?” he asked Mary Ann, a melancholy tinge to his voice, as he came around to kiss her cheek and pull out her chair.

She did not suppose it mattered. “The
Tribune
, I think,” she said, sitting down and bracing herself, her appetite long since fled.

Edwin handed her the paper, distributed others to his siblings, and settled into his own chair at the head of the table. The cook brought in
their breakfasts, but except to murmur their thanks, only June, still ravenous from his ordeal, dug into the fragrant, steaming platters set before them. The others studied the printed pages, the bold headlines announcing the sentences of John's fellow conspirators, the dire fates that might have been his own.

THE ASSASSIN
ATION. ALL THE PRISON
ERS FOUND GUILTY
, proclaimed the top headline on the front page of the
Tribune
.
P
AYNE, HARROLD, ATZEROD
T, AND MRS. SURRATT TO
BE HANGED TODAY
.

“Oh, dear me,” Mary Ann exclaimed. “They're going to hang a woman. They cannot.” Shocked, she looked down the table to Edwin, who looked back bleakly. “Can they?”

“They can, but surely they will not,” Edwin replied. “President Johnson will pardon her. The American government has never executed a woman, and I can't imagine Mr. Johnson would want to go down in history as the first president to give such a horrendous order.”

Shaken, Mary Ann returned her gaze to the page and learned that John's childhood friends Sam Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen would be imprisoned for life, along with Dr. Mudd. Edman Spangler, a stagehand at Ford's Theatre, had been sentenced to six years.

Mary Ann pressed a hand to her heart, shaken. Thank God the authorities had realized early on that Junius and Clarke had nothing to do with the plot, sparing them this horror.

“Mrs. Surratt begs for more time,” noted another headline, and Mary Ann quickly scanned the column below until she found the story: “Payne was the first to whom the intelligence was communicated. It did not seem to take him by surprise, as doubtless he anticipated no other sentence, and had nerved himself accordingly. The other prisoners were naturally more or less affected. Mrs. Surratt, particularly, sank under the dread announcement, and pleaded for four days' additional time to prepare herself for death.”

Surely they would give her more time than that, Mary Ann thought. Surely Edwin was right and President Johnson would commute her sentence, giving her many long years in prison, perhaps all the years remaining to her on Earth, to prepare for a natural death not hastened by vengeful man.