June 30, 1865---Sentence is pronounced: To hang or to rot in jail?

JUNE 30, 1865:         

“Extort confessions and procure testimony to establish the conspiracy . . . by promises, rewards, threats, deceit, force, or any other effectual means.” --- From an official Order by Colonel Lafayette Baker, Edwin M. Stanton’s Chief of Detectives

I

The Lincoln Assassination conspirators are convicted.

After a six week trial marked by legal irregularities that would have resulted in a mistrial at any other time in American history, the Lincoln assassination conspirators received the following sentences: 

David Herold --- To hang.

George Atzerodt --- To hang.

Lewis Powell --- To hang.

Mary Surratt --- To hang.

Dr. Samuel Mudd --- Life imprisonment at hard labor.

Michael O’Laughlen --- Life imprisonment at hard labor.

Samuel Arnold --- Life imprisonment at hard labor.

Edmund Spangler --- Six years imprisonment.

Jefferson Davis --- Indicted but not tried.

John Surratt --- Indicted but not tried.

John Wilkes Booth --- Deceased April 26, 1865.

The convicted were made aware of their sentences on the evening of July 6, 1865, and those to be hanged were sent to the gallows on July 7, 1865.

II

Booth of course had been killed at the time of his capture, and never stood trial.  Jefferson Davis, former President of the Confederacy, was imprisoned at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, and had been indicted not only as part of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy but on a completely separate charge of treason. He was never tried on either. John Surratt had fled the jurisdiction of the United States and was unavailable for extradition.

 

III

David Herold and family, the night before his execution

 

Of the remaining Defendants, David Herold was very largely guilty by association with Booth. He had become an accessory after the fact when he helped Booth flee after President Lincoln’s shooting.

Herold had known John Surratt when the two were schoolboys, and in 1864 he had met Booth and Mudd, and several other conspirators several times. He was in on the planning sessions for the President’s kidnapping, and was originally tasked by Booth to help George Atzerodt (whom Booth did not trust) with killing Vice-President Johnson.

Herold had never pulled a trigger nor harmed anyone directly, but the Hunter Commission sentenced him to death. Herold never made any secret of his aiding Booth, and they had been cornered together in the Garretts’ tobacco barn. What earned David Herold a noose was his having bragged about the crime to ex-Confederate Willie Jett, who had been Booth and Herold’s guide to the Garrett farm.

Willie Jett was one of the 371 witnesses called by the Prosecution in this case, and he testified that Herold had boasted to him that, "We are the assassinators of the President."

When questioned, Herold readily admitted the same thing.    

Whatever role he had played, Herold was, of course, not an assassin, and Herold’s attorney, Frederick Stone, tried to make this distinction before the Tribunal. They did not accept it.  

Stone then tried to mount a slender defense, describing Herold as “young” (he was twenty three) and “simple-minded,” “wax in the hands of a man like Booth."

It was a defense not without its merits. Herold was certainly not a canny conspirator. He talked too much and too freely to strangers, and seemed to have a very weak grasp of the gravity of the crime he was accused of, or of his position afterward, stating time and again that he would just like to go home.

One defense witness called Herold "a light and trifling boy," while a second said of Herold: "In my mind, I consider him to be about eleven years of age."

The Hunter Commission was unmoved, and Herold was ordered to be “hanged by the neck until dead.”

The Potomac's Navy Yard Bridge, over which Booth and Herold escaped (separately) on the night of April 14, 1865

IV

George Atzerodt with a clergyman on the night before his execution

George Atzerodt was in a similar position to David Herold. Atzerodt, born in 1835, was a German immigrant, and this may have prejudiced the Tribunal against him.

Atzerodt was an unsuccessful carriage-maker from Port Tobacco, Maryland, who had a fondness for drink and was chronically short of money.  He was a friend of John Surratt’s, and met John Wilkes Booth through that connection. 

Atzerodt, though nominally pro-Confederate (he rowed Southern agents across the Potomac at night for $50.00 a trip), seemingly had little interest in the war or in politics, but was seduced into the Presidential kidnapping plot when Booth promised him a share of the “prize money” the kidnappers would receive for bringing President Lincoln to Richmond in chains. (In fact, there was no “prize money,” and Booth cadged small amounts of cash from Atzerodt throughout the plot.)

Atzerodt was a cooperative witness. He admitted his involvement in Booth’s kidnapping plan, but told the Court that he only heard that the plan had shifted from kidnapping to killing on April 13^th.  (Booth’s diary, which was suppressed evidence, indicated that Booth had only told a few of the indicted co-conspirators about the change of plan at the last minute.) He said that Booth had tasked him with murdering Vice-President Johnson much against his will.

Atzerodt admitted that he had gone to the Kirkland Hotel and checked in intending to kill Johnson as per orders, but that a few drinks had made him change his mind. “I joined up to kidnap the President,” he explained carefully. “Not to kill anyone.” Atzerodt also told the Court that Herold had been assigned to assist him in killing Johnson because Herold had “more pluck,” but that Herold had abandoned him that night.

Atzerodt’s defense was as weak as Herold’s. His own attorney described him as “a constitutional coward,” and witnesses who testified for him described him likewise as “a good-natured fellow who is a notorious coward,” and “remarkable for his cowardice.”   

As with Herold, the Hunter Commission was unmoved, and Atzerodt too was ordered to be “hanged by the neck until dead.” 

V

Lewis Powell was convicted virtually before the trial began. The brutality of his attacks on the Seward family and on innocent bystanders were well-known and had been witnessed by many eyes.   Plus, he had been one of Mosby’s Rangers.

All the weapons shown in this section were used by Powell during his attack on the Sewards 

 

Demonized completely in the eyes of the Court, Powell’s initial decision to mount no defense made his conviction an open and shut matter. Although Counsel had been obtained for him (on the third day of the proceedings) Powell did not meet with his lawyer until late June. An insanity defense was then argued, but Powell was uncooperative even with his own Counsel, which doomed even this weak attempt to spare his life.

It is questionable whether Powell was completely compos mentis during the trial. He seemed to fade in and out of awareness, was uncertain where he was, and even forgot his own name at times (though he was called “Payne,” his alias, as often as not by the Court). They easily found him guilty, and ordered him “hanged by the neck until dead.” 

The rope used to hang Lewis Powell

Of all the Defendants, Powell had handled his incarceration worst. A suicide attempt had been foiled, but his hooding and shackling had undoubtedly damaged his mind and caused him physical problems as well. Powell was likely mentally ill even before the war, and the mental abuse he suffered at the hand of his jailors only further unhinged his mind.  

The hood Powell wore when he hanged

As a child he had been known as “Doc” to his friends for his habit of caring for sick and injured friends, family, and animals.  Powell was born in Alabama in 1844, the son of a Baptist Minister who later relocated his family to Apopka, Florida. What turned "Doc" toward violence is an unanswerable question. Powell joined the Confederate Army (“The Jasper Rifles”) at 16. He fought on the Peninsula, was wounded at Gettysburg, and was one, as noted, of Mosby’s Rangers. It was during his tenure as a Ranger that he met John Surratt, who recruited him into the Confederate Secret Service. It was around this time that he began using the names “Payne” and “Paine.”

Powell's shackles, known as "Lily Irons" were habitually used in the 'madhouses' of the time.

 

He was an enthusiastic participant in John Wilkes Booth’s plan to kidnap President Lincoln (again recruited by Surratt), and when Booth morphed the plot into an attempt to kill Seward and Lincoln and Johnson and Stanton, the powerful Powell went along with it. Booth gave him the task of killing Seward. Powell’s own individual motives for the attack are unclear, other than the fact that he was a rock-ribbed Confederate who apparently believed that decapitating the United States government might change the course of the war. He never expressed any remorse for his crimes. 

Shortly before he was hanged, Powell met with a Minister. He wept copiously, told his confessor that the Tribunal had hardly scratched the surface of the entire conspiracy matter, and when pressed on his crimes answered that he had acted only in his role as a Confederate soldier, but that the Confederate leadership had let him down. 

Powell's Death Warrant

One thing that Powell insisted upon throughout the trial, rationally and coldly, was the innocence of Mary Surratt, a fact he repeated even as the noose was being fitted around his neck.

"Mrs. Surratt is innocent!"

Beyond this brief biography, there is something more, something unnerving about Lewis Powell. In the various photographs taken of Powell (and Gardner found in Powell his most willing subject) there is always madness in his eyes. He has, in short, the dead eyes of an instinctive killer, a shark or a mass murderer. That is troubling enough, but there is a frightening 21^st Century modernity to the photos not seen in most 19^th Century pictures. 

In photos of the era, the subjects are normally posed and composed, looking into the camera lens with certain air of self-consciousness. The environment in which they find themselves is alien. Not so Powell. He seems utterly at ease with the medium, even unselfconscious of it. 

He is virtually modeling in those photos taken wearing the hat and overcoat in which he stabbed five people, including Secretary of State Seward. 

The above colorized photo could be a photo of any angst-ridden young man today. Perhaps his long-sleeved T-shirt and modish hairstyle add to the effect, but of all President Lincoln’s accused killers, Lewis Powell is the only one who affects this blogger personally. To inject a personal note, even 150 years after his death, Lewis Powell gives me chills, the one man among Booth’s group whom I sense is a thoroughly modern mass murderer, a man without remorse, without ethics, and without any cause beyond his own desires. 

  

  

VI

Judge Advocate Holt contemplating Mary Surratt's death penalty

If Lewis Powell seemed to be an easy case for the rope, the case of Mary Surratt was bedeviling. 

Surratt's Tavern in Surrattsville (now Clinton), Maryland

Mary Surratt was an unapologetic Rebel. Her husband, John Surratt Sr., had left Maryland to go South and join the gray army in 1861. John had died in Confederate service (though not in battle) in 1862, and Mary blamed the Union for her husband’s death. 

It was at that point that her son, John Jr. had applied to assume his father’s job as Postmaster of Surrattsville, Maryland, their ancestral home. Abraham Lincoln himself approved young John’s application. 

John used his position to act as a Confederate courier in southern Maryland. The region around Surrattsville was geographically within the Union but psychologically in the Confederacy. Lincoln had received but 12 votes in five counties of the area, and the pro-Lincoln people in the area had been threatened into obscurity or long ago run off by 1864, when John had formally joined the Confederate Secret Service. 

Mary actively supported her son’s endeavors, and Surratt’s Tavern in Surrattsville became a center of gravity for Confederate sentiment in the area. A major “secret” smuggling route ran right through Mary Surratt’s parlor, where shady Unionists looking to make a buck would meet with shady Confederates looking to buy items unavailable in the South --- anything from lacy pantaloons to gatling guns.  

Mary used her family’s “vig” from all the swag flowing through the tavern to buy a boarding house in Washington, D.C., and the parlor of the boarding house became the northern terminus of the smugglers’ road.   

None of this was very secret. Union spies used the Surratt route as well. Mary was picky about her house guests, and both places catered to apparently honest hardworking (white) laborers (George Atzerodt was not permitted to room there, and John Wilkes Booth felt it beneath him). 

Things were a bit odd at dinner times, when guests were addressed by any number of aliases by other guests, depending on who recognized whom from where, but Mary seemed to keep things straight in her head.  She was trustworthy to hold weapons, money, documents, and messages, making her establishments major “drops.”  

A statue of Mary Surratt as she looked circa 1864

Whether Mary Surratt was actively involved in any of the deals and plots that were discussed in the dark corners of her houses is questionable. No doubt she overheard much. She certainly knew more about the Lincoln kidnapping plot than the “absolutely nothing” she admitted to in open Court, but how much more and when is one of history’s great mysteries. 

Surratt's Boarding House in Washington, D.C.

Mary Surratt earned much from providing safe houses to scoundrels, spies, and scouts, and therefore had a stake in staying willfully blind and deaf in her own home. She “kept the nest that hatched the egg” (as President Johnson said in denying her clemency) of the Lincoln kidnapping plot but there is little solid evidence that she participated in the conspirators’ meetings or knew any beyond the haziest details. And though her suppositions were informed ones, there is no legitimate evidence that she knew anything about John Wilkes Booth’s decision to kill President Lincoln until after the fact.  She was, however, friendly with Booth, and their relationship prior to the assassination was a deciding factor in her fate. 

Unfortunately for Mary Surratt, the name of John Surratt, her son, moved in and out throughout the testimony. It became clear that John Surratt was a linchpin of sorts for the conspiracy ---he was a Confederate spy, and everyone involved knew him. Mary was in a very literal sense, the nest from which he had been birthed, and his absence enraged most everyone involved with the trial. Mary was, thus, standing as surrogate for her son.  

Perhaps even more unfortunate for Mary Surratt was the fact that she was a stern-looking iron-gray woman who did not capture the Court’s sympathy at all. Had she been a petite china doll female, the apotheosis of femininity as it was measured in the 1860s and had she shed dainty tears into a kerchief of cambric lace, Mary Surratt’s fate might have been different. But she was not dainty, she was a woman for whom life had been hard. Except for the matter of race, she would have agreed with Sojourner Truth’s sentiments:

Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? 

The Hunter Commission condemned Mary Surratt “to be hanged by the neck until dead,” with a recommendation for clemency based upon her “sex and age.”

Mary Surratt receiving Extreme Unction from her priest just prior to her hanging

VII

Dr. Samuel Mudd, who aided John Wilkes Booth by setting the assassin’s broken leg after the killing was convicted and sentenced to life at hard labor. Although Mudd insisted he was a good Union man, numerous witnesses testified to his hatred of the United States, his disdain for the slain President, and his strongly pro-Confederate stance throughout the war. Perhaps most damning was his prior relationship with Booth, a relationship that dated back to at least August 1864. His proffer of sanctuary to this supposed “stranger” also raised many eyebrows. His transparent lies that he did not know Booth and had heard nothing of the assassination of the President until several days after the killing did nothing to convince the Tribunal that he was innocent, but Mudd, surprisingly, was spared from hanging by a single vote. Instead, he was sent to Fort Jefferson in the lonely Dry Tortugas, there to spend the rest of his life, or so it was assumed. 

 

VIII

Michael O’Laughlen was, like Mudd, convicted and sentenced to life at hard labor at Fort Jefferson. O’Laughlen had been a cooperative witness all along. He had turned himself in on April 17^th, had openly admitted his part in the failed kidnapping plot (Booth had designated him to overpower the President’s coachman and drive the rig with the captive Lincoln out of Washington City). 

O’Laughlen claimed, however, to know nothing of the assassination plot (Booth’s diary exonerated him) and two character witnesses testified that they were with O’Laughlen on that Friday night enjoying the carnival atmosphere of joyous Washington D.C. O’Laughlen testified in detail regarding the gaslights and candles in the windows of buildings off the main streets. 

A prosecution witness, however, claimed that the “shadowy figure” seen near Edwin Stanton’s house that night resembled O’Laughlen (another, conflicting, prosecution witness testified that the figure looked like David Herold).

Regardless, the Hunter Commission found him guilty. He had been a lifelong friend of John Wilkes Booth, a childhood playmate and schoolmate, and they simply would not believe that O’Laughlen was not in the assassin’s confidences. 

IX

Samuel Arnold, like Michael O’Laughlen and like Dr. Samuel Mudd, was convicted and sentenced to life at hard labor at Fort Jefferson. Arnold too had been a cooperative witness after his arrest on April 17^th. He openly admitted conspiring in the failed kidnapping plot He also admitted knowing of Booth’s desire to kill the President, though not the precise plan. He was in Baltimore on April 15^th, and had been there for several weeks. 

The Hunter Commission found him guilty. Just like Michael O’Laughlen, Arnold had been a lifelong friend of John Wilkes Booth, a childhood playmate and schoolmate, and a recent correspondent; his letters were judged to be sympathetic to Booth’s aims.

X

Edman (sometimes “Edmund” and sometimes “Ned”) Spangler was an employee at Ford’s Theatre. He had helped prepare the Presidential Box for the evening show on April 14. Spangler knew John Wilkes Booth only slightly, and was convicted on very dubious testimony. 

Spangler had apparently said, “Let him go,” or “How do you know?” or something similar when a fellow stagehand cried out, “That’s John Wilkes Booth!” as Booth darted across the stage after shooting the President and leaping down from the Box. 

Spangler was convicted of aiding in Booth’s escape, but even the implacable Hunter Commission could not impose too harsh a sentence on the man; he received six years at hard labor at Fort Jefferson, but was pardoned after only eighteen months.

XI

Although there have been billions of words written on the Civil War, and millions on Abraham Lincoln, the assassination, and the conspirators (either singly or together), the Conspirators’ Trial is relatively scanted in the literature, an uncomfortable subject for Civil War historians. Perhaps in part, this is because the trial involves legal issues that have to be parsed out in dry detail, and perhaps it is because publishers believe that a book on the subject wouldn’t sell, but to a great extent it is simply because the Trial is a blot upon the escutcheon of the legal system of the United States. 

While there is no question that the Conspirators needed to be punished, it’s unclear if the right conspirators were punished and if the punishments here fit the crimes. 

While the brutal actions of Lewis Powell spoke for themselves and might have earned him a death penalty even today, the fact is that, of the Conspirators tried, not one had actually killed anybody. 

And though Booth had gathered a coterie around him to perpetrate a kidnapping that never even began to occur, most of the Conspirators were out of the loop on the assassination.

No evidence linked Dr. Mudd to the actual killing of the President, nor Samuel Arnold, nor Michael O’Laughlen. Mary Surratt’s connection was at best incidental. 

Of the ones that acted on the night of April 14^th, Edman Spangler uttered a phrase.   George Atzerodt decided to do nothing at the last moment except drink. David Herold aided Booth’s escape (and perhaps approached Edwin Stanton’s door). Lewis Powell was the only Conspirator to carry out Booth’s orders, and he failed to achieve his actual objective. Only Booth, tragically, succeeded in doing what he set out to do. 

But the public was howling for a blood-price to be paid for the life of President Lincoln, and most importantly, so was Edwin Stanton. Still wielding power like the Acting President, Stanton was able to choreograph the Trial to a nicety. Disinterested in the folderol of a Civil Criminal proceeding, Stanton made sure that the Conspirators were treated as the worst of War Criminals. They were brutally abused in captivity, denied Counsel virtually right up until the day of trial, and were kept hooded even in the courtroom for the first ten days of Hearings. The presence of seven faceless, essentially headless, men (and one woman) in the Courtroom must have been surreal and deeply disturbing even to those who believed they deserved such treatment.

Nor were they the only persons arrested for the crimes specified. Scores of people were jailed after Lincoln’s death. Even John Ford, the owner of Ford’s Theatre, had been arrested on the night of the President’s shooting. The theatre itself remained closed, the building under military occupation. 

In terms of forensics and evidence, there was little. The shooting scene had been trampled by panicked theatregoers and then picked clean by souvenir hunters, as had Peterson’s Boarding House. Mary Surratt’s places had been turned upside down in multiple searches for evidence. Whether evidence had been lost, or alternately planted, or what the chains of custody were for existing evidence, had already become hellish questions. They remain so to this day. 

Instead, the Prosecutors fudged the Trial proceedings by conflating the kidnapping plot with the assassination, and by creating tenuous, imaginative linkages between known Confederate spy plots --- including the Confederate Secret Service cell in Canada and the Bermuda Yellow Jack Plot (meant to infect the Union with Yellow Fever) --- with the assassination. 

At the time, and for subsequent historians, this was like taking ten randomly-chosen 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles, hurling them all into a heap, and then trying to make a wall-sized theme mural of them in a six week period. Inconvenient evidence was suppressed, testimony was led, and inferences and suppositions took the place of real information. At least the Court tried all the right people --- or did they?

XII

One of the Common Law peculiarities of the era was the rule that precluded indicted individuals from testifying against fellow Defendants. While the rule may have made sense in 13^th Century England as a way to minimize the potential for self-serving perjury, the application of the rule in 19^th Century America was troubling, especially in a case as complex as the Lincoln assassination where virtually everyone the authorities questioned about the killing stood a more than fair chance of being indicted. 

As impacted by the rule, indictments were pursued by Prosecutors based on a cost-benefit analysis. It was left up to investigators to determine whether the probative value of a person’s testimony outweighed their perceived guilt. This encouraged people under investigation to lie creatively, not only confirming the assumptions of investigators but adding additional facts and information that would make them indispensable witnesses. The capital nature of the Lincoln trial only intensified this impulse. 

XIII

Much of the testimony that convicted Mary Surratt, for example, came from John Lloyd, who worked for her as Manager of Surratt’s Tavern in Surrattsville. 

Although Mary spent the majority of her time at the Boarding House in Washington, Lloyd (who seemed suspiciously well-versed in the details of the conspiracy) testified that five to six weeks before the assassination (sometime in early March or February) John Surratt, David Herold, and George Atzerodt came to Surrattsville to drop off two carbines and ammunition (these may have been for use in the kidnapping). Lloyd, though, further testified that just days before the assassination, Mary Surratt mentioned that "the shooting irons" would be needed soon, and that Mary confirmed this again on the morning of the 14^th of April. 

The fact that she was in Washington and that he was in Surrattsville never seemed to trouble anyone (according to his testimony, he had taken two five hour round-trip carriage rides within three days to have these two brief conversations with his employer; but the carriage driver or drivers were never found nor questioned).   

The fact that Lloyd had kept “the shooting irons” hidden for two months and that he testified to conspiratorial remarks made by the male Defendants may have impressed the Hunter Commission that he was a conspirator himself, but he had bought his freedom by providing crucial (uncorroborated) testimony. 

XIV

The chief witness for the Prosecution was Louis J. Weichmann, a friend of John Surratt’s from Seminary. During the Civil War Weichmann was a low-level clerk at Edwin Stanton’s War Department and routinely passed Intelligence to Surratt. 

Weichmann, who was well-known to Mary Surratt, boarded at her place in Washington for a much-reduced room rate. He claimed that the Conspirators used Surratt’s Boarding House as their primary meeting place, that he had been in on several meetings, that Mary Surratt was present at all of them, and that he had traveled to Surrattsville with Mary a number of times to meet with John Wilkes Booth, including three meetings on April 14^th. 

Weichmann also testified that he had gone to Richmond with John Surratt and conferred with Jefferson Davis on the Conspiracy. Jefferson Davis much later stated that he had never heard of Louis J. Weichmann.  Other testimony concerned the involvement of Jacob Thompson,  the Confederate spymaster in Canada, and of James Dunwoody Bulloch, the spymaster in Liverpool (this last is of interest, because Bulloch was the uncle of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26^th President of the United States, a man who lionized Lincoln).  

Even during the Trial, and for years after, Weichmann’s testimony was attacked. Rumors (then) and evidence (now) indicate that Weichmann’s testimony was perjurous and suborned by Edwin M. Stanton. Stanton’s interrogators threatened Weichmann’s family, strung him up while standing on a chair, and likely beat him to obtain conformed testimony. After the Trial, Weichmann received a “gift” from Stanton --- a position at the Customshouse in Philadelphia from which the Star Witness could line his pockets thickly. 

 

Weichmann never lived down his role in the Trial. Any business he opened in the postwar years failed, as it was avoided by people not wishing to be associated with such a notoriously dishonest man. And though Weichmann swore out a deathbed Statement claiming that there had been no perjury nor coercion, evidence that has come to light since has cast doubt on his Statement. 

XV

This Blog is ill-suited to do more than report certain facts. In a situation such as the Conspiracy and the Trial, where so many fact patterns intersect and overlay one another, the best that can be done is to recount some of the most pertinent points. Thus, we have given only the briefest attention to the role of Jefferson Davis in the Conspiracy (actual or supposed), have barely scratched the surface of John Surratt’s involvement, and have hardly addressed at all the fascinating speculations about Booth’s secret trips to Canada, for example. 

Many Conspiracy timelines exist. What the truth of each is is a question every person must answer for themselves.

Was John Wilkes Booth working for the Confederacy? In brief, it might be said that he believed he was. Booth wanted to be a Confederate Secret Agent; an actor and natural dramatist, he presented himself as one. Whether he had “real” orders from Jefferson Davis is another question. 

And though John Surratt seemed to have been the hub around which the spokes rotated on the bizarre wheel that was the Conspiracy, it should be remembered that Surratt, the “spy” was all of twenty years old in 1865, hardly of an age to be a trained or trustworthy agent. His subsequent 1869 trial ended in a hung jury, a fact which should cast a different light on the entire Hunter Commission proceeding. 

Special Judge Advocate John Bingham summed up the Hunter Commission findings in one paragraph: 

What more is wanting?  Surely no word further need be spoken to show that John Wilkes Booth was in this conspiracy; that John Surratt was in this conspiracy; and that Jefferson Davis and his several agents named, in Canada, were in this conspiracy . . . Whatever may be the conviction of others, my own conviction is that Jefferson Davis is as clearly proven guilty of this conspiracy as John Wilkes Booth, by whose hand Jefferson Davis inflicted the mortal wound on Abraham Lincoln.

The bonnet Mary Surratt wore on July 7, 1865

What more is wanting? From the perspective of this 21^st Century American lawyer, the answer is, “A great deal.”