But Mudd had also lent the man a razor to shave his mustache and had directed him and David Herold to an escape path through a nearby swamp. Since his patient was proved to be John Wilkes Booth, Mudd’s conviction seemed ensured.
None of the men in the courtroom, however, captured the spectators’ attention like Mary Surratt. Gallant reporters described her regularly as a devoted mother, and one account noted that as a former Southern belle, she still had “pleasing features.” To those journalists, Mrs. Surratt seemed entirely deserving of the testimonials to her good character from her several Catholic advisers.
• • •
As the trial proceeded, a grand jury in the District of Columbia indicted Jefferson Davis and John Breckinridge for high treason. Prosecutors announced that they would try Davis instead for his involvement in a July 1864 attack on Washington. But as delays mounted, critics wondered whether the government was trying to avoid a debate over the legality of secession. As Davis waited in prison through the many months, Breckinridge remained at large in England.
• • •
During the forty-eight days of testimony in the assassination trial, prosecution and defense called a total of 366 witnesses. The charges did not distinguish between the four men linked directly to the plot to kill Lincoln and the six involved in the earlier kidnapping scheme. The prosecutors argued that even if they had balked at the assassinations, none of the five men or Mary Surratt had come forward to prevent them.
Despite the outrage provoked by their crime, the defendants attracted several prominent attorneys. Reverdy Johnson, a Maryland senator, agreed to represent Mrs. Surratt on grounds that she and her fellow prisoners had been entitled to a civil trial. He demanded to know whether constitutional rights existed only in peacetime.
• • •
Despite Reverdy Johnson’s maneuvering, he could not erase the damning evidence against Mary Surratt offered by Louis Weichmann, the boarder who had once studied with her son. Weichmann was desperate to convince the authorities that he had not been involved in the plot, and he testified to the many times that Booth beckoned John Surratt upstairs for talks that might last two or three hours. He added that when her son was away, Mrs. Surratt and Booth held similar long private conversations.
Gratefully, Weichmann took up hints from Judge Holt to keep his answers consistent with what he had already told government detectives. In his final questioning, Holt drew from Weichmann an account of a meeting between Booth and Mrs. Surratt eight hours before the murder. It came soon after the actor learned that Lincoln would be attending the Ford Theater that evening.
Reverdy Johnson seemed to have given up on proving his client innocent. Instead, he tried and failed to tie Weichmann into the conspiracy.
• • •
An hour before noon on June 29, 1865, Judge Holt and the nine commissioners voted on the charges against the defendants. David Herold was the first to be sentenced—“to be hanged by the neck until he be dead.” The same verdict was reached for Atzerodt and Powell, convicted under the name Lewis Payne.
The court decreed life sentences for Michael O’Laughlen and Samuel Arnold. The evidence against Edward Spangler, the stagehand accused of helping Booth escape from the Ford Theater, had been only thinly corroborated. He was sentenced to a six-year prison term.
Last to be announced were the verdicts against Mary Surratt and Dr. Mudd. Mrs. Surratt was sentenced to be hanged for her “traitorous conspiracy,” which the commission deemed to have begun on March 6.
Because those deliberations had taken the full day, Mudd’s case was held over to the next morning. His testimony about not knowing Booth had been contradicted by witnesses who had seen them together and yet, by a vote of five to four, Mudd was spared the gallows. Hanging required a two-thirds vote, and Mudd was sentenced instead to life in prison.
• • •
The prospect of hanging a woman for the first time in U.S. history provoked five of the commissioners to urge clemency, and they attached their recommendation to the court’s findings that were sent to President Johnson. They did not argue for her innocence but instead on behalf of her sex and her age, which they established was forty-two. Throughout the trial, reporters had estimated that Mrs. Surratt was between forty-five and sixty.
Andrew Johnson had not stirred from the White House since he had moved in earlier in the month. Rumors spread that he feared another round of assassinations, but in fact he was swamped with visitors and paperwork, and his health was suffering.
When Johnson received the verdicts, the commissioners’ petition for clemency for Mrs. Surratt was somehow omitted. In any case, the new president might have balked at commuting her death sentence, since he was insisting that everyone must understand that “if women committed crimes they would be punished” like men. Johnson added that if he agreed to the request for clemency, “hereafter conspirators and assassins would use women as their instruments.”
By his reasoning, Johnson was protecting the rest of Mrs. Surratt’s gender by letting her hang. He concluded, “It would be a mercy to womankind to let Mrs. Surratt suffer the penalty of her crime.”
• • •
When all last-minute appeals failed, families of the condemned prisoners were allowed to pay their final visits. David Herold’s bevy of six sisters were sobbing, seemingly more unnerved by his fate than Herold himself, with his cultivated air of indifference. Lewis Powell, who had lost two brothers fighting for the Confederacy, also had six sisters, but none came to visit.
One heavily veiled woman asking for George Atzerodt set off speculation in the press that she was either his mother or his sister. The trial had not disclosed that Atzerodt had fathered a child with a common-law wife.
John Surratt, unwilling to jeopardize his sanctuary in Canada, never saw his mother again.
• • •
On July 7, 1865, a thousand spectators showed up at Washington Arsenal, where scaffolding had been erected. Its platform had been measured to ensure that the prisoners would climb the traditional thirteen steps before reaching the four hangman’s nooses that dangled in a row.
At 1 p.m., the four prisoners were led to chairs on the platform. Lewis Powell wore a straw sailor’s hat, tilted at a rakish angle.
An official read out the death warrants, and a clergyman offered a prayer. When the prisoners were summoned forward, George Atzerodt was trembling so violently that his hands and legs had to be tied. Mary Surratt’s arms were also bound but she complained that the tight knot was uncomfortable, and it was loosened.
Given his height, Powell had to bend his head to let the rope be slipped over his neck. The officer doing the fitting explained that because Powell’s neck was so thick, a looser noose would make his dying less painful. Powell said, “You know best, Captain.”
The four prisoners were draped with white cloth, and soldiers kicked away the wood blocks beneath the trapdoors. The four bodies fell about six feet before the ropes jerked them back again for an instant.
When all four bodies were motionless, surgeons examined them and soldiers cut them down. The scaffolding would remain in place for days, a reminder for Samuel Arnold, Edward Spangler, Michael O’Laughlen, and Samuel Mudd when they were brought out to exercise in the courtyard.
With the spectacle ended, the crowd moved out of the hot noonday sun and headed for makeshift stands selling lemonade and cakes. Some in the audience loitered in the shadow of the gallows throughout the afternoon until officers shooed them away.
Oliver O. Howard
CHAPTER 6
OLIVER OTIS HOWARD (1865)
ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S SELECTION OF MAJOR General Oliver Otis Howard to head the Freedmen’s Bureau was quickly proving to be a mixed mark of favor. Howard had welcomed the appointment as a way of extricating himself from a posting in the army’s Western Theater. But almost at once he found that no job in the rebuilding of the United States was subject to harsher criticism.
Howard’s reputation had ma
de Lincoln’s settling on him easy to understand. Born in Leeds, Maine, Howard attended Bowdoin College and then, at twenty, was offered in 1850 an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy. He accepted even though four years at West Point would delay his marriage to Elizabeth Ann Waite, his attractive young fiancée, who approached life seriously.
Lizzie Waite’s sober manner suited Howard. Bearded and with a full head of brown hair, he cut a dignified figure as he stubbornly attended the Bible classes that were unfashionable among his fellow cadets.
Although Howard did well in his studies, he found that his mild support for abolition, combined with his religiosity, made him something of a pariah. Custis Lee—whose father, Robert E. Lee, was soon to be named West Point’s new superintendent—told Howard, with consummate politeness, to stop coming to his room without an invitation.
For his part, Howard’s Christian tolerance did not extend to Southern members of the academy’s debating society. He described them as “full of gas, seldom ever speaking to the point, but have a great flow of language.”
Graduating near the top of his class, Oliver Howard married Lizzie Waite, fathered a son, and left as a second lieutenant to fight in Florida against the Seminoles.
• • •
At a Methodist revival meeting near Tampa, Howard had an experience that changed his life. When the preacher called for sinners, Howard stepped forward, and very soon he was wondering whether he should resign from the army and devote his life to the ministry. But at home, awaiting their second child, Lizzie Howard was not sure that she wanted the life of a clergyman’s wife.
Howard was still debating his future—possibly applying for a six-month leave to study at Bangor Theological Seminary—when Fort Sumter fell to Southern forces, and he felt committed to the Union army for the war’s duration.
Commanding a brigade, Howard first saw the carnage of war at the Battle of Bull Run, and the sight caused his legs to tremble but confirmed his determination to protect civilians and minimize casualties. Together with his diligence and sense of fairness, that spirit raised him rapidly to the rank of brigadier general and led to a nickname, “the Christian General.”
• • •
In late May 1862, Howard’s right arm was badly shot up in fighting outside Richmond and was amputated between his elbow and his shoulder. When Major General Phil Kearny, who had lost his left arm in the war with Mexico, visited Howard’s camp, the new amputee offered a money-saving suggestion: Henceforth, the two of them should buy their gloves together.
After a brief period of recovery in Maine, Howard returned to battle but with dismal results.
His errors in judgment in May 1863 contributed to a rout of Union forces by Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. That public embarrassment was followed two months later by Howard’s disorganized retreat at Gettysburg.
The Eleventh Corps that Howard commanded was made up largely of German immigrants, and they were humiliated to learn that within the Army of the Potomac, his two debacles had sullied the reputation of their entire unit.
Then, in an unexpected reversal, Howard’s name was included in a congressional resolution praising the Union command at Gettysburg. Although the gesture of rehabilitation gratified Howard, he wanted his family and friends to know that to get it he had not engaged in any unworthy political chicanery.
• • •
When Howard learned of President Lincoln’s assassination, he shared his grief with his mother. “I anticipated a real pleasure in serving under his administration after the war was over,” Howard wrote, and he said he had felt the “complete confidence in Mr. Lincoln that I would in my own father and knowing that he would sustain me in every right course.”
Within the month, Howard was summoned to Washington, where Secretary of War Stanton told him that Lincoln had intended to appoint him as the new commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Stanton added that President Johnson desired to carry out Lincoln’s wish.
Howard had considered buying a farm in Maine and retiring from public life. But the chance to do good was too tempting to refuse. Howard rolled up his sleeve and set to work.
Howard could expect that Southerners would be hostile to his assignment, but elsewhere the choice was hailed. The New York Times praised the selection “of this Christian patriot.” In New Orleans, the French-language Tribune took heart from Howard’s history as an abolitionist. And Secretary of War Stanton received a fervent endorsement from a man with a unique perspective. Henry Ward Beecher’s daughter, Harriet, had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin. On meeting her, Lincoln was quoted as saying, “So you’re the little woman who started this great war.”
Now her father described Howard as “of all men yet mentioned, the very one.” Beecher envisioned Howard carrying “a wax candle lighted and signifying the word of God and the spirit of Love.”
• • •
On May 24, 1865, Howard received his nation’s thanks in person as he rode through Washington in the capital’s Grand Review. Spectators who had learned of Howard’s appointment called out his name during the victory parade, but at his side, William Tecumseh Sherman was less enthusiastic. Sherman had already warned Howard against letting “the theorists of New England” force upon the South the right of the Negro to vote and perhaps provoke a second civil war. Given the expectations for the bureau, Sherman added, “I fear you have Hercules’ task.”
Sherman was like other Union generals who had been unsure about how to deal with the former slaves who swarmed to their camps. In the war’s earliest days, when Ulysses Grant was trying to prevent slavery from becoming the central issue in the conflict, he had ordered his officers to “turn the negro out of your camp as you would any other vagrant.”
But within months Grant had come to believe that he had no choice but to supply sustenance for the dispossessed blacks.
As thousands of former slaves followed Sherman during his march from Atlanta to Savannah, he had written, “It is hard to tell in what sense I am most appreciated by Sambo—in saving him from his master” or in protecting him from politicians who were scrambling for his vote, if black men were allowed to cast it.
Sherman explained his misgivings to Howard: “I have realized in our country,” he said, “that one class of men makes war, and leaves another to fight it out. I am,” William Sherman concluded, “tired of fighting.”
• • •
Howard saw his mission as assisting the former slaves, not as shielding the property or sensibilities of their former owners. To his wife, Howard wrote that “the negroes must be employed, instructed, cloaked, and fed, borne with and kindly treated as well as emancipated.”
He was also mindful of the limits to his authority and its duration. He expected enlightened Southerners to commit to fair play for the former slaves and to extend to them full equal rights, although he recognized that the former owners were a “people claiming to be superior.”
When a state fulfilled its legal obligations, Howard was prepared to withdraw his bureau. He often repeated that he did not intend to perpetuate a permanent occupation.
And yet, if Howard succeeded, his Bureau would transform the lives of the former slaves—through land policy, education, voting rights, and even marriage practices—more surely than an occupation by Union troops.
Howard expected his assistant commissioners to share his optimism that “all good men” would recognize former slaves as “free laborers.” But the assistants were also pragmatic. To guide the blacks of Kentucky and Tennessee, Major General Clinton Fisk issued a brochure he called “Plain Counsel.”
Fisk cautioned black men from marrying hastily as a reaction against the laws that had prohibited marriage between slaves. Once they took a wife, however, the bureau expected them to respect their vows, even though few assistant commissioners went as far as Rufus Saxton, Howard’s longtime friend in South Carolina.
Saxton decreed that a wife who left her husband because of his adul
tery would be entitled to exclusive control of their children and “one-half of his real and personal property, and all household effects.”
• • •
In appointing his first ten assistants, Howard had drawn most of them from the ranks of the Union army and described them as “men of integrity with Christian hearts.”
He made an occasional blunder. One appointee, an army chaplain in New Orleans, seemed more concerned with his salary than with the work to be done, and Howard replaced him.
In other instances, Howard had first considered candidates for his team who were hostile to their black clientele. Major General George Hartsuff had been a cadet with Oliver Howard at West Point, but Howard found that he was lecturing Negroes around his army command that they better get to work because their former owners owed them nothing. Howard passed him over as head of the bureau in Virginia in favor of Colonel Orlando Brown, a protégé of Ben Butler.
More to Howard’s liking was Colonel John Eaton, to whom General Grant had turned over the seven hundred thousand Negroes emancipated along the Mississippi River. Eaton had commandeered the estate of Jefferson Davis at Davis Bend, Mississippi, and turned it into what was described as a “Negro Paradise” with all white people banished from the area. Howard named Eaton his assistant for the District of Columbia.
They would be working out of a Washington townhouse on the northeast corner of I and Nineteenth Streets, taken over four years earlier, when the Southern congressman who owned it had gone home.
• • •
Given his limited budget, Howard could afford to to hire only nine hundred staff members for the entire South. At his office, he amassed stacks of the petitions flooding into the War Department, fresh evidence of the epic casualties from the war.
Although 360,000 Union troops had died during the four years, the North had been spared widespread devastation, and its industries were flourishing.
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