The Flimsy Case Against Mary Surratt

[mikegriffith1]

Before I present the points I want to make about Weichmann, Lloyd, and the Mary Surratt case, I must say that the comments in this thread that strain to defend the legality of Stanton's military commission are just another sad example of the apparent propensity here to see the Emperor's New Clothes, in spite of clear evidence to the contrary. If you go back and read the newspapers of the day, you will discover that everyone, everybody, the whole country knew that Ex Parte Milligan was a clear slap at Stanton's military commission, which perhaps explains why Stanton and his ilk were so furious with the decision. And then there's the fact that Stanton wanted to try John Surratt before a military court but could not do so precisely because of the Milligan decision (H. Donald Winkler, Lincoln and Booth, p. 243; William Marvel, Stanton: Lincoln's Autocrat, p. 423; see also this article on Ex Parte Milligan and this article on the legality of Stanton's military commission). Anyway. . . .

Historians Benjamin Thomas and Harold Hyman, whom I quoted on Stanton's Confederate conspiracy theory in another thread, also had a lot to say about Weichmann and Lloyd. I thought about including their comments in my article on the Mary Surratt case, but I decided not to use them because the quotes from Bogar’s book and Clampitt’s article convey much of the same information. Here are the comments by Thomas and Hyman that I almost included in my article:

Weichmann, too, might very well have been accused of complicity in the plot, and two years later, at the trial of John Surratt, Lloyd not only contradicted some of the statements at the conspiracy trial but admitted that he had been subjected to both promises and threats. That Weichmann was subjected to the same sort of intimidation by Stanton, in the private cross-examination, seems likely from the statement made by John T. Ford, owner of the celebrated theater. Ford, imprisoned with Lloyd and Weichmann, became convinced from what they told him that Mary Surratt was innocent and that the two witnesses had been coerced. “Many yet living recall their fright,” Ford wrote, and asserted that Weichmann had told him that “Secretary Stanton had, in a threatening manner, expressed the opinion that his [Weichmann’s] hands had as much of the President’s blood on them as Booth’s.”

Weichmann, testifying at the John Surratt inquiry in 1867, said he had been “nervous” at the previous trial and contradicted some of his previous statements, thereby putting Mrs. Surratt in a more favorable light. At this second trial, which in some respects amounted to a rehearing of Mrs. Surratt’s case, Louis Carland, a former customer at Ford’s Theater, testified that Weichmann had told him in 1865 that if he had been “let alone . . . it could have been quite a different affair with Mrs. Surratt than it was,” that his statements had been written out for him, and that he had been threatened with prosecution as an accessory if he refused to swear to them. Weichmann, under examination, denied that he had made this confession, but admitted that he had talked to Carland.

John W. Clampitt, one of Mrs. Surratt’s lawyers, a number of years after the trial wrote that Weichmann, after testifying, had been stung with remorse because he had committed perjury in implicating Mrs. Surratt in Lincoln’s murder. Certain “authorities of the War Department” had threatened to prosecute him as an accomplice in the conspiracy against Lincoln if he refused to offer testimony, Weichmann claimed, according to Clampitt. Holt had rejected the first statement Weichmann had prepared with the remark that “it was not strong enough,” whereupon, still under threat of prosecution, Weichmann had written a second and stronger statement, the substance of which he subsequently swore to on the witness stand. The man to whom Weichmann made this confession, wrote Clampitt, was refused permission to testify. (Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962, pp. 426-427)

You can find this information in lots of books whose main subject is not the Lincoln assassination but that discuss people who were involved in the case. Very few books written on the Lincoln assassination present this information. Most of the relatively few that do present this information are attacked by the echo chamber of the Lincoln assassination research community. This community, as evidenced by this forum, is dominated by people who believe in the War Department’s version of the assassination. 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.

This little echo-chamber community tends to summarily reject information that does not fit with their version of the case, now matter how credible and/or documented the information might be. Take, for example, their reaction to David Homer Bates’ matter-of-fact account of Stanton’s and Eckert’s final encounter with Lincoln on the night of the assassination. The true believers here reject it with various excuses, even though Bates deeply admired Stanton, wrote glowingly of Stanton, and was so close to Stanton that Stanton took him on a vacation with his family.

So why do true believers refuse to accept Bates’ account? Well, because Bates innocently reported that when Lincoln asked Stanton to let Eckert be his bodyguard that night, Stanton refused and gave the excuse that Eckert would be too busy with “important” work that evening. Bates, you see, had no idea that Stanton was lying. Bates thought he was simply reporting on an innocent encounter. Bates did not know that subsequent research would prove that the War Department’s telegraph office handled only a few routine telegrams that night, that Eckert left early and was home by supper time, and that Eckert left a low-level subordinate to handle the telegraphic traffic that evening (Theodore Roscoe, The Web of Conspiracy: The Complete Story of the Men Who Murdered Abraham Lincoln, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1959, pp. 21-22).