Katharina Buczek
After moving to Washington, D.C., Mary’s son John befriended a well-known Southern actor– John Wilkes Booth. And after becoming friends, the pair would often meet up in the boarding house.
So, the boarding house– which was located less than a mile away from the White House– eventually served as a safe house for Confederate spies and rebel agents. Most notably, the boarding house was also where John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators concocted the plan to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
By April 1865, though, that plan changed drastically. After the Union triumphed over the Confederacy, Booth and his co-conspirators decided to switch courses.
Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination
Originally, John Wilkes Booth’s plan was to abduct Lincoln. Then, he was going to transport the president to Richmond and offer him up in exchange for Confederate war prisoners.
So, while fleshing out the kidnapping plan, both Booth and John Surratt Jr. decided to recruit more co-conspirators. Then, the group’s meetings were hosted at Mary Surratt’s boarding house, and their guns and ammunition were stored at Mary’s Maryland tavern.
Once the Confederacy surrendered on April 9, 1865, though, Booth and his group quickly changed their plans. They were no longer interested in kidnapping but rather in carrying out an assassination.
Booth was supposed to kill Lincoln; meanwhile, George Atzerodt was tasked with killing Vice President Andrew Johnson. Additionally, David Herold and Lewis Powell planned to kill the Secretary of State, William H. Seward.
So, altogether, the group believed that this three-fold murder would essentially paralyze the U.S. government.
But, five days later, just John Wilkes Booth was successful in his attempt to kill. Moreover, within mere hours of Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre, Mary Surratt was visited by District of Columbia police at her boarding house.
Upon arrival, the officers explained that while they were looking for Booth, they were also searching for her son John– who had been suspected of helping Herold and Powell.
