The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt - Paperback

by David Miller DeWitt (Author)

Mary Surratt was the first woman tried and executed by the United States. She owned and ran a boardinghouse in Washington, D.C. where John Wilkes Booth and other conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln often met. She was tried and convicted of complicity in Lincoln's assassination and hanged on 7 July 1865. This book portrays her as an innocent victim of a vengeful military tribunal that did not have the right to try her for involvement in the assassination plot. Two subsequent events supported this view. One was the 1866 Supreme Court decision Ex parte Milligan, which invalidated the authority of military courts to try civilians in places where civil courts were functioning. Ambiguity concerning military and civil authority in Washington, D.C. in 1865 raised questions about the legality of her trial. The other event was the trial of her co-conspirator son, John Surratt, before a civil jury in 1867, two years after her death. Surratt's testimony was similar to that of his mother. When his trial ended in a hung jury, it seemed to many that the military court had executed an innocent woman.

Author Biography

David Miller DeWitt was born November 25, 1837 in Paterson, New Jersey, and settled with his parents in Brooklyn, New York in 1845. He attended the public schools of Brooklyn, and later graduated from Rutgers College in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Obtaining his law degree, he was admitted to the New York bar in 1858 and commenced practice in Kingston. He served as district attorney of Ulster County from 1863 to 1870 and was elected as a Democrat to the Forty-Third Congress where he served from 1873 to 1875. He died in Kingston on June 23, 1912 at the age of 74 and was buried in Wiltwyck Rural Cemetery.