Born Mary Jenkins in Maryland in the 1820s, Mary Surratt converted to Catholicism at a girls’ academy in Virginia and married John Surratt, a man with heavy debts, a violent temper and a drinking problem. After a fire destroyed their farmhouse they built a tavern at the crossroads that became Surrattsville, which during the Civil War served as a way station for Confederate couriers, one of her sons among them. When John died of a stroke in 1862, Mary leased the tavern and opened a boarding house in Washington, D.C., where John Wilkes Booth and his circle began to gather around a plot that started as a plan to kidnap Abraham Lincoln.

Days before the assassination Mary rode to the tavern on what she called debt collecting, and her tenant testified she told him to ready hidden firearms. On the day itself she delivered a package of field glasses from Booth. Two nights after the murder she denied knowing a disguised man with a pickaxe at her door, the attacker of the Secretary of State. A military tribunal convicted her, five of nine judges asked for clemency, habeas corpus was suspended in her case, and she became the first woman executed by the federal government.

• Her husband sold land and enslaved people to pay creditors after the fire.
• The tribunal could convict by simple majority and admit evidence a civilian court might exclude.
• The two key witnesses, her tenant and a boarder, faced prosecution themselves if they did not cooperate.
• Her daughter Anna was turned away at the White House while trying to plead for her mother’s life.
• The officer overseeing the hanging tied her noose with fewer loops, expecting a last-minute reprieve.