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L Verge · 06-15-2015, 06:01 PM

(06-15-2015 12:47 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:
(06-14-2015 12:47 PM)RJNorton Wrote:
(06-14-2015 12:07 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote: Did he ever comment on his mother's "innocence",

Hi Eva. In his Rockville, Maryland, lecture he said, "I have very little to say of Louis J. Weichmann. But I do pronounce him a base-born perjurer; a murderer of the meanest hue! Give me a man who can strike his victim dead, but save me from a man who, through perjury, will cause the death of an innocent person. Double murderer!!!! Hell possesses no worse fiend than a character of that kind. Away with such a character. I leave him in the pit of infamy, which he has dug for himself, a prey to the lights of his guilty conscience."
Thanks Roger - if this is all it seems to me his mother didn't matter much to him. As I
said, since he was the one to get her into all that and since it was "his thing" rather than his mother's, he IMO was more responsible for her hanging than Weichmann was. How easy to put all the blame on him. Plus on another thread the opinion prevailed that his surrender to the police would probably have saved her live.

I can only offer one thought as to how John felt about the execution of his mother. It was over and done with three years before his lectures; society was pretty much on Mary's side by that time - thinking that she didn't deserve to die. I'm going to hark back to Victorian culture once again to suggest that the less said about Mary Surratt and the whole family at that point, the better. Proper people did not discuss scandals in their own family.

As I have mentioned before, I have had great-grandchildren tell me that we at Surratt House know more about the subject than they. The subject was taboo. I have also been told that the same held true for the Mudd family until Dr. Richard Mudd decided to take up his grandfather's cause. Over the past twenty years or so, as more true historians delved into the case, we can see that his crusade may ultimately have backfired. Be careful - dig too deep and things tend to get Muddier (pardon the pun - just had to throw it in!), and the same holds true for other family and national scandals. Secretly, I hope some scandals are more widely exposed in the political world of 2016... Just had to throw that in also. I'm a slow learner at being politically correct.