The Assassin's Accomplice By Kate Clifford Larson

[Thomas Thorne]

My greatest regret about the archival compilation "The Evidence" is the almost total lack of inter office memos between Federal officials concerning the guilt and innocence of the various parties. I suppose most of this can be traced to the fact they worked in such close proximity that any deliberations were conducted orally. It is a pity that nobody kept minutes or left an account of the proceedings.

It must have been a profound shock to them to come to the belief that a woman was a principal player in the assassination of the President of the United States.

In reading Mary Surratt's answers to her interrogators, her extraordinarily defensive responses must have struck officials as too clever by half. Her most interesting answer IMO was her response to the following:

Q-What are your political sentiments?

A-I don't pretend to express my feelings at all: I have often said that I thought that the South acted too hastily; that is about the amount of my feeling, and I say so again.

The second "sentence" could well be truthful. The fault line between the 7 gulf states that formed the Confederacy in Feb 1861 and the 4 other states that seceded after Ft Sumter was the insistence of the latter that secession required an overt act of aggression by the Lincoln administration. The call by Lincoln for 75,000 militia to suppress the Rebellion after Ft Sumter met this requirement and Virginia,North Carolina,Tennessee, and Arkansas soon followed their southern brethren with ordinances of secession.

Mary Surratt's unwillingness to express any political opinion in the first "sentence",her attempt to separate herself from South Carolina fire eaters in "sentence" two and her claim that she held no opinion on any other aspect of the Civil War must have made War Department readers shake their heads.
Tom