The Darkest Dawn

by Thomas Goodrich

  Unlike the men, the lone woman, Mary Surratt, evoked a degree of sympathy, not only because she was a widow and mother but also because the evidence against her seemed weakest. Although her home had been a rendezvous for Booth and the others during the earlier kidnapping plot against Lincoln, and although her escaped son, John, was deeply implicated, nothing but circumstantial evidence and “tainted” testimony tied her to the assassination.15 On the rare occasions when her heavy veil was lifted, spectators could see that Mary was an average-looking woman, though not unattractive; “rather pretty,” mused one man.16

  Dressed in black, sitting silently with eyes closed and face turned toward the wall, the woman spent the days and weeks to herself, a palm leaf fan in hand, which she seldom used.17 Adding to a growing compassion for Mary was the ghastly thought of a defenseless female in chains. While some insisted that she was not shackled when brought into court, others insisted that she was. All the same, many writers were determined to reveal what they saw as Mary’s inherent depravity.

  “She is a large, Amazonian class of woman, square built, masculine hands; full face, dark grey lifeless eyes,” revealed a reporter for the Chicago Tribune.18

  While he himself could see no more beneath the dark veil than his Chicago colleague, this in no way hindered one New York correspondent: “A cold eye, that would quail at no scene of torture; a close, shut mouth, whence no word of sympathy with suffering would pass . . . ; a square, solid figure, whose proportions were never disfigured by remorse or marred by loss of sleep.”19

  Mary Surratt, concluded the Chicago Tribune neatly, was “the perfect type of venomous Southern woman.”20

  Of all the defendants, none drew more comments or caused more ink to flow than Lewis Powell, alias Lewis Payne. Because of his bloody rampage in the home of Secretary Seward, he naturally became the focus of morbid curiosity. The first question generally asked by newcomers to the trial, was “Which is Payne?”21 Recorded one newsman:

  He absorbs the greater part of the attention of the audience, and you hear continually such expressions as, “Did you ever see such a perfect type of the cut-throat?” What a monster he is, to be sure. Had Booth hunted the world over, he could not have found a more fitting tool for his work. He is constitutionally an assassin.22

  “Out of a thousand men,” said one spectator, “I sh’d be sure to pick him, if I wanted a tool who w’d cut a throat as readily as he w’d carve a chicken.”23

  Beginning with his alias, which he tenaciously clung to—”I don’t know my name. I was stolen from my parents when quite young”—intrigue surrounded Powell from the outset of the trial.24 While rumors hinted that the young man was the illegitimate child of Jefferson Davis, he was in fact the son of a well-to-do Florida clergyman.25 Powell reportedly fought under Robert E. Lee in numerous engagements until he was eventually captured at Gettysburg. Escaping captivity, the rebel then joined up with Mosby’s Rangers as they operated in northern Virginia.26 Adding to the fog shrouding Powell was when and where he had become involved with Booth in the plot. The defendant himself provided almost no clues.

  “When spoken to he replies with off-hand bluffness, using barely enough words to convey an answer,” wrote a trial reporter.27

  Despite the cold-blooded nature of the assault, over the days and weeks of the trial, a curious, grudging admiration grew for the powerfully built twenty-one-year-old. More than a match for the sneers and scowls that greeted his daily arrival in court, Powell’s stony return stare unnerved would-be tormentors and forced all to look away confused and frightened.28 “He sat bolt upright against the wall, looming up like a young giant above all the others,” recorded Noah Brooks.29 Even those who desperately hoped to hate him were forced to acknowledge Powell’s courage, as a Philadelphia reporter did one day when a victim of the bloody rampage, nurse George Robinson, was called to testify:

  The court room was almost breathless at this moment, every eye being turned upon the prisoner . . . but he not so much as stirred. His wild stare was fixed upon the witness. His mouth was closed tightly, as if his teeth were firmly clenched together, and he stood up as straight as a statue, with no sign of fear, trembling, or trepidation.30

  Defiant, unyielding, strong, Powell’s indifference to his fate was in stark contrast to the other defendants who naturally grasped at any straw to save their lives. Although David Herold tried to maintain a stoic air in court, the pathetic youth often wept uncontrollably in his cell. Not so Lewis Powell. In court or out, he was his same stolid self.31 “Payne does not give way in the least,” confided one journalist. “There is something wonderful about this creature. . . . His face is not an ugly one; the eyes are bright and defiant, yet not maliciously so. He is the only one of the accused whose bearing has anything at all manly in it. The rest seem to be weak and detected villains.”32

  “Payne never complained—no matter what you did to him, he never said a word,” remembered his jailer, Captain Christian Rath. “I grew fond of the fellow, and was sorry for his predicament.”33

  Rath was not the only person impressed with Powell. Each day, new crowds of tittering females flocked to the trial, most to feast their eyes and admire the handsome, rugged spectacle on display.34 For the most part, Powell was inscrutable and remained as unmoved by the ogling as he had been by the scowls. One day, a Washington writer noticed the young defendant gazing wistfully toward a window and a world beyond that was now as remote and unattainable as the far side of the moon. “As he looked,” recorded the reporter, “a strange, listless dreaminess pervaded his face. . . . Who can tell, who imagine, what memories or what fears, what regrets or what hope, rolled in the brain behind those listless eyes?”35

  While the case against Powell was open and shut, the evidence leveled at many other defendants was not so clear. All the same, the odds that the accused could receive a fair trial in the District of Columbia a mere month after the assassination were long at best. Although civil courts were in full operation, President Johnson, with the encouragement of Edwin Stanton, insisted that the prisoners be tried by a military commission—the trial would be shorter, the likelihood of convictions greater, the punishments certainly stiffer, and embarrassments to the federal government fewer. Additionally, court procedure would be dictated by military fiat, not the United States Constitution. As a result, many—Gideon Welles and former attorney general Edward Bates, to name but two—considered the trial little better than a farce.36

  Dispensing with normal protocol, the tribunal placed impossible barriers before the defense. Testimony for the accused was often withheld or simply stricken from the record, while any amount of hearsay favoring the prosecution was admissible and accepted as fact. Those who might have spoken for the defense were intimidated and threatened by the government.37 A boarder at Mary Surratt’s home was warned that he would be prosecuted himself unless a statement was signed deeply implicating the woman in the crime.38 Another man, after testifying for the defense, was led from the courtroom “through a jostling vulgar crowd, affecting to shrink away on either side of him as if from a monster ill-secured.”39 The trial, said one who faced it, was simply a “court of death.” Recounts Henry Kyd Douglas:

  [F]or willful disregard of every principle of law and justice this tribunal has no rival. . . . If justice ever sat with unbandaged, blood-shot eyes, she did on this occasion. The temper, the expressions, the manners, the atmosphere pervading the Court made it an unprecedented spectacle. . . . [P]assion decided everything. Of official decorum, fairness, calmness, there was absolutely none. . . . Although the Court was organized to convict, the trial need not have been such a shameless farce.40

  The press was as guilty as the government. In their dispatches to the various newspapers, reporters seldom referred to the eight prisoners on trial as the accused or the defendants; rather, they were “assassins,” “criminals,” and “conspirators.” The eyes of the defendants were never blue or brown, but “dull” or “snaky” or “full of crime and treache
ry.” A simple smile from one of the accused became a “smirk.” Every feature and mannerism of a prisoner was scrutinized for signs of innate depravity. Instead of eight human beings on trial for their lives, correspondents depicted the defendants in their dispatches as “apes,” “dogs,” “panthers,” “tigers,” and “hyenas.” Not surprisingly, the public was pleased with these portrayals.

  “They are, taken together,” proclaimed an Ohio minister who visited the court, “the most hang dog, villainous looking set of rascals one c’d wish to see. I don’t believe you c’d take an equal number out of the penitentiary . . . without improving on their faces full fifty per cent.”41

  The fact that none of the eight prisoners had had any trouble moving virtually unnoticed through the world prior to the trial seemed to have escaped critics such as the clergyman quoted above.

  By late June, after weeks of testimony, the trial of the conspirators began to lose its novelty. Newcomers, especially ladies, continued to irritate the court with their loud whispers and laughter, and souvenir-hunters were relentless in their attempts to whittle down the chairs and rails for relics. None could deny, though, that the trial was becoming monotonous.42 “The community will experience a sense of relief at the termination of this tragedy,” a local editor confessed. “Day after day the subject has been brought before the public until every one was weary of it.”43 Also by late June, mercifully, the wretched condition of the prisoners was alleviated somewhat. Gone for good were the hideous hoods, and in their place came pillows.44 Additionally, the inmates were allowed an hour of outdoor exercise each day, the men received tobacco, and mail began to arrive. Wrote the worried father of defendant Edman Spangler:

  Our Family is in grate distres that your name is mentioned in so many papers A bout you in this murder of the Chief President men[.] if you will gratify us to hear of you the truth of the matter and the reason of your name in Almost everey paper in the Country you can certainly Let me no the truth about the matter. . . . [T]here is so much A bout it in the Nues that we cannot no the truth. . . . god bee with you.45

  For none of the prisoners were the relaxed rules more welcome than for Mary Surratt. In addition to a rocking chair, the woman was allowed visits from Anna. “The daughter immediately on entering the room,” wrote a witness, “ran to her mother and eagerly embraced and kissed her; tears meanwhile streaming down the daughter’s cheeks.”46

  “They stayed in this position for fully ten minutes—not a word was spoken,” said another moved viewer. Throughout this first meeting of mother and daughter after weeks of separation, Mary remained strong and stoic, merely chiding Anna for breaking down so completely.

  “That woman is like a rock,” one man later remarked to the jailer after witnessing the scene. “When she saw her daughter she acted as though she hadn’t any heart.”

  “You think so?” replied the jailer. “Then you ought to have been here when I went to take her to her cell. She collapsed, cried terribly, and we had to carry her bodily from the room.”47

  In addition to the eight defendants, others were also imprisoned at the arsenal. One was Burton Harrison. Like the conspirators, Harrison was kept in solitary confinement. Unlike that group, the former secretary to Jefferson Davis was neither shackled nor hooded. Nevertheless, except for his brief walk each day, Harrison was totally isolated, and never, under any circumstances, was he allowed to speak to anyone. Thus, each night, the wretched, lonely prisoner looked forward with the greatest of joy to a slow, sad whistling that filtered up a ventilation shaft from some cell below. There was never any whistling during the day while the trial was in session. But each night Harrison felt a strange companionship with the inmate below who unwittingly helped him maintain his fragile connection to humanity—and his sanity.48

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE MOST

  DREADFUL FATE

  THOUGH THE FOCUS OF WASHINGTON and much of the reunited nation was naturally on the trial taking place at the Old Arsenal prison, other events crowded in as summer deepened. Most heartening of all, at least to Northerners, was the entire collapse of the former Confederacy. Only scattered guerrilla bands and a remnant of regular soldiers in Texas and Indian Territory still held out. The imprisonment and chaining of former rebel president Jefferson Davis at Fortress Monroe was welcome news, as was the word that other high officials in the Confederate government were now safely behind bars.

  On a sober note, another victim was added to the casualty list of Black Friday. Although Secretary of State Seward was well on the road to recovery, as was his son, Fred, his wife did not fare so well. Frances Seward was already in frail health prior to April 14, and the shock and stress resulting from the attack on her household was simply too great for her to overcome. After successfully ministering to her husband and children, the exhausted woman finally lapsed into a fatal fever, and on the morning of June 21, three months short of her sixtieth birthday, she passed away.1 The body of Mrs. Seward was escorted to her home in New York on the same train that had carried Lincoln.2

  While thousands of Union soldiers had been mustered out of the service and had returned to their families, thousands more remained in Washington clamoring for discharge and transportation home. With discipline all but forgotten, roving gangs of surly soldiers created havoc in the sweltering city. Drunkenness, fistfights, shootings, theft, lewdness, indecent exposure, saloon brawls, and bawdy-house riots became so common that life in the capital became a “general terror.”3 One such incident occurred after several soldiers were duped by prostitutes in the red-light district. Calling on comrades for help, upwards of two hundred men soon responded, and the furious mob, many of whom had themselves been hoodwinked in the past, proceeded to dismantle the whorehouses and saloons in the area. Because the section was heavily populated by blacks, the situation quickly developed into a full-scale race riot, in which bottles, rocks, bricks, and firearms were used freely by both sides. A pistol-waving physician who bravely tried to restore order had his face smashed by a flying brick. When the riot was finally quelled, many lay seriously injured, including a soldier who had had his bowels ripped out.4

  Although much of the terrible paranoia that had swept the streets of Washington had mercifully vanished, there were still enough rumors and dark whispers to keep nerves on edge.

  “It is highly probable that our political assassinations are not yet over,” hinted one reporter a full three months after Lincoln’s death.5

  After sending a violently threatening letter to Andrew Johnson one day, a “crazy German” was arrested on the next day as he entered the White House. The deranged man was packed off to the Government Insane Asylum.6 More seriously, a group of men were supposedly overheard one night detailing plans to assassinate the president when he spoke at Gettysburg on July 4th. At a given signal, the men would fire from different points in the crowd.7

  Because of threats such as the above—some real, some fanciful—the roundup continued. Many arrests were certainly warranted, as in the case of George Gayle of Alabama, who late in 1864 had placed an ad offering to kill Lincoln, Seward, and Johnson in exchange for one million dollars.8 Most suspects though, were jailed and kept on bread and water without a particle of evidence against them, save the words of a jealous neighbor or a malicious gossip.

  Unlike earlier arrests, this latest wave was met by mounting opposition. With peace established and hysteria waning, such high-handed and arbitrary actions were deemed unnecessary. Many, including Horace Greeley, now urged an “immediate clearing out of the Federal bastilles.”

  “We cannot doubt,” argued Greeley in his New York Tribune, “that hundreds have been caught up and caged who were innocent and loyal, and whose estates have become the prey of the perjured villains who prompted their arrest.”9

  “It is high time that the dungeon doors were thrown open,” agreed another editor.10

  Greeley and a handful of others also protested the bloody purge that took place in the Border States following t
he surrender.11 Already brutalized by years of invasion and guerrilla warfare, now further inflamed by Lincoln’s assassination, vengeance-minded loyalists from Maryland to Missouri were quick to take matters into their own hands. In Wheeling, West Virginia, Cambridge, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and scores of other border communities, vindictive Unionists passed resolutions forbidding rebel neighbors from returning to their homes.12 At Hagerstown, Maryland, Confederates who had already returned were ordered out by a mob. Similarly, Southern soldiers arriving in Martinsburg, West Virginia, were attacked and beaten on the streets.13 To the west in that same state, the editor of the Clarksburg newspaper menacingly warned Confederates that “Judge Lynch’s Court” would soon begin operations.14

  The “court” was already in session in neighboring Kentucky. Torn apart by years of partisan activity and atrocities committed by each side, the angry victors in the Bluegrass State were in no mood to split hairs over who was a regular soldier and who was not. Scores of returning rebel soldiers were simply ambushed and murdered.

  “[T]hey shoot down the returned Confederate heroes like dogs or deer,” wrote one horrified woman from Perrryville. “[W]ithin my knowledge & neighborhood they have killed hundreds!!”15

  Two such victims were Samuel Robinson and Thomas Evans. Accused of being guerrillas, the men were hauled to the fairgrounds in Lexington and hustled up to a well-worn scaffold. After hymns were sung and prayers spoken, the condemned said a few words, then bade goodbye to the world. Just as the hangman was in the act of adjusting the ropes, a horseman was seen approaching at a gallop waving a handkerchief. When the breathless rider pulled up, he blurted out that Evans had gained a reprieve. A witness continues: