The Trial of the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators: An Account

On June 30, 1865 eight alleged conspirators in the assassination of Lincoln were found guilty. Here is a portion of the article:

"SENTENCES AND EXECUTIONS
On June 29, 1865, the Military Commission met in secret session to begin its review of the evidence in the seven-week long trial. A guilty verdict could come with a majority vote of the nine-member commission; death sentences required the votes of six members. The next day, it reached its verdicts. The Commission found seven of the prisoners guilty of at least one of the conspiracy charges, and Spangler guilty of aiding and abetting Boooth's escape. Four of the prisoners (Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and David Herold) were sentenced "to be hanged by the neck until he [or she] be dead." Samuel Arnold, Dr. Samuel Mudd and Michael O'Laughlen were sentenced to "hard labor for life, at such place at the President shall direct." Edman Spangler received a six-year sentence.

The Commission forwarded its sentences and the trial record to President Johnson for his review. Five of the nine Commission members, in the transmitted record, recommended to the President--because of "her sex and age"--that he reduce Mary Surratt's punishment to life in prison. On July 5, Johnson approved all of the Commission's sentences, including the death sentence for Surratt.

The next day General Hartrandft informed the prisoners of their sentences. He told the four condemned prisoners that they would hang the next day.

Surratt's lawyers mounted a frantic effort to save their client's life, hurriedly preparing a petition for habeas corpus that evening. The next morning, Surratt's attorneys succeeded in convincing Judge Wylie of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia to issue the requested writ. President Johnson quashed the effort to save Surratt from an afternoon hanging when he issued an order suspending the writ of habeas corpus "in cases such as this."

Execution day

Shortly after one-thirty on the afternoon of July 7, 1865, the trap of the gallows installed in the courtyard of the Old Arsenal Building was sprung, and the four condemned prisoners fell to their deaths. Reporters covering the event reported that the last words from the gallows stand came from George Atzerodt who said, just before he fell, "May we meet in another world."

EPILOGUE AND THE CONSPIRACY AS NOW UNDERSTOOD
In the summer of 1867, John Surratt, having been captured in Egypt, faced trial in a civilian court for having participated in a conspiracy to assassinate the president. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, with eight jurors voting "not guilty" and four voting "guilty." In August, 1867, Surratt was released from prison. Three years later he began a public lecture tour describing his association with the conspirators and proclaiming his innocence.

Military personnel escorted Dr. Samuel Mudd, Michael O'Laughlen, Edman Spangler and Samuel Arnold to Fort Jefferson in Dry Tortugas, Florida. Two years later, a yellow fever epidemic swept the prison, killing O'Laughlen and the prison's doctor, among many others. Upon the death of the prison doctor, Mudd assumed duty as chief medical officer at the prison. On March 1, 1869, Mudd and the other three imprisoned conspirators received an eleventh-hour presidential pardon from President Johnson.

The last surviving convicted conspirator was Samuel Arnold, who died in 1906 after writing a detailed confession of his role in the conspiracy to kidnap President Lincoln.

Over the years, critics have attacked the verdicts, sentences, and procedures of the 1865 Military Commission. These critics have called the sentences unduly harsh, and criticized the rule allowing the death penalty to be imposed with a two-thirds vote of Commission members. The hanging of Mary Surratt, the first woman ever executed by the United States, has been a particular focus of criticism. Critics also have complained about the standard of proof, the lack of opportunity for defense counsel to adequately prepare for the trial, the withholding of potentially exculpatory evidence, and the Commission's rule forbidding the prisoners from testifying on their own behalf. The critics have a point: The 1865 trial of the Lincoln conspirators did fall short of commonly accepted norms of procedure and the verdicts--by modern standards--seem harsh.

There does seem little question, however, that four of the convicted conspirators participated--in ways either large or small--in Booth's plan to assassinate key federal officials. Lewis Powell clearly attempted to stab to death Secretary Seward. David Herold, Dr. Samuel Mudd, and Edman Spangler aided Booth's escape from Washington. Herold and Mudd provided aid to Booth with full knowledge of his crime--and Spangler most likely did as well.

The four other convicted conspirators--and Jefferson Davis--undoubtedly supported at least Booth's original plan, to kidnap Lincoln and take him to Richmond. George Atzerodt, in a confession made shortly before he was hanged, admitted to have willingly agreed to play an important role in the planned abduction, but claimed not to have supported the assassination--and to have first heard of the plan to assassinate Lincoln just two hours before Booth fired his fatal shot. Arnold also admitted his initial willingmess to participate in the kidnap plot. The evidence with respect to O'Laughlen's and Mary Surratt's complicity in the scheme is only slightly less compelling. Recent scholarship has strengthened the already strong evidence that approval for the kidnapping came directly from Jefferson Davis. William Tidwell's Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln shows that large numbers of Confederate troops had massed in March of 1865 in the northern neck of Virginia along what must have been a planned route to take Lincoln to Richmond. Apart from a planned abduction of Lincoln, there was no plausible strategic reason for their placement in that area.

The prosecution fairly can be faulted for intentionally obscuring the fact that there were two conspiracies involving Lincoln in 1865: the original abduction plan, developed in the fall of 1864 and supported by all eight conspirators and top Confederate leadership, and Booth's assassination plan, conceived only after the original plan fell through when Lincoln cancelled plans to attend a play at the Campbell Hosptial on the outskirts of Washington on March 17. (The plan had been to intercept the President's carriage as it returned from the matinee performance.)

After the failure of the March 17 plot, and abandonment as infeasible of another plot to kidnap Lincoln at Ford's theatre, Booth's thoughts turned to assassination. Shooting Lincoln seems to have been on Booth's mind by April 7 when, after some hard drinking with his friend Samuel Chester in New York, Booth slammed the table and said, "What a splendid chance I had to kill the President on the fourth of March!" Booth's April 7 visit to New York was one of several in the weeks leading up to the assassination, leading some historians to speculate that New York was the location of his Confederate Secret Service control--possibly Confederate underground insider Roderick Watson. George Atzerodt's confession revealed that Booth learned during his last New York visit of a plot by his Confederate associates to kill the President by blowing up the Executive Mansion: "Booth said he had met a party in New York who would get the prest. [president] certain. They were going to mine the end of the pres. [president's] House. They knew an entrance to accomplish it through." The dispatch from Richmond that reached Montreal on April 6, carried by John Surratt and Sarah Slater, most likely authorized activation of the bombing plot. The capture of the Confederate explosives expert assigned the task of planting the bombs the Executive Mansion, Thomas Harney, on April 10 must have prompted Booth to begin planning his own attempt on Lincoln's life. By April 11, his mind was made up. After to listening to Lincoln speak from the balcony of the Executive Mansion on his plans for reconstruction, Booth--according to Thomas Eckert who interviewed Powell in prison--turned to Lewis Powell and said, "That is the last speech he will ever make!" By April 13, Booth was casing both Ford's Theatre and Grover's National Theatre, anticipating that the President would soon take a night out--his last.

At Garrett's farm, Colonel Everton Conger found on the body of John Wilkes Booth a small red book, which Booth kept as a diary. In an entry written sometime between the assassination and his capture, Booth wrote: "For six months we had worked to capture, but our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart." The prosecution did not introduce Booth's diary into evidence in the 1865 trial. In 1867, it turned up in a forgotten War Department file with eighteen pages missing.

The Booth conspiracy killed a president, but in so doing it made Lincoln a martyr. Booth and his accomplices hoped to be remembered in the South as heroes, but largely their hopes were not realized. For most southerners, the assassination plot was an embarrassment. Booth, a well-known actor himself, may have opened his own play in Ford’s Theater that April night. And it certainly was dramatic. But it did not have the ending he hoped for and few in his audience applauded his performance."