Judicial Murder of Mrs. Surratt

[wpbinzel]

The subject of Johnson's view of Mrs. Surratt's innocence (but not Stanton's "suicide") is also referenced in Trefousse's biography of Andrew Johnson, citing "William Eblin McElwee Memorandum, May 1, 1923, Johnson Papers, [Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, TN]:

"Johnson started to discourse about his years at the White House. Most of the political troubles after the war, he believed, were the fault of Secrertary Stanton, whom he called 'the Marat of American politics' and a 'very bitter, uncompromising, and self-assertive man.' He even said that he had heard that Stanton was indirectly responsible for Booth's crime, because the secretary had allegedly stopped Lincoln from comuting the death sentence of one of the assassin's friends. . . . As for Mrs. Surratt, he believed her to have been entirely innocent but to have been done in by Stanton." -- Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), p. 376.

(McElwee's memo purports to detail a chance meeting and converstion he had with Johnson on a train on July 28, 1875, mere hours before the former-president suffered a stroke, from which he would die three days later. Personally, I do not consider McElwee's account to be all that credible, especially as something written nearly 50 years after the fact.)