Judicial Murder of Mrs. Surratt

[Steve]

Unfortunately, I can't find a digitized version of the newspaper in any of the online resources I checked. McElwee was Capt. William Eblin McElwee, a Tennessee Confederate veteran who had an interest in history. According to the citation of this book, McElwee's account was only written down a month before it appeared in The Greeneville-Democrat-Sun:

https://books.google.com/books?id=rG5q7k...22&f=false

Here's a link about McElwee:

http://www.roanetnheritage.com/research/.../index.htm

Note that the page says that "his stories must be taken with a grain of salt". I don't know if that applies to his personal recollections or not.

Here's a couple of links to books that give more context to McElwee's account of his conversation with Johnson:

https://archive.org/stream/presidencyofa...ch/McElwee

and:

https://books.google.com/books?id=rG5q7k...22&f=false