The Judicial Murder Of Mary E. Surratt

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 Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and hanged on July 7, 1865. Though current scholarship indicates otherwise, many writers have portrayed her as an innocent victim of a vengeful military tribunal that did not have the right to try her for her involvement in the assassination plot. This book discusses two events that supported this view.