July 7, 1865---"Don't let me fall."

JULY 7, 1865:                      

 The Lincoln Conspirators hang this day:

After a restless night of prayer, weeping, and repentance in the company of clergy and with family members, those scheduled to hang --- Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, Mary Surratt, and David Herold --- faced their last sunrise.

 

The hangings were arranged to take place at the Old Arsenal Building at Fort McNair in Washington D.C., and the graves of the condemned were dug in the same courtyard by eager volunteers. It was a brutally hot day, nearly 100 degrees out, and much hotter behind the high walls of the Old Arsenal’s airless courtyard. The area was packed with a thousand spectators.

The extraordinarily clear photographs of the execution were taken by Samuel Gardner on glass negatives and are considered among his finest work.

At daybreak Powell made a statement exonerating Mary Surratt. He made a second statement exonerating George Atzerodt. Atzerodt, for his part, made a statement further implicating Surratt. Nobody paid attention to either man.

At 11:30 A.M. the gallows were tested repeatedly by the execution squad. The sound of the springing trapdoors and falling sacks of flour unnerved the condemned who could hear all the racket from their cells.  

Although the hangings were to take place at noon, General Winfield Scott Hancock contrived to delay the hangings by more than an hour, hoping, praying, and expecting that President Johnson might pardon Mary Surratt. Hancock had stationed a line of soldiers from the White House door all the way to the execution yard to speed any clemency messages along, but as the leaden minutes ticked by, Hancock realized with a sinking heart and a sense of shame that he would be the first man to execute a woman in American history.

Finally, around 1:00 P.M. he announced that the hangings would take place.

“The woman too?” one of his subordinates asked.  

“Yes. The woman too,” Hancock answered heavily.

Anna Surratt, Mary’s daughter, who had been lingering nearby hoping for a deus ex machina from the White House began to scream uncontrollably at these words. Hancock had her led away, kindly. Anna never recovered from the day, and was eventually committed to a sanitarium.  

Ironically, the only man in America who could have and undoubtedly would have pardoned Mary Surratt was the man she had been convicted of killing.

 

At 1:15 P.M., the four condemned were led into the courtyard and helped up the gallows steps. Lewis Powell was given a straw hat to keep him from fainting under the blazing sun, and Mary Surratt was given a chair to sit in. Someone stood over her, shielding her from the sun with an umbrella.

A stray breeze carried off Powell’s hat as the Death Warrants were being read. It being given back to him, Powell said, "Thank you, Doctor, I shall not need it much longer."

After the Warrants were read, white cloth was tied around each prisoner’s torso, binding their arms to their sides, and white cloth was likewise bound around their legs so that they would not kick as they hung. Each prisoner was fitted with a white hood obscuring their faces.  Afterward they were led to the nooses.

As the nooses were being fitted, Powell spoke out: “Mrs. Surratt is innocent.”

Atzerodt said, “We shall all meet in a better world.”

Herold’s last words, if any, are unremembered.

Mary Surratt pleaded weakly, “Don’t let me fall.”

And then they all fell. Mary Surratt appeared to die immediately, Atzerodt vomited, and Powell appeared to struggle for some long moments, drawing his legs up at one point into a sitting position. Herold strangled slowly. It took almost five minutes for him to die.

The bodies hanged there, on display, for a half an hour. Mary Surratt, the last to be cut down, was not taken from the gallows until 1:58 P.M.  After a medical examination, they were encoffined and buried without ceremony.

Justice, of a sort, had been done.