The Flimsy Case Against Mary Surratt

[Rob Wick]

Quote:From what I’ve seen in this forum, most members of this community are unaware of the degree to which “outside” scholars, i.e., scholars who do not focus on Lincoln’s murder, have rejected and debunked key elements of the War Department’s version.

And that proves what? I have to say that my interest in Lincoln's assassination pretty much ended when I stopped researching about Everton Conger. However, I have researched those "outside" scholars far more than you have (even publishing in peer-reviewed journals on them) and just because a consensus of Lincoln scholars who otherwise glossed over the assassination accepted something doesn't make them correct. Those same scholars found William Herndon's material troublesome and of little value, yet today's scholarship has all but proven them wrong. They refused to believe that Lincoln fell in love with Ann Rutledge, yet they again have been proven wrong.

That most of the mid-20th century Lincoln scholars rejected the radical cause and disliked Stanton proves nothing but that most of the mid-20th century Lincoln scholars rejected the radical cause and disliked Stanton. The most prominent of that class was James Garfield Randall, a Wilsonian Progressive. In a letter to Edgar J. Rich, a prominent Boston attorney and Lincoln student, Randall wrote of Stanton, "His radical intrigues, his conduct as a member of Johnson's cabinet, his methods in connection with the conspiracy trial, his and Holt's harshness toward Mrs. Surratt, his treatment of General Sherman, and many other things in his career are, in my opinion, not very easily susceptible justification. What it boils down to as I see it is this; the fact that Stanton did not do the horrible thing suggested by Eisenschiml does not necessarily imply that he was altogether a statesmen of pure and unblemished record." (James G. Randall to Edgar J. Rich, September 21, 1939, Box 5, James G. Randall Papers, University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign).

Randall's outsized influence on other Lincoln scholars, as well as the results of their own researches and prejudices, led them to the same conclusion. In the final volume of his eight-volume history of the war, Allan Nevins, another liberal in the John F. Kennedy mold, wrote "The trial of Mrs. Surratt excited especial interest because she stoutly protested her innocence, and bore herself with dignity in the most trying circumstances. A number of witnesses, some of them Catholic clergymen (for she was a Roman Catholic), and including also several colored people of transparent honesty, testified to her character, Cristian piety, and readiness to befriend Union soldiers during the war. She had clearly been a Confederate sympathizer, but no substantial evidence was offered that she had participated in any murder plot." (Nevins, The War For the Union: The Organized War to Victory: 1864-1865, 333)

You mention Thomas and Hyman as well. I would be careful with that example, given that we have little in the way of knowledge as to who wrote what. In looking at Thomas's biography of Lincoln, he writes "Eisenschiml's Why Was Lincoln Murdered? (1937) brings forth much new material, with startling implications about men in high position, especially Stanton." (Thomas, Abraham Lincoln: A Biography, p. 548). That's hardly damning commentary.
Thomas wrote an essay located in his papers titled "Edwin M. Stanton Takes Over the War Department" in which Stanton is painted as acerbic, emotional, and often times short tempered, but again there is little of real dislike for the subject here. ("Edwin M. Stanton Takes Over the War Department" in Michael Burlingame, ed., "Lincoln's Humor" and Other Essays, pp. 189-203).

Thomas's biographer, John Hoffman, writes of the Thomas-Hyman connection "It is virtually impossible to apportion credit for Stanton" (Hoffman, "Benjamin P. Thomas", Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, p. 53). Given that Hyman is a Constitutional scholar who has focused in other works on the question of military and civilian control, it's likely he was more involved in the final product written about the trial. Hyman was suggested to Thomas's publisher as the one to complete the biography by none other than Allan Nevins, who knew Hyman when he was a student at Columbia.

However, Hyman has taken issue with some of the nonsense that has passed for Lincoln assassination "scholarship" in an essay entitled "With Malice Toward Some: Scholarship (or Something Less) on the Lincoln Murder" which I close with.