HANGED!

A meticulously researched account of Mary Surratt, whose still-disputed role in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln led to her becoming the first woman executed by the United States government.

No one disputed the fact that actor John Wilkes Booth fired the shot that killed Lincoln. A simultaneous, fortuitously nonfatal, attack on Secretary of State William H. Seward made it immediately clear that a conspiracy was involved. In the weeks following, with Booth dead, seven men were arrested for the crime—and one woman, Surratt. A widow, devout Catholic, and former enslaver, Surratt owned and ran a boardinghouse where Booth sometimes met with the other defendants. From the start, newspapers reviled her and, during the trial, wrote sexist, prejudicial accounts of her description and actions. The trial itself, run by a military tribunal, was biased in favor of the guilt of the accused. Surratt was sentenced to death, refused clemency by President Andrew Johnson, and hung the following day. The controversy surrounding her execution did not die, however; conflicting testimony by her former boarder Louis Weichmann, in particular, created doubts that persist to this day. Miller does an admirable job of sifting through the often conflicting source material and judicial obfuscation. Her author’s note discusses which sources she most trusts and why. The full truth of this intriguing historical mystery will never be known.

A bold, sympathetic, well-written account of a perplexing and complicated subject.