From The Pursuit & Arrest of John H. Surratt
© 2000 Proofmark

Foreword

The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln continues to fascinate historians and crime buffs, more than 130 years after the fact. Nearly every schoolchild is familiar with the story of John Wilkes Booth making his way into the President's box at Ford's Theater on the night of 14 April 1865 and firing a bullet into the brain of the sixteenth President. Lincoln's untimely death came just as the country was beginning to heal the wounds of four years of civil war.

Booth was tracked down and killed twelve days after the "mad act". A conspiracy trial, conducted by a military court, resulted in the execution of four convicted conspirators, with four others sentenced to various prison terms. The exact guilt or innocence of some of those 'conspirators', however is still argued to this day.

One of those charged with conspiracy, but not tried with the others, and undoubtedly one of the most interesting people connected to the assassination, was John Harrison Surratt, Jr., the youngest child of Mary Surratt; she was hanged for her part in the conspiracy.

A student at St. Charles College at the outbreak of the war, Surratt returned home to assume his father's position as postmaster of Surrattsville, Maryland upon his father's death. The younger Surratt soon became connected with the Confederate courier service, a duty he continued after giving up his position as postmaster. While there remains some controversy as to Surratt's exact location on the night of the assassination, he claims that he was in or near Elmira, New York, soon to make his way to Canada.

Following the assassination, Surratt began a long and peculiar odyssey that led him from New York to Egypt. Arrested as a fugitive, he was returned to the United States, 'a captive in irons', and was tried before Judge George P. Fisher of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. The trial opened on 10 June 1867 and dragged on for sixty-two grueling, hot summer days. On 10 August, after deliberating seventy-two hours, the jury stated they were hopelessly deadlocked. Judge Fisher dismissed the jury, and the case of the United States v. John H. Surratt was over. Two subsequent attempts to indict Surratt for treason proved ineffectual, when it was decided the statute of limitations had run out.

After that, John Surratt fell on rather hard times. Three years after his trial he attempted to clear his name, and perhaps capitalize on interest in the assassination, by lecturing on the Booth conspiracy. His first address was planned for Rockville, Maryland on the night of 6 December 1870. [The complete text of his address appears in Appendix Seven] Admission was set at 50 cents, with children charged half-price. Surratt related how he left St. Charles College to assume the postmastership of Surrattsville prior to joining the Confederate courier service. He admitted to being involved in the failed 17 March 1865 plot to kidnap President Lincoln, but denied any knowledge of, or participation in, the activities surrounding 14 April. During his diatribe Surratt viciously denounced Louis Wiechmann as having lied on the witness stand, claiming Wiechmann's testimony was responsible for the execution of his mother. Surratt admitted to receiving copies of the National Intelligencer while in Canada that carried detailed accounts of the trial of the assassins, but denied he could have saved his mother from the executioner's rope. The lecture closed with the Rockville Cornet Band playing Dixie.

Surratt's lecture was such a success that further performances were scheduled for New York and Baltimore. But a planned performance in the District of Columbia was canceled when Surratt was arrested in Baltimore [for selling tobacco without a license] the night before the lecture; when the mayor of Washington later suggested Surratt cancel his lecture tour, he did so, rather unceremoniously.

Surratt remained out of the public eye for nearly thirty years before Washington Post reporter Hanson Hiss printed an interview with the former Confederate in April of 1898. By this time, Surratt had embellished his story to reflect his bravery as a courier, but continued to display utter contempt for Louis Wiechmann. John Surratt survived another eighteen years before succumbing to pneumonia at his home in Baltimore on 21 April 1916, the last of Booth's band to die.

What follows are the official dispatches [or despatches, as people were still using the English spelling during the War] outlining the efforts of the government to track and arrest John Harrison Surratt, Jr. They reveal as much about the officials pursuing Surratt as they do about the conspirator himself, but reading them one will easily sense Surratt's trepidation when he was spotted and identified by a former school chum, or the desperation he must have felt as he leapt over a cliff to elude his captors. If, at times, they read like the stuff of a Hollywood adventure film, it was all too real to those involved.

Steven J. Wright
Librarian & former curator of the Civil War Library & Museum
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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