Part 2

Aiken and Clampitt were two young attorneys who volunteered their services in Mary Eugenia’s behalf. Neither had had much experience in criminal trials and they were only too happy to welcome the assistance of Reverdy Johnson, the United States Senator from Maryland, who felt that the least he could do for an old constituent was to help her defend her life. On Saturday, his co-counsels introduced him to the Commission, only to find that one member--Brigadier-General T. M. Harris--objected to Johnson because he had publicly questioned the legality of the loyalty oath of 1862. When the Senator informed the Commission that he had merely expressed his opinion that the Maryland Constitutional Convention of 1864 did not have the authority to make the taking of such an oath a condition of voting on the new charter, Harris withdrew his objection.

As the prisoners filed into the courtroom, Pitman and his fellow reporters noticed that all except Mrs. Surratt and Dr. Mudd wore ten-inch manacle bars which prevented them from bringing their hands together. Mudd sported ordinary handcuffs while the feet of all the male defendants were shackled together with chains. With Atzerodt and the half-mad Payne, Stanton had taken the additional precaution of welding heavy weights to their steel anklets which made it impossible for them to walk without help from their guards.

The courtroom itself was a dimly lit room with only four small windows to illuminate its more than twelve hundred square feet. The prisoners’ dock consisted of a railed-off raised platform at the far end of the room. The defendants were separated from each other by blue-clad guards who sat between them. Mrs. Surratt’s seat was the last chair on the right side of the platform, just a few feet away from the door through which prisoners were brought from their cells every morning at precisely nine o’clock. There were two small field tables directly in front of the makeshift dock around which the seven defense attorneys sat. In the middle of the chamber were two long conference tables, one of which was occupied by the members of the Commission, with the other reserved for the official reporters. The witness stand was located in dead center between two of the three pillars that supported the room’s eleven-foot ceiling. The walls had been freshly white-washed and cocoa-nut matting had been spread over the stone floor.

As soon as all the defendants were represented by counsel, they were given permission to withdraw their “Not Guilty” pleas and attack the Commission’s jurisdiction. Each prisoner took the position that, since they were all civilians and there were appropriate Washington civil courts available to try them, the Military Commission did not have any power over them. The Judge Advocate answered this by claiming unequivocally that “this Commission has jurisdiction in the premises.” Hunter, who was very much Stanton’s man, went through the formality of clearing the courtroom, and then announced that the prisoners’ pleas were over-ruled. After a motion for separate trials had suffered the same fate, all of the defendants then reaffirmed their innocence.

As it put in its case against the eight defendants, the prosecution digressed for hours attempting to prove that Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders had been responsible for Lincoln’s murder. In fact, Holt and his aides were determined to show that the assassination plot had been connected with Southern guerilla warfare in New York and Vermont as well as with the maltreatment of Union captives at Andersonville and other rebel prisons. Although, the evidence hardly supported their grandiose thesis, they succeeded in creating an illusion that the prisoners in the dock were part of a gigantic plot in which the President’s death was only one of many factors.

Late on the afternoon of May 13th, the Provost Marshal escorted Lou Weichmann to the tri-railed witness stand. Weichmann stated that he had first met John Surratt in the Fall of 1859 at St. Charles College in Maryland. Because of this friendship, he had moved to the H Street boarding house on November 1, 1864. He remembered that his landlady had requested him to visit John Wilkes Booth at the National Hotel twelve days before the President’s murder “and say that she wished to see him on ‘private business’.” Later that same evening, Booth had come to the house and closeted himself with Mrs. Surratt for more than an hour.

On April 11th, Mrs. Surratt had asked her boarder to see whether the actor would lend her his buggy for a trip to Surrattsville, which was some ten miles southeast of the capital. Booth informed Weichmann that he had just sold his vehicle, but gave him ten dollars “that I might hire one.” Weichmann had rented a surrey at Howard’s Stables and then driven Mrs. Surratt to Surrattsville “for the purpose of seeing Mr. Nothey, who owed her some money.” The couple had returned to Washington late that afternoon.

After lunch on Good Friday, Mrs. Surratt had again asked Weichmann to drive her into the country because, she told him, she had received a letter “in regard to that money Mr. Nothey owed her.” She had given him a ten-dollar bill with which to hire another rig. “We took with us only two packages; one was a package of papers about her property at Surrattsville; and another package done up in paper, about six inches, I should think in diameter. It looked to me like perhaps two or three saucers wrapped up. This package was deposited in the bottom of the buggy and taken out by Mrs. Surratt when we arrived at Surrattsville.” As soon as they reached Lloyd’s tavern at 4:30, Lou had headed for the taproom while his passenger went into the parlor. When he called for her at six o’clock, he had noticed that Booth was with her and that the two were in deep conversation.

Before John Surratt left Washington early in April, Booth had been a frequent visitor at 541 H Street. Whenever he called, he had always asked for young Surratt or his mother. “Sometimes,” Weichmann recalled, “when engaged in general conversations, Booth would say, ‘John, can you go upstairs and spare me a word?’ They would then go upstairs and engage in private conversation which would sometime last two or three hours. The same thing would sometimes occur with Mrs. Surratt.”

The witness had first seen Lewis Payne at the boardinghouse early in March. The defendant, who had been introduced to Weichmann as Wood, had arrived with no luggage and remained overnight. The next morning, Payne had taken the early train to Baltimore. He had returned three weeks later, this time dressed as a Baptist preacher, and said that he had just finished a seven-day term in a Baltimore prison but that the experience had taught him a lesson. “He had taken the oath of allegiance, and was now going to become a good and loyal citizen.”

From the first time he saw Payne, he was convinced that the latter was up to no good. One day, he had found a black false mustache “of medium size” on the table in his room. “When I found it, I thought it rather queer that a Baptist preacher should use a mustache. I took it and locked it up because I did not care to have a false mustache lying round on my table.” Later, he used to entertain his fellow clerks in the office of the Commissary-General of Prisoners with “a pair of spectacles and the mustache.”

One evening, he had returned to the house to find Payne and Johnny Surratt “playing with bowie knives” in his room. He also saw two Navy revolvers and four sets of new spurs on the bed. Just after the assassination, the Metropolitan Police had found one of these spurs in Atzerodt’s room at the Kirkwood House. Weichmann had seen Atzerodt, whom the ladies at Mrs. Surratt’s called Port Tobacco, “at the house, ten or fifteen times.” Like Booth, the carriage-maker had always asked for John Surratt or his mother.

Although Weichmann had never seen Arnold or McLaughlin before, he had met Dr. Mudd walking with Booth on Seventh Street on January 15, 1865. The actor had invited him to join them for a glass of wine in his room at the National. There, Booth and Mudd had had a private conversation in the hallway, a discussion which Weichmann was told had to do with the contemplated purchase of the physician’s farm by Booth. “Dr. Mudd apologized to me for his private conversation and stated ... that Booth wished to purchase his farm, but that he did not care about selling it, as Booth was not willing to give him enough.” It was after this meeting, that Booth had begun to show up frequently at the boardinghouse.

Herold had been at H Street once. But Weichmann had also seen him at Surrattsville in the summer of 1863. The only other time that he had met him was in March of ’65 when Booth, who was playing the part of Pescara in _The Apostate_, had given Surratt and himself two complimentary tickets. On the way to the theatre, the two young men had met Atzerodt and Herold, who were also going to the play. After the final curtain, the witness “found Atzerodt and Herold in the restaurant adjoining the theatre, talking very confidentially to Booth.” When the Judge Advocate asked him to identify Herold, Weichmann pointed to the defendant. Benn Pitman, using his brother’s new shorthand system, noted that Herold “smiled and nodded in recognition.”

Senator Johnson took over the brunt of the cross-examination. Weichmann admitted that Mrs. Surratt, whom he had met through her son, was a “member of the Catholic Church and a regular attendant upon its services.” In fact, he had usually accompanied her to church on Sunday mornings. Yes, he was on friendly terms with her son, John, who had never intimated to him that there was a plot afoot to kill the President. The only thing young Surratt had told him about Booth was that he hoped to go on the stage with him in Richmond after the war.

No, there was nothing suspicious about Mrs. Surratt’s April 11th visit to Surrattsville. A John Nothey had owed her $479.00 for more than thirteen years and she had decided to see him personally about it. She had met Nothey early that afternoon in the parlor of a tavern she had leased to a retired Washington policeman by the name of John M. Lloyd, for fifty dollars a month, just before she moved to the H Street house in the Spring of ’64. Her second visit, three days later, had been motivated by a letter she had received from George H. Calvert, Jr., “urging the settlement of the claim of my late father’s estate.” When her husband died in 1862, he had still owed Calvert Senior part of the purchase price of the Maryland property.

When Johnson sat down, young Clampitt took over. He wanted to know whether Weichmann had heard Booth or Mudd discuss anything subversive when he saw them at the National Hotel in January. The witness had not. As for the ten dollars which Booth had given him to hire a buggy for Mrs. Surratt, “I thought at the time that it was nothing more than an act of friendship. I said to Booth, ‘I am come with an order for that buggy that Mrs. Surratt asked you for last evening.’ He said, ‘I have sold my buggy, but here are ten dollars, and you go and hire one.’” No, he had never told Mary Eugenia about that. A few minutes later, he told Aiken that he had written a letter for his landlady to Mr. Nothey, threatening him with a law suit if he did not pay what he owed her at once. He remembered that he had helped her to calculate the interest on “the sum of $479 for thirteen years.”

When Weichmann stepped down late in the afternoon, Hunter adjourned for the day. Since the next day--May 14th--was a Sunday, the commission did not reconvene until the fifteenth. The first witness called on Monday was Mrs. Surratt’s tenant, John M. Lloyd. He recalled that Herold, Atzerodt and John Surratt had come to his house some five or six weeks before the assassination. They had brought with them “two carbines with ammunition ... a rope from sixteen to twenty feet in length, and a monkey wrench.” Surratt had asked him to hide these articles and even showed him a secret hiding place “underneath the joists of the second floor of the main buildings.” On April 11th, he had met Mrs. Surratt on the road at Uniontown. “When she first broached the subject to me about the articles at my place, I did not know what she had reference to. Then she came out plainer, and asked me about the ‘shooting irons.’... Her language was indistinct, as if she wanted to draw my attention to something, so no one else would understand. Finally, she came out bolder with it, and said that they would be wanted soon.”

Three days later, when he returned from watching a trial in Marlboro, he had found Mrs. Surratt in his backyard. “She met me by the wood-pile as I drove in with some fish and oysters in my buggy. She told me to have those shooting irons ready that night, there would be some parties who would call for them. She gave me something wrapped in a piece of paper which I took upstairs, and found to be a fieldglass. She told me to get two bottles of whiskey ready, and that these things were to be called for that night.”

At midnight, Herold had woken him up and said, “Lloyd for God’s sake, make haste and get those things.” The tavern owner had immediately gone to the place where he had hidden the carbines and given them to Herold. For some reason, he did not turn over the rope and the monkey wrench. Herold had taken the bottle of whiskey which Lloyd gave him and offered it to a man who was sitting on a light-colored horse in front of the tavern. In the bright moonlight, the tavern keeper had watched this man, who “was a stranger to me,” put the bottle to his lips and drink deeply. The two men had stayed for only five minutes before riding off in the direction of Tee Bee, a hamlet a few miles to the south. Just as they were about to leave, the man who was with Herold had said, “I will tell you some news, if you want to hear it. I am pretty certain that we have assassinated the President and Secretary Seward.” As they rode off, only Herold took a carbine with him. The other man “said he could not take his because his leg was broken.”

Whether it was the unseasonably hot weather or a monumental case of stage fright, Lloyd had wilted fast as the long morning wore on. By the time the prosecution let him go, he was on the verge of collapse. As Colonel John A. Bingham, Holt’s chief assistant, put him through his paces, the ex-policeman’s back country drawl frequently became so low that even the members of the Commission who were sitting directly in front of him had difficulty in hearing him. Both Aiken and Clampitt were constantly imploring Hunter to instruct the whispering witness to raise his voice, requests that the presiding officer consistently ignored.

On cross-examination, Aiken couldn’t shake Lloyd’s story. But he did get him to admit that there might have been a witness present at the April 14th conversation with Mrs. Surratt about the “shooting irons.”

Q. Are you positive again that Mrs. Surratt told you at that time that the shooting irons would be called for that night?

A. I am very positive.

Q. Was there any other persons present during the interview?

A. Mrs. Offutt, my sister-in-law, was, I believe, in the yard; but whether she heard the conversation or not I do not know.

But he couldn’t remember whether or not he had told “these circumstances” to Mrs. Offutt.

As for the package which Mrs. Surratt had brought to the tavern with her on Tuesday, the 11th, he had taken it upstairs at once.

Q. Did you undo it immediately when you got upstairs?

A. As soon as I got upstairs, I saw what it was.

Q. Did you lay the package down and leave it anywhere before you went upstairs?

A. No, sir.

He was sure that he had told Mrs. Offutt, shortly after Mrs. Surratt had started back to Washington, “that it was a fieldglass she had brought.”

He had gone to bed early on Good Friday because “I was right smart in liquor that afternoon and after night I got more so.” He had been sleeping soundly when Booth and Herold arrived. As soon as they had ridden off, Lloyd went back to bed. When he awoke the next morning, his yard was being picked over by Union soldiers who had traced Booth and Herold there. He was asked whether he “had seen two men pass that way in the morning.” He had replied that he had not. “That is the only thing I blame myself,” he remorsefully told the Commission. “If I had given the information they asked of me, I should have been perfectly easy regarding it. That is the only thing I am sorry I did not do.” In fact, it was not until the middle of the next week that he had decided to tell Captain George Cottingham, who had locked him in Roby’s Post Office in Surrattsville for safekeeping, that Booth and Herold had been at the tavern at midnight on April 14th.

As Lloyd rushed out of the hearing room, obviously destined for the first bar he could find, Holt recalled Weichmann. Outside of some elaboration of his previous testimony about the strange goings-on at chez Surratt, he contributed nothing further to the case against Mary Eugenia. He conceded that he had not heard the conversation between his landlady and Lloyd at Uniontown. It seemed that “Mrs. Surratt leaned sideways in the buggy and whispered, as it were, in Mr. Lloyd’s ear.” When Aiken asked him why he hadn’t told somebody about the suspicious circumstances at the house on H Street, he insisted that “my suspicions were not of a fixed or definite character.” Besides, when he had tried to tell Captain Gleason of the War Department about some peculiar remarks he had heard Booth utter about kidnapping the President, the officer had “laughed and hooted at the idea.”

After Lloyd was brought back to explain that he now wasn’t sure where he had taken the package which Mrs. Surratt had brought to the tavern on Friday, April 14th, Emma Offutt took the stand. She had been in the carriage with Lloyd when they had met Mrs. Surratt near Uniontown three days before the assassination. No, she hadn’t heard a word of the conversation because her brother-in-law had gotten out of the buggy to talk to Mrs. Surratt and “I was some distance off.” As far as Good Friday was concerned, she hadn’t heard anything that was said between Lloyd and Mary Eugenia in the tavern’s backyard. Mrs. Offutt had spoken to Mrs. Surratt shortly after the latter’s arrival that afternoon but she “gave me no charge in reference to her business, only concerning her farm, and she gave me no packages.”

Major H. W. Smith had been in charge of the troops who had arrested Mrs. Surratt on the night of April 17th. “While we were there, Payne came to the house. I questioned him in regard to his occupation, and what business he had at the house that time of night. He stated that he was a laborer, and had come there to dig a gutter at the request of Mrs. Surratt.” Major Smith had asked Mrs. Surratt, who was sitting in the parlor, whether she had hired Payne. She had stepped out into the vestibule and, from a distance of three feet, taken a long look at the man. “Before God, sir,” she had told Smith, “I do not know this man, and have never seen him, and I did not hire him to dig a gutter for me.”

When Holt showed the witness a brown and white coat, he promptly identified it as the coat that Payne had been wearing that April night. Ten minutes later, when William E. Doster, Payne’s attorney, asked him whether he was sure that the brown and white coat had been worn by the defendant, he repeated that “I am certain that this is the coat.” Seconds after the words had left his mouth, Major Smith was busy eating them. Doster shoved a drab-gray coat under his nose and asked him whether he didn’t want to change his mind. He did. “The coat now shown me is the one worn by Payne on the night of his arrest,” he conceded. It was very difficult, he explained, in the poor light of Mrs. Surratt’s vestibule to tell one coat from another. But now he was certain that “the coat just shown me is the one.”

Both Smith and R. C. Morgan, who had been sent to H Street to superintend “the seizing of papers”, had found photographs of such Confederate leaders as Beauregard, Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens. Lieutenant John W. Dempsey, the officer in charge of the search party, had turned up a rotogravure of John Wilkes Booth hidden behind a small framed lithograph entitled _Morning, Noon and Night_ which hung in Mrs. Surratt’s first floor bedroom. But Captain W. M. Wermerskirch, Smith’s executive officer, swore that he had also seen a photograph of Union General George McClellan in the parlor.

Weichmann had testified that the H Street boardinghouse had been a beehive of activity during March and early April of ’65. On May 22nd, Holt called Honora Fitzpatrick, one of Mrs. Surratt’s more attractive boarders. Miss Fitzpatrick was a very definite young lady. “During the month of March last,” she said, “I saw John Wilkes Booth and John H. Surratt there.” Payne and Atzerodt had also dropped in but only once or twice. Early in March, Payne and Surratt had taken her to a performance at Ford’s Theatre. “I do not know what box we occupied, but I think it was an upper box. John Wilkes Booth came into the box while we were there.”

On May 23rd, the Judge Advocate called it a day and Messrs. Johnson, Aiken and Clampitt began their labors on behalf of Mrs. Surratt. Their first witness was George Cottingham, the special officer who had arrested John Lloyd on April 15th. For two solid days, he had urged his prisoner to tell what he knew about Booth and Herold. Finally, Lloyd had broken down and sobbed, “O, my God, if I was to make a confession, they would murder me.” When Cottingham had asked him who had designs on his life, he was informed that it was “these parties that are in this conspiracy.”

Then the dam had burst. The conscience-stricken Lloyd had told Cottingham everything. “He stated to me that Mrs. Surratt had come down to his place on Friday between 4 and 5 o’clock; that she told him to have the fire-arms ready; that two men would call for them at 12 o’clock....” The two men had turned out to be Booth and Herold, who showed up at midnight and picked up a carbine and some whiskey. As he had unburdened himself to Cottingham, he began to cry out, “O, Mrs. Surratt, that vile woman, she has ruined me! I am to be shot! I am to be shot!”

Cottingham had obviously caught the defense by surprise. Aiken had interviewed him in the bar of the Metropolitan Hotel on May 20th and, at that time, Cottingham had told the lawyer that Lloyd had not mentioned Mrs. Surratt. But, he insisted, “I had an object in that answer. He wanted to pick facts out of me in the case, but that is not my business; I am an officer and I did not want to let him know anything either way. I wanted to come here to the Court and state everything that I knew.”

Q. Did I ask you if Mr. Lloyd, in his confession, said anything at all in reference to Mrs. Surratt?

A. That question you put to me, and I answered; I said, “No.”

Q. That Mr. Lloyd did not say so?

A. I did say so. I do not deny that.

Q. Then you gave me to understand, and you are ready now to swear to it, that you told me a lie?

A. Undoubtedly, I told you a lie there; for I thought you had no business to ask me.

Q. No business! As my witness, had I not a right to have the truth from you?

A. I told you you might call me into court; and I state here that I did lie to you; but when put on my oath, I will tell the truth.

The fact that the Commissioners of Prince George’s County had offered a $2000.00 reward for information leading to the arrest of “anybody connected with the assassination” had had absolutely nothing to do with this fine distinction!