Who Was Mary Surratt, The First Woman To Be Executed By The US Government?

How did Mary Surratt end up on the scaffold? Surratt was undoubtedly sympathetic to the Southern cause. She was once married to a secessionist tobacco farmer (via Time), but after she was widowed she rented out her Maryland farm and tavern and began running a boarding house in Washington D.C. to make ends meet (via History). The house was situated at a convenient spot for sending urgent communications, and pretty soon Confederate agents began showing up there — and Mary's son John was at the very center of the clandestine spiderweb that began to form around the Surratt boarding house.

While some historians have speculated that Mary may have been innocent, her son John Surratt was undeniably guilty. During the Civil War, John began mailing messages on behalf of the Confederate side (via Smithsonian Magazine), and he developed a number of ingenious methods for hiding secret mail. John heartily enjoyed his time as an agent, commenting after the war that "It was a fascinating life to me ... It seemed as if I could not do too much nor run too great a risk."

Through his secretive activities, John Surratt soon got to know John Wilkes Booth (above), who became a regular at the boarding house. Before long, John Surratt was personally involved in a plan to kidnap the president — a plot that would eventually turn into a murder. Although he admitted his involvement in the plot years after the assassination, unlike his mother, he would get off scot-free.