Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt

by David Miller De Witt

Mary Surratt was the first woman tried and executed by the United States. She owned and ran a boardinghouse in Washington, D.C. where John Wilkes Booth and other conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln often met. She was tried and convicted of complicity in Abraham Lincoln's assassination and hanged on July 7, 1865. Though current scholarship indicates otherwise, many writers have portrayed her as an innocent victim of a vengeful military tribunal that did not have the right to try her for her involvement in the assassination plot. Two events supported this view. One was the 1866 Supreme Court decision Ex parte Milligan, which invalidated the authority of military courts to try civilians in places where civil courts were functioning. Ambiguity concerning military and civil authority in Washington, D.C. in 1865 raised questions about the legality of her trial. The other event was the trial of her co-conspirator son, John Surratt, before a civil jury in 1867, two years after her death. Surratt's testimony was similar to that of his mother. When his trial ended in a hung jury, it seemed to many that the military court had executed an innocent woman.

Genres: History, Historical

259 pages, Hardcover

First published April 14, 1895

About the author

David M. De Witt was a U.S. Representative from New York.

Reviews

[MALLORY · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Must Read

I loved this book. I wanted to find out the truth about Mary Surratt and I did. She got railroaded big time. Secretary of War Stanton just wanted to solve the Lincoln Assassination and he didn't care who he pinned it on. So an innocent women and 3 others died because of him.He wouldn't get away with it now!

[Betty Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the start one has to get beyond the florid and passionate style to see the detail in which the trial, sentencing, and hanging evolved. It was a set up pure and simple for Mrs. Surratt; Mr. DeWitt goes into such detail as to be 100% convincing that not only was the hanging a crime, but the entire way the military tribunal was a miscarriage of the rule of law and unconstitutional.
I picked this book because this year I am focusing on past presidents. His treatment of Johnson was at time sympathetic, but in the end as villainous as the prosecutors.

[Romina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for history class