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By Root 807 0

rounding up of Lincoln’s killers has become a national pastime. Secretary of War Stanton has personally taken charge of identifying the larger conspiracy that has grown out of Booth’s single gunshot, pushing Lafayette Baker from the limelight. While some in the Confederate South now call Booth a martyr and hang pictures of him in their homes as they would for any family member, northerners are even more determined to see every last one of his co-conspirators found—and killed. The jails are full of men and women who have been trapped in the spider’s web of the Stanton investigation. Some have absolutely nothing to do with Lincoln’s death, like James Pumphrey, the Confederate-sympathizing owner of a stable, who spent a month behind bars. No one is immune from suspicion. Federal agents scour their list of suspects, making sure no one is overlooked. One missing suspect is twenty-one-year-old John Surratt, whose mother, Mary, provided Booth and his conspirators with weapons and lodging.

Mary herself sits inside the old Arsenal Penitentiary awaiting her fate. She’s been locked up since her arrest on April 17. The trial of all the co-conspirators, including Mary, began on May 10, and some 366 witnesses were called before it was over, seven weeks later. From the beginning, the public viewed all the conspirators as clearly criminals. Certainly the drunken George Atzerodt and the brutish thug who attacked the Sewards, Lewis Powell, look the part. But Mary Surratt is different. Standing five foot six, with a buxom figure and a pretty smile that captivates some of the journalists in attendance, Mary has initially engendered some sympathy, and many Americans wonder if her life should be spared.

But Mary’s physical appearance, like that of her co-conspirators, began to change as the trial stretched into its sixth and seventh weeks. Stanton was responsible for this disfiguring transformation. When not on trial, he insisted, all the conspirators had to wear a thick padded hood over their heads. Extra cotton padding was placed over the eyelids, pressing hard against the eyeballs. There was just one slit, at the mouth, for eating. The purpose was to prevent them from seeing or hearing one another as they remained chained in the bowels of the Montauk, the warship President Lincoln visited on the last day of his life.

Underneath the hoods the heat was intense and the air stifling. The sweating and the bloating of the skin from the heavy hoods made each conspirator appear more and more swollen and rabid with each passing day.

Mary Surratt endured an even greater private hell. In addition to the claustrophobia and disfigurement caused by the hood, she suffered from severe cramping, excessive menstruating, and constant urinating from a disease known as endometriosis. She was barely tended to by her captors or given the freedom to properly care for herself. One eyewitness called her cell aboard the Montauk “barely habitable.” Sick and trapped in this filthy cell, Mary Surratt took on a haunted, bloated appearance.

After deliberating for three days, the nine-member jury finds Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and David Herold guilty. They will be hanged. As for Dr. Samuel Mudd, Michael O’Laughlen, Ned Spangler, and Samuel Arnold, their punishment will be the remote penitentiary of Fort Jefferson in the Gulf of Mexico.

Guilty! Sentenced to hang (left column): Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt (not pictured). Sentenced to prison (right column): Samuel Arnold, Ned Spangler, Michael O’Laughlen, and Dr. Samuel Mudd (not pictured)

There is no one willing to speak up for the men who will hang. But Mary Surratt’s priest comes to her defense. So does her daughter, Anna—though not her missing son, John. Mary Surratt’s attorney frantically works to get an audience with President Andrew Johnson so that he might personally intervene on her behalf. Her supporters say she was just a lone woman trying to make ends meet by providing weapons for Booth and his conspiracy and point out that she didn’t pull