Exhumation of Conspirators

[L Verge]

Found in the files at Surratt House: This will appear as an article in the Surratt Courier in a few months, but here's a sneak peek for those of you who may not have ever seen this account. It is taken from a clipping in a bound scrapbook belonging to George Alfred Townsend (GATH) which is in the Library of Congress Manuscript Room. The clipping is undated and is from the Boston Traveler.

Lincoln's Assassination
Funeral of the Five Conspirators After the Execution

As a newspaper correspondent, I had occasion to visit the Old Capitol Prison in Washington in February 1869 [sic - bodies were at the old Washington Penitentiary, not Old Capitol Prison] to witness the exhumation and the rendition to their respective relatives and friends of the remains of the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination. President Johnson was about to go out of office and he issued an order permitting Christian burial to the bodies of the five persons implicated in the death of Lincoln -- Booth, Mrs. Surratt, Atzerodt, Payne [sic] and Harold [sic]. They had been buried in ammunition boxes of common pine wood, six feet long, two feet wide and two feet deep. When the lid was lifted from Booth's coffin, his face was perfect, with the exception of a small hole abut the size of a dime in each cheek. His hair was in good condition as if he had just come out of a barber's shop. In taking out the body to place it in a handsome rosewood coffin supplied by his mother, Mrs. Booth of Baltimore, the head dropped off from the body. Not so with Mrs. Surratt. Her face and form were perfect, and she looked like one in a happy, dreamless sleep. Her head adhered to the body in the process of transfer. Payne's body was greatly wasted, but Atzerodt's was the worst of all; for when the army blanket that covered his remains was lifted up, it revealed a shapeless mass of blackened bones and ashes, with a bald and separated skull in one corner. Talking of this matter of the Lincoln assassination, I remember asking Andrew Johnson one day, when we were traveling together through East Tennessee at a time when he was running for Congressman-at-large against Horace Maynard and Frank Cheatham, why it was he did not pardon Mrs. Surratt. He was in a communicative mood and he said: "The true history of that case has never been told. It was represented in the papers that I refused to see Annie Surratt, the daughter of Mrs. Surratt when she came to the White House the morning of the executions, asking for the pardon of her mother. The fact is that I never knew it was Miss Surratt, because a man in charge named Muzzy, who had general charge of the White House, came to me and said a crazy woman was down stairs and wanted to get in to see me and she wouldn't give her name, but was crying and tearing her hair and exhibited all the evidence of insanity."

"But would you have pardoned Mrs. Surratt", I asked, "supposing you had known better?"

"I don't think I would", he replied, in his bluff way. "She didn't do the shooting, but she was an accessory to it which is all the same."

NOTE: If I remember correctly, several months ago, we discussed a conversation that Johnson had with a gentleman near the end of his life, and his reply regarding Mrs. Surratt was a tad different.