Top Legal Minds Hold Mock Trial on Lincoln Assassination

Some of the top legal minds in Chicago took part in a mock retrial Friday night involving the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Mary Surratt was one of four people executed for conspiring to kill Lincoln. Some historians have debated her innocence of guilty.

Surratt owned a boarding house where the assassin John Wilkes Booth and others plotted the murder.

I went to Ford’s theater in Washington this spring and saw the park ranger’s presentation about the assassination. I later asked the ranger what she thought about Mary Surratt’s guilty verdict. The ranger answered by saying that Mary Surratt was “up to her neck” in it.

Incidentally, Surratt’s boarding house still exists and is only a few blocks from the theater in what is now Chinatown. It is now a Chinese restaraunt. It is worth the 10 minute walk to go see it. Another very interesting site to see is to take the 2 mile drive out to the restored Soldiers Home where the Lincoln family spent their summers in sweltering Washington City. One evening, as Lincoln was riding his horse alone from the White House to the Home, an assassin” bullet whirred by Lincoln’s head.

The Lincoln assassination trials are interesting. One has to respect the care and precision of the investigating authorities. Under the circumstances, most governments throughout history would have swept through the ranks of Booth friends and associates and hung just about everyone with the slightest taint of suspicion.

In this case, however, the authorities rather precisely differentiated among (1) confederate sympathizers, many of them associates of Booth; (2) confederate underground agents, many of them associates of Booth; (3) participants in Booth's ultimately aborted kidnapping plot; and (4) participants in the assassination plot. Only those in group 4 were hung. The celebrated Dr. Mudd was probably only a (1), (2), and (3), and he only went to prison (and was eventually parolled).

Mary Surrat was unquestionably up to her neck in the kidnapping plot. The evidence tying her to the actual assassination rested on direct testimony that she had hidden and ultimatly provided weapons to the assassinators immediately before the attacks. She had also, of course, collaborated with the same people in the earlier kidnapping plot, and the assassination was planned in her business, the Surrat Tavern, while she was present.

Ergo, she was a known close associate and co-conspirator of those involved; she was present (on the premises) while the attacks were planned; and she held the weapons. The court found that testimony credible, and so have most historians. Attempts to exonerate Surrat rest on the familiar tactic of cause driven people, many years after the event, to impeach the testimony of people who are no longer here to defend themselves. Sometimes new evidence justifies this, but usually it's a crooked game.

Mary Surrat was guilty, IMHO.

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