...Mary Surratt: Accomplice or Innocent Bystander Mary Surratt was a woman of many firsts. She was the first woman to ever be executed by the United States federal government. Her crime was suspected involvement in the first United States President assassination. This is better known as President Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth. But how much did she really know about the scheme? Was she an accomplice to Booth, like many others including her son, or was she an innocent bystander who accidently got involved with assassins? Many people have heard of the John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s shooter, but few have heard of the people behind the scenes of the assassination. Some of the people suspected to be involved included Lewis...
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...charged as a conspirator in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Mary Surratt. Seven men and one woman are arrested and charged with conspiring to kill the President, the Vice-President, and the Secretary of State. Mary Surratt owned a boarding house where John Wilkes Booth and others met and planned the attacks. Frederick Aiken defended Surratt before a military tribunal. As the trial unfolds, Aiken realized his client may be innocent and that she is being used as bait and prisoner in order to capture her son, the only conspirator that had escaped a manhunt. He later turned himself in after his mom was executed. The Conspirator had a few scenes that were not accurate. Overall, this movie is historically accurate because after John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, he was taken to a house across the street from the theater to be cared for, four of the captured conspirators were executed by hanging, and the trial by military tribunal was deemed unconstitutional. On the late evening of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth snuck into the viewing box where President Abraham Lincoln and others watched a play at Ford’s Theater. Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head at a close range. The President was moved across the street to a gentleman’s home where he was pronounced dead the following morning. According to Lincoln’s family physician, Dr. Robert King Stone in a statement he had made during the trial, “I was sent for by Mrs. Lincoln immediately after the assassination. I arrived...
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