An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [98]
Officials were making a graveyard of General Robert E. Lee's front lawn at Arlington, which would eventually become our National Cemetery; the telegraph, cameras, and newspapers were making news available quicker than ever before; and what I call "the hysteria of celebrityhood" was fast taking hold.
State legislators had not yet made up laws to deal with supplying bodies for teaching. Resurrectionists, those who dug up and sold bodies, were rushing to Washington. Grave robbing became a lucrative activity. Handbooks were written on it. Wealthy people posted guards in cemeteries to protect the final resting places of their loved ones. There were four colleges in the District of Columbia. Three had medical departments. But there were a lot of cemeteries, as well as the Washington Asylum, and the Washington Almshouse (poorhouse). There were many derelicts who had nobody to claim their bodies. There was a potter's field and a good rail line, which made feasible the interstate shipment of bodies to Virginia and Michigan, where there were more good medical schools. (Back in 1859, when John Brown made his raid on Harper's Ferry to free the slaves, students from a medical school in Winchester, Virginia, rushed to the scene on hearing that the raid failed. They stuffed the body of Watson Brown, son of John, into a barrel, packed it in ice, and took it back to the college for dissection.)
In 1865, Washington was a boiling pot of confusion and constant turmoil. It had a peculiar mixture of educated and uneducated African Americans, well-placed citizens and transients, captured Confederate soldiers, Confederate sympathizers, political power grabbers, visiting dignitaries, do-gooders establishing new social agencies, architects finishing the Capitol building and the Washington Monument in the midst of pigs wandering in the muddy streets, a newly organized Sanitary Commission (precursor of the Red Cross) rushing to organize hospitals, the first women nurses in America, barrooms, dance halls, Willard's Hotel, the Smithsonian Institution, as well as people in the vanguard of our culture establishing museums, theaters, and art galleries.
It also had John Wilkes Booth.
I felt that the assassination and the mayhem that accompanied it was the perfect backdrop for my book. And Annie Surratt, the perfect friend for Emily. Only Annie Surratt could show Emily, who thinks she knows horror in her suspicions of her uncle's body snatching, what horror really is.
Emily Pigbush, Dr. Valentine, Maude, and Robert deGraaf are characters I created. Merry Andrews, the Spoon, and the Mole really lived and were involved in body snatching, though not in this time and place. Everything that happened to the Surratts is as I depict it.
It is true that Mrs. Surratt didn't have lawyers and someone supplied Mr. Aiken and Mr. Clampitt. No one knows who. Three doctors did attend Lincoln at Ford's Theater the night he was shot. Two are known. I made Dr. Valentine Bransby the third, who was unknown.
Lewis Thornton Powell also called himself Wood, and sometimes Payne. He did hide away in the Congressional Cemetery the Sunday night after the assassination, as I have him doing. And he did arrive at the Surratt house just as detectives were about to take Mrs. Surratt and Annie away for questioning.
Johnny Surratt's "career" and background were exactly as I depict them. He did take two young ladies to Ford's Theater on the night of March 15, 1865, and they did sit in the president's box, and John Wilkes Booth did stop by. Everything about Elizabeth Keckley, dressmaker and personal confidante of Mrs. Lincoln, is true.
There seems to be a controversy over Annie Surratt's age. Louis J. Weichman, author of A True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, has her age as twenty-six in the text and twenty-two in his chapter notes. Although his book is in my bibliography, I do not consider him a reliable source. He was a member of the cast in the Surratt house and the trial that followed. It would be like taking the word, a hundred and thirty