![]() ![]() Soon Booth was stopping by the boardinghouse regularly. ![]() Then, early in 1865, John Surratt brought home a new acquaintance: actor John Wilkes Booth. John, too, served the Confederacy, but in a different way: making the dangerous trip across the Potomac River to carry clandestine messages from North to South.įor the rest of 1864, life went on in Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse no differently than it did in the many other small boardinghouses that dotted wartime Washington. Two of her grown children, John and Anna, came to Washington with her the third, Isaac, was serving in the Confederate army. Some years earlier, her husband had acquired a house there, and Mary decided to operate it as a boardinghouse. Mary’s march to the scaffold began in the fall of 1864 when, saddled with debt from her alcoholic husband, who had died two years before, she leased out the tavern she operated in Prince George’s County, Maryland and moved to Washington, D.C. But even though a military tribunal had judged Mary Surratt to be complicit in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the debate about her guilt or innocence was only just beginning, ![]() ![]() On July 7, 1865, a middle-aged, middle-class widow, unremarkable in appearance, stepped onto the gallows and plummeted to her death, becoming the first woman to be hanged by the United States government. Mary Surratt awaits her execution (photo courtesy of the Library of Congress) ![]()
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