Hanging Mary: A Novel

by Susan Higginbotham

  I had to take one last look at her.

  Returning to the room, I opened the shade. The four bodies, still wearing their white hoods, were lying atop the crude boxes that would serve as their coffins. Up on the scaffold, soldiers were cutting down the ropes and tossing bits of them to their friends, who were scrambling for the souvenirs. When one of two men, competing for a bit of Mr. Atzerodt’s rope, stumbled backward and fell into one of the open graves, his friend seized a shovel and gleefully began throwing dirt on his flailing companion.

  I pulled down the shade and hurried away.

  • • •

  At the boardinghouse, its door covered with black crepe I supposed the Holohans must have put there, a crowd had again gathered. As I followed Father Walter and Anna out of the carriage, and a policeman yelled at the crowd to stand back, I saw my father. I walked over to him, and I saw another familiar face: Alexander Whelan. He gave me a sad little salute and disappeared into the crowd.

  I put my arms around my father. “I’m sorry, Father. I had to try to help her. And I had to see her.”

  He shook his head and led me out of the crowd. “You have the look of death upon your face, child. You saw the executions?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw a hanging many years ago, and I have never been able to forget it. You saw four. I have not been able to protect you from anything this summer.”

  We walked on in silence. “What are your plans?” he inquired politely.

  They must have been developing at the back of my mind all along. “I want to move in with Miss Surratt and be of what help to her I can. And I want to find work. If no one in the government will have me, perhaps I can find a teaching job. But first—first, I want to go back to Baltimore and get away from here for a while.”

  “As you wish.”

  I squeezed his hand. “And I would like you to take me there, Father.”

  We got to the station just in time for the next train, crowded full of people talking excitedly about the executions, a few clutching bits of fake souvenir ropes that were already being sold to the gullible. This time it was my father who sat stiffly beside me until the train started to move and I began to nod off.

  “You’re exhausted, child. Rest here.”

  I leaned my head against my father’s shoulder, then opened my eyes wide.

  You don’t forget the sight of a woman who treated you like a daughter swinging at the end of a rope. That night, and many long nights afterward, I would be haunted by the sight. I would never be the same, just as I knew the men in blue who had walked in triumph down Pennsylvania Avenue and the men in gray making their way in defeat to their homes would never be the same. Maybe someday the memory would beat me down. If the past few months had taught me anything, it was that everything could change in the blink of an eye.

  But I was sick of death. It was life that was calling out to me, and I wanted to make the best of mine.

  I closed my eyes again. This time, amid the gabbling of the crowd clutching their ersatz ropes, the train lulled me straight to sleep.

  Epilogue

  NORA

  JUNE 1869

  Four years after her mother’s hanging, Anna married William Tonry, an Irishman who had spent much of his childhood in Boston and who worked as a chemist for the army.

  In other words, he was a certified Yankee.

  What singular quality in Mr. Tonry possessed Anna to abandon her most cherished prejudice, I cannot say, but when (with President Johnson’s permission) Mrs. Surratt was finally laid to rest in February 1869 with a proper funeral service at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, Mr. Tonry was there, and it was plain to everyone, even the members of the press who stood at a discreet distance from the mourners, that he adored Anna, which certainly helped. All that was needed was a decent interval from the funeral to pass so they could marry, and that interval having passed, the party that had gathered at Mrs. Surratt’s graveside gathered at St. Patrick’s Church for a very different occasion. I knew if Mrs. Surratt’s soul had been uneasy, it surely was at peace now, knowing Anna was in the hands of a good man who would cherish her.

  The day before, Anna had gotten all of her crying done over the fact that her mother wasn’t there to see her married (I had shed some tears myself), so as she dressed the morning of the ceremony, she was dry-eyed and beautiful, if not exactly calm.

  I adjusted her headdress for perhaps the fifteenth time. “Is this better?” I asked.

  “No!”

  You don’t argue with a bride. Sighing, I tried again, moving it forward just a fraction. “This?”

  I held my breath as Anna, her mother’s earrings sparkling, surveyed herself in the mirror. “Perfect,” she pronounced.

  “Then don’t you dare move your head until after the ceremony is over.”

  The press still took a certain interest in Anna, so this was to be a private, quite wedding with no bridesmaids or groomsmen, save for her oldest brother, Isaac, to lead her to the altar. He had finally made his way back east in the fall of 1865, having been held in Texas along with the rest of his regiment.

  Having dressed Anna to her satisfaction, I left her in the charge of Isaac (whose resemblance to his mother still startled me at times) and slipped into the pew that Mrs. Surratt had favored when I was living in her boardinghouse. It was a tribute I’d paid to her on many a Sunday since her hanging.

  At the front of the church sat John Surratt, lost in his own thoughts. Having learned from the newspapers of his mother’s execution, Mr. Surratt, then hiding in a remote part of Canada, had fled to Europe and had finally ended up in Egypt, where he was caught and brought back to Washington to be tried for the president’s death. I had reprised my testimony from the conspiracy trial, as had many others, including Mr. Weichmann, whose memory, I thought bitterly as I read the newspapers each morning, seemed only to have sharpened with time.

  But although the government had trotted out witnesses swearing Mr. Surratt had been in Washington on the night of April 14, other, more convincing witnesses claimed to have seen him elsewhere, and the civilian jury had been unable to reach a verdict. So he had gone free. But many shunned him now, some because they believed he’d had a hand in the president’s murder, and others because they believed he could have saved his mother by returning to Washington. Still, Anna and Isaac had remained loyal to him—Anna visiting him in prison, taking him delicacies, and procuring a first-rate lawyer for him, Isaac sitting in the courtroom and glaring at whoever glared at John—and I hoped he would take comfort in that in the lonely days to come.

  Anna, looking as pretty and rosy in her wedding dress as when I first saw her, glided down the aisle on Isaac’s arm, and the small congregation, John Surratt included, broke into a collective smile. Father Walter, presiding as he had at Mrs. Surratt’s reburial, had tears in his eyes as he pronounced the couple man and wife.

  We had a little wedding breakfast before Anna changed into a cream-colored traveling dress, her mourning dresses having been packed away, not to be needed again, I hoped, for years to come.

  “Write to me,” I said, hugging her good-bye as the carriage that would take her and her husband to the railway station appeared at the church door. “And you had better bring me a souvenir from Niagara Falls, do you hear?”

  “I will,” Anna said. She kissed me on the cheek, then took Mr. Tonry’s arm. “Nora!” she called when she reached her carriage. “Catch.”

  I held out my hands, and Anna tossed her wedding bouquet straight at me.

  As the couple settled into the carriage, someone coughed, and I turned to see the now-widowed Mr. Whelan, who had lately gotten into the habit of walking me from work to the house where I resided with the other teachers. “How was the wedding, miss?”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Are you going back to school?”

  “No, sir. I have t
he day off. A substitute is boring my girls to death.”

  “Then maybe you’d like to get some ice cream?”

  I smiled and took his arm. “That would be lovely,” I said, cradling the bouquet in my free arm as the wedding carriage clattered away.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Nora married Alexander Whelan in January 1870 and bore him three sons: James, Bernard, and John. Unfortunately, the marriage broke down, partly due to Alexander’s alcoholism and perhaps partly due to Nora’s deteriorating physical and mental health. After separating from Alexander in 1882, Nora was in and out of hospitals until August 1885, when her brother committed her to the Government Hospital for the Insane (known informally then, and officially now, as St. Elizabeths). Whether Nora’s mental health problems were in any way connected with the events of 1865 can only be guessed at. Her brother, who wrote a detailed account of her troubles at the time of her admission to St. Elizabeths, blamed her misfortune on her husband and made no mention of the war years at all.

  Nora’s slender file tells us little about her life at the asylum, but she appears to have stayed in contact with her sons and stepdaughters and was allowed occasionally to visit her sister in Baltimore. She died of tuberculosis at St. Elizabeths on January 7, 1896, at age fifty. Her death certificate describes her as having suffered from “chronic melancholia.” Nora was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington next to her parents, in a plot not far from Mary Surratt’s grave. Her husband, Alexander, died in 1916, at age eighty, and was buried in the same cemetery at some distance from Nora. If anyone at the time of her passing remembered the brief part Nora had played in history, it went unremarked.

  Days after he married Anna, William Tonry was dismissed from his government job in what the press believed was an act of petty retaliation for his marrying the daughter of Mary Surratt. Despite this setback, Tonry went on to become a prominent chemist who was often called upon as an expert witness at trials. He and Anna settled in Baltimore and had five children. Anna stayed far out of the public eye following her marriage, letting her husband speak for her about the events of 1865 on the rare occasion that it was necessary. She died in 1904 and was buried next to her mother at Mount Olivet; the following year, her husband was laid to rest beside her. Although the Cincinnati Commercial made the sensationalist claim in 1882 that Anna was a “wreck, both mentally and physically, with hair as white as the driven snow,” this is likely a gross exaggeration.

  In 1870, a financially strapped John Surratt began a speaking tour in which he acknowledged plotting to kidnap President Lincoln but denied knowing of any plan to assassinate him; he also denied the involvement of the Confederate government in the kidnapping scheme. As for his mother, John claimed that he had made contact with her lawyers and was told to stay away; not until the day his mother was hanged did he realize that her life had been at stake. Victorian audiences, however, found his lectures both unseemly and insufficiently revealing. When a furor erupted over his plan to speak in Washington, John canceled his lecture and retired from the public eye. After a few unhappy years working as a teacher, he moved to Baltimore and found work at the Old Bay Line steamship company, where he spent the rest of his career, rising eventually to the position of auditor. In 1872, he married Mary Victorine Hunter, with whom he had seven children. He died in 1916, reportedly having burned a memoir, and was buried in Baltimore.

  Isaac Surratt never married. He also worked at the Old Bay Line. Following his death in 1907, he was laid to rest in Mount Olivet by his mother and his sister, in accordance with his dying request.

  After the conspiracy trial, Louis Weichmann abandoned his plans to become a priest. Instead, he worked for the government in Philadelphia. His brief marriage to Annie Johnson, a temperance activist, ended in a separation. In 1886, after a change in administration cost him his government job, he moved to Anderson, Indiana, where some of his family lived, and opened a business college. Weichmann died in 1902, swearing on his deathbed that he had told the truth at the conspiracy trial. Unlike his erstwhile friend John Surratt, he did leave behind a memoir, which was finally published in 1975.

  Olivia Jenkins testified on behalf of her cousin John Surratt at his trial in 1867. The following year, she married Robert Thorn, by whom she had a daughter and a son. In 1879, the widowed Olivia married James Donohoe, whose two brothers were married to two of her sisters. She died in 1898 of influenza at her home in Capitol Hill. Her son served as a pallbearer for both Isaac and Anna Surratt and for Anna’s husband.

  Mary Apollonia Dean married Napoleon Bonaparte Grant, a railroad engineer who died in a train wreck in 1894, a few months before Mary’s own death. John T. Holohan died in 1877; his wife, Eliza, who had been working as a “sewer of books,” followed in 1899.

  Catherine Virginia Baxley returned to Baltimore after being released from prison. While at Old Capitol Prison, she kept a diary in the pages of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden, in which she recounted the death of her son. The diary eventually passed into the hands of her niece, who gave it to the New York Public Library. I have not found out when she died; the last trace I have found of her is in 1867, when she wrote to Robert E. Lee about some funds he had donated to benefit Southern orphans.

  John Brophy continued to proclaim Mary Surratt’s innocence after her execution. He married the blue-blooded Elizabeth Warren Tyler, a relative of President Tyler, in 1866 and eventually moved to New York City, where he was the president of St. Louis College, a small Catholic school in Manhattan, and later a clerk of court. The father of a large family, he died in 1914. His diverse interests included the Fenian movement and his wife’s genealogy, on which he and his sons published an endearingly snobbish little book.

  Mr. Howell was released from prison shortly after the executions of Mary Surratt and her codefendants. He died in 1869 of typhoid fever and was buried in Washington’s Congressional Cemetery under the name of Gustavus Howell.

  Mary Surratt’s tenant John Lloyd gave up his ill-fated career as a tavern keeper and returned to Washington, where he worked as a bricklayer and a contractor. He was fatally injured on the job after falling from a scaffold in 1892. Writing of his role in the Surratt trial, the Washington Post claimed that despite the importance of his testimony in sending Mary to the gallows, he believed her to have been an innocent victim of circumstance.

  Although Mrs. Slater was brought up frequently during both the conspiracy trial of 1865 and John Surratt’s trial in 1867, she was never linked to the assassination plot and never seems to have been arrested or even questioned. One paper, the Hartford Courant, identified her during the conspiracy trial as the former Sarah Gilbert, an erstwhile resident of Connecticut. But no one followed up on this scoop for over a hundred years, until in the 1980s, famed assassination researcher James O. Hall painstakingly traced her history from birth through April 1865, after which she disappeared into obscurity. Further research by John Stanton shows that she surfaced briefly in Manhattan in 1866 as Nettie Slater to divorce her husband, Rowan Slater. She remarried twice and died in Poughkeepsie, New York, as Sarah A. Spencer in 1920. Eschewing the lecture circuit and leaving no memoir behind, Sarah took her secrets to the grave, the marker of which shaves some ten years off her age. (Ironically, her third husband was a Union veteran.)

  Those who study the Lincoln assassination in depth will have noticed the absence of some of the minor players in the events of that terrible Good Friday of 1865. Indispensable as they may have been in life, they proved dispensable in fiction! In the same vein, although Mary Surratt had two female servants toward the end of her stay in Washington, for simplicity’s sake, I have combined them into one person: Susan. Otherwise, in telling Mary’s story, I have stayed as closely to known facts as possible. For the trial testimony I used Ben Perley Poore’s transcript and adhered closely to the original, although it has been heavily condensed and in some cases altered slightly for the sake of readability. The letter Johnny gives to his mother
prior to the failed kidnapping attempt is my own invention.

  While Adele Douglas did come to the White House to beg President Johnson for clemency for Mary Surratt, there is nothing to suggest that she did so at Nora’s request, although there was indeed a connection between Adele and Nora in that both were alumnae of Georgetown Visitation. Likewise, although press accounts record that an unidentified lady accompanied Anna to the White House and the Old Arsenal Prison on the day of Mary Surratt’s death, there is no evidence that this lady was Nora or that she watched the execution. Nora, however, seemed to me to be the likeliest candidate to have been Anna’s companion, especially since Nora was one of the select company present at Mrs. Surratt’s reburial in 1869, by one account riding in the first carriage with Anna. As for whether Anna herself saw her mother’s execution, recollections given years after the fact vary. Lewis Powell’s lawyer claimed in 1915 that Anna watched until fainting at the sight of the noose around Mary’s neck; John Brophy, on the other hand, recalled in 1880 being told by General Hancock that he should on no account permit Anna to witness the hanging. Given Anna’s near-breakdown at her mother’s trial, I found Brophy’s account more likely.

  In 1881, George A. Townsend, a prominent reporter of the day, noted rumors that Father Joseph Finotti “got into such a flirtation with Mrs. Surratt that it raised a commotion, and he had to be sent to Boston to get him out of the scandal.” While it seems unlikely that either party misbehaved, it is a fact that Father Finotti was transferred from Maryland to Massachusetts, and Mary’s surviving letters to Father Finotti suggest that she was aware that the two had been the subject of gossip. Her letters also make it clear that she sorely missed the company of the priest, to whom she confided her worries about her children’s futures and her dismay and disgust at her husband’s alcoholism.