Was Frederick Stone a Confederate Agent?

[wpbinzel]

History remembers Frederick Stone as a Charles County, Maryland, attorney who represented Samuel Mudd and David Herold in the trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators in 1865. He went on to serve two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1867-1871) and as an associate judge on the Maryland Court of Appeals (1881-1890).

Stone's name is also raised in Richard M. Smoot's Shall We Gather at the River (Randal Berry, ed.): "However, after some little time spent in negotiating with [John, Jr.] Surratt, I [Smoot] finally agreed to sell him the boat for two hundred and fifty dollars, which amount was to be deposited with some third party who was to be mutually satisfactory, to be paid to me when my boat was put to use. I went with Surratt to the office of Ex-Judge [Frederick] Stone in Port Tobacco. There he placed in the hands of Judge Stone one hundred and twenty-five dollars in trust for me, and Judge Stone became personally responsible for the payment of the balance. Under instructions from Surratt I turned the boat over to Andrew Atzerott, who figured so prominently in the assassination plot and who then lived in Port Tobacco." (p. 6)

One has to question how it was that Frederick Stone was so familiar with John Surratt, Jr., that he was willing to be "personally responsible" for the balance of $125 (approximately $1750 in current dollars) for a boat ultimately intended to be used to transport a captured Abraham Lincoln across the Potomac River en route to Richmond.

There is another curious reference to Frederick Stone in George A. Townsend's "How Wilkes Booth Crossed the Potomac," (The Century, April 1884): "Mr. [Thomas A.] Jones himself is a man of hardly medium height, slim and wiry, with one of those thin, mournful faces common to tidewater Maryland, with high cheek-bones, gray-blue eyes, no great height or breadth of forehead, and thick, strong hair.... Judge Frederick Stone told me that he once crossed the [Potomac] river with Jones, when a Federal vessel suddenly loomed up, apparently right above them, and in the twinkling of an eye, the passenger said, he could see the interior of the Old Capitol prison for himself and all his companions; but at that moment Jones was as cool as if he had not noticed the vessel at all, and extricated them in an instant from the danger." (p. 825)

One further has to ask why Stone would be crossing the Potomac River in dire fear of a Union vessel, with a known Confederate agent in whose company Stone "could see the interior of the Old Capitol Prison for himself."

Perhaps Frederick Stone was better connected with Confederate operatives and the government in Richmond than has previously suggested.