Mary Elizabeth Surratt (1820-7 July 1865) was an American boarding house owner and Confederate sympathizer from Washington DC who was executed for taking part in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
Biography[]
Surratt in prison
Mary Elizabeth Jenkins was born in Clinton, Maryland in 1820, the daughter of tobacco planters. She converted to Catholicism while attending a private Catholic girls' boarding school, and she married a miller in 1839 and settled in Oxon Hill. Her husband became a major landowner near Clinton and purchased a townhouse at 541 H Street in 1853, but he struggled with debts and alcoholism and died in 1862. Mary Surratt struggled with her husband's debts, as well as the escape of many of her slaves.
In 1864, Mary moved to her Washington townhouse after giving up on her farm, tavern, and other businesses in Clinton, and her children Anna and John resided with her while her eldest son Isaac served in the Confederate States Army amid the American Civil War. Starting in December 1864, Mary's son John networked with John Wilkes Booth through Samuel Mudd and began inviting Confederate agents to the Surratt Boarding House. On 17 April 1865, Captain Henry Warren Smith arrested Surratt and co-conspirator Lewis Powell at the H Street boarding house after Daniel H.L. Gleason tipped the police off about the Surratt family's ties to Booth. Surratt was held at the Old Capitol Prison before being transferred to the Washington Arsenal on 30 April, and she became weak under spartan prison conditions. Her trial began on 9 May 1865, and Frederick Aiken defended her before a military tribunal. She maintained her innocence throughout the trial, but John M. Lloyd and Louis J. Weichmann testified against her, resulting in her death sentence on 30 June 1865. A sickly Surratt was hanged on 7 July, making her the first woman to be executed by the federal government.
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