I went to Washington D.C. to participate in small part in the 150th anniversary ceremonies of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. I attended as many of the official ceremonies as I could, including most of the events connected with the National Parks Service 36-hour marathon at Ford’s Theatre they called “The Lincoln Tribute.” Although bleary-eyed and dragging, I then embarked on a trip I had been dreaming about since I was a young I.P.S. student; retracing the escape route of assassin John Wilkes Booth. I shared those experiences with you in three parts over the past few weeks.
Now, on this the final day of my trip to our nation’s capitol, I found myself with unexpected time on my hands; a luxury that seems to be very rare for me and one that I was sure not to waste. I had seen and visited all of the sites most commonly associated with the assassination of our sixteenth President. But what of his assassins and their aftermath? Most of them were born and raised in the region I now found myself wandering aimlessly through. I decided to spend my last day “digging” them up.
Like many American history buffs, I often find myself purposely walking in the footsteps of history. For whatever reason, I just as often find myself tramping through graveyards to eventually stand over the mortal remains of those whose exploits and deeds I have read about in books and pamphlets. It is a rare thing indeed to think that here lies the body of a noteworthy American from generations past with just a whisper between our own mortality and his (or her) eternity. Before you judge me ghoulish, keep in mind that cemeteries were originally designed much the same as parks, with the intention of accommodating visitors in the same fashion, albeit with expected respect and reverence for the more permanent residents.
On the first day of my trip, I visited one of my heroes, Lincoln collection curator and decorated Civil War soldier Osborn H. Oldroyd at Rock Creek cemetery. The cemetery is located a few miles north of the White House just a stone’s throw from the Lincoln Cottage where Mr. Lincoln sought retreat from the rigors of his job and the “heat” of D.C. Oldroyd rests not far from authors, actors, politicians, cabinet members and Supreme Court Justices. He also rests a short walk from one of the Lincoln conspirators, Lewis Thornton Powell, whose headless body rests in an unmarked grave nearby.
Powell, alias Paine, is surely the most intriguing, and arguably the most sympathetic, of the doomed quartet of conspirators. Powell, a true son of the south from extreme North Central Florida via Alabama and Georgia, enlisted in the Confederate army and was wounded during Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. He served as an orderly in the soldier’s hospital located there for several weeks after his capture, earning the nickname “Doc.” He escaped and eventually hooked up with John Wilkes Booth and his gang. He would attack and seriously wound Secretary of State William H. Seward on the night of Lincoln’s assassination. Seward would live, but Powell would be hanged for his part in the conspiracy.
Ever the rigid rebel soldier, Powell’s body would swing ramrod straight for 30 minutes after the trap door dropped. His body, along with his three fellow conspirators, was buried unceremoniously near the scaffold in a wooden gun case with the only identifier being his name written on a scrap of paper pinned to his shirt. There it remained until 1867 when the War Department decided to tear down the portion of the Washington Arsenal where the bodies of the executed lay. On October 1, 1867, the coffins were disinterred and reburied in the basement of Warehouse No. 1 at the Arsenal, with a wooden marker placed at the head of each burial vault. In February 1869, after much pleading from the Booths and Surratts, President Johnson agreed to turn the bodies of the co-conspirators over to their families. I visited the hanging site on this trip. Now located on the grounds of Fort Lesley J. McNair, south of Washington (near the Washington Senators stadium), the site is now a tennis court with no hint of it’s former nefarious historical significance.
Powell’s family declined to retrieve his body which was eventually buried in an unmarked grave at Rock Creek Cemetery. In 1991, a Smithsonian Institution researcher discovered Powell’s skull in the museum’s Native American skull collection. It appears that sometime in 1885, the skull was donated to the Army Medical Museum and ironically housed in the basement of Ford’s Theatre with their collection of artifacts, apparently unbeknownst to, and certainly unacknowledged by the curators. At that time, it was stenciled with the number 2244 and a capital “P.” The museum’s documentation showed that the skull belonged to a male erroneously named “Payne,” a criminal who had been executed by hanging. The Army gave the skull to the Smithsonian on May 7, 1898, and somehow it became mixed with their Native American collection. Almost a century later, on November 12, 1994, Lewis Powell’s skull was returned to his family and buried next to the grave of his mother, Caroline Patience Powell, at Geneva Cemetery in Florida. But now, here at Rock Creek cemetery, his headless body rested eerily beneath my feet. A sad, somehow fitting end to an even sadder life of a misguided soldier.
I then went in search of the grave of conspirator Mary Surratt in Mount Olivet Cemetery, not far from Rock Creek. Mt. Olivet is the largest Catholic burial ground in the District of Columbia, and like Rock Creek, it includes the graves of D.C.’s rich and famous. Mary Surratt, who most believe was guilty solely based on the fact that she owned the D.C. boarding house where the conspirators met, was the first woman hanged by the U.S. government. In my opinion, she was hanged as a substitute for her active participant conspirator son John Surratt, who had fled to Canada, thereby leaving his mother to walk his plank. Mrs. Surratt’s lonely, isolated grave is sadly symbolic of her fate and rests stark and solitary in the back of the cemetery. The stone that rests there today is a replacement of the original which was broken into many pieces by means unknown generations ago. Today it rests in the Surratt House museum.
Ironically, 100 yards from Mary Surratt’s grave is the final resting place of her former employee John Lloyd. Lloyd was the drunken innkeeper left to mind the Surratt Boarding House in Surrattsville, Maryland on the night of the assassination. He delivered the rifles, hidden in the attic of the boarding house, to Booth and Herold when they appeared there on the first leg of their escape. Lloyd’s dubious testimony at the trial was chiefly responsible for the conviction of Mrs. Surratt. I feel certain that his is a restless eternal slumber.
However, Mary Surratt is not the only infamously hanged Civil War figure buried at Mt. Olivet cemetery. Within a short walk are the uneasy remains of Henry Wirz, former commandant of the infamous Andersonville Prison in Georgia. Wirz was hanged for war crimes four months after Mary Surratt on a similar scaffold and in the same courtyard. Like Surratt, Powell and their fellow conspitators, Wirz’s neck did not break and he slowly strangled to death. Like Surratt, many believe Wirz was a substitute scapegoat for a much larger crime. Hopefully you see now why I find cemeteries so interesting.
Next week, I’ll continue the conspirators graveyard tour.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest book is “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
