After visiting the graves of Abraham Lincoln assassination conspirators Lewis Thornton Powell and Mary Surratt during the 150th anniversary week of the great crime, I decided it might be interesting to track down every one of those tangled up in the death dance of Mr. Lincoln. Or at least what remained of them. I found Powell quite by accident while searching for the grave of my hero Osborn Oldroyd, our country’s first Lincoln collector/curator. Powell has always intrigued me because he served (albeit for the losing side) honorably at Gettysburg, receiving a wound which resulted in his capture on that famous field. He always seemed to me a misguided soul, perhaps too thick in mind and body to realize what he was involved in. Whether you agree or disagree on his motives, you cannot deny that he was a soldier.
I sought out the grave of Mary Surratt because I tend to believe that she was wrongly convicted. She was convicted, and subsequently hanged, chiefly based on the testimony of two men; John Lloyd who is buried 100 yards from her and Louis Weichmann, a Surratt House boarder who died (and is buried) in Anderson, Indiana. After all. I had just returned from visits to her tavern home in Maryland and her boarding house in D.C., now known as the “Wok and Roll” Chinese restaurant. It seemed only fitting that I investigate her final resting place. Having visited two of the four hanged conspirators, I felt I might as well go and find the other two doomed miscreants.
It didn’t hurt that I knew that conspirator David Herold’s grave was located in Congressional Cemetery, the second most famous burial grounds in the district behind Arlington National Cemetery. Known also as Washington Parish Burial Ground, it is an active cemetery with over 65,000 individuals buried there. Traditionally, most 19th century members of Congress who died while Congress was in session were interred at the cemetery. Burials include a Vice President, a Supreme Court justice, 6 Cabinet members, 19 Senators and 71 Representatives (including a former Speaker of the House), alongside FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover and Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.
Herold, who was with John Wilkes Booth on the escape route, was captured, held for trial and subsequently hanged. Herold’s body lies in his family plot in an unmarked grave. The Herold family had owned a burial plot at Congressional Cemetery since 1834. Davy was the seventh person to be buried there when his body was released in 1869. While Davy is unmarked, his sister Elizabeth Jane was later buried right on top of him. Her stone is the farthest right in the plot. Herold’s grave is unremarkable except for the fact that he lies just yards from Mathew Brady’s.
It was Brady’s protege, Alexander Gardner, who would take those immortal photos of Herold in captivity in the U.S. Navy Yard and the series of photos of Herold and his fellow conspirator’s ordeal on the scaffold. The caretaker guided me to the grave by identifying it as the “one with all the weeds around it” adding that “the weeds grow so fast near that stone, I don’t understand it.” According to a February 16, 1869 New York Times article detailing the 1869 re-interment of Herold, “The top of the (gun) case (coffin) was found to have decayed and fallen in. The flesh had entirely disappeared, the skeleton only remaining. The clothing appeared to be in a fair state of preservation. The head was entirely separated from the body.” But unlike Lewis Thornton Powell before him, Herold’s skull was buried with his body.
The last of the four hanged conspirators I attempted to chase down was George Atzerodt, the German immigrant carriage maker from Port Tobacco, Maryland. Atzerodt’s mission was to kill Vice-President Andrew Johnson on the night of the Lincoln assassination. Atzerodt lost his nerve, fled and got drunk instead. He was captured by soldiers, tried and hanged. The location of George Atzerodt’s remains are still a bit of a mystery and required a little more research. While no one knows for sure where his mortal remains rest for eternity, it is known that they were originally placed in the public vault of Rock Creek’s Glenwood Cemetery, just north of D.C., after being disinterred from the Arsenal. The public vault still stands, although obviously unused and neglected for decades.
Built into the side of a sloping hill, the massive granite structure is ornamented by a pair of giant metal doors, which are kept precariously locked and further protected by a pair of medieval-looking spiked gates which are chained shut. The vault hasn’t seen a body in generations. It remains a sad, forlorn relic as forgotten as the unclaimed bodies it once held. It is possible to climb the gates and look through the two portal windows at the imposing space inside. The vaulted ceiling covers eight sets of heavy iron riveted castle doors in the walls below where the bodies once rested until they were claimed. Or in most cases, until their time was up. It is possible that Atzerodt is buried somewhere at Glenwood but the interment book for that period of time was stolen in the late 1800s by a disgruntled, unpaid cemetery trustee. Like Herold before him, Atzerodt’s assumed final resting place is more notable for the fact that it rests near the grave of Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner.
Well, now it was becoming a quest. I decided to hustle back down to Waldorf, Maryland and visit the grave of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who treated Booth’s broken leg after the assassination. Mudd was convicted of aiding and conspiring in a murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, escaping the death penalty by a single vote. Mudd, Michael O’Laughlen, Samuel Arnold and Ned Spangler were imprisoned at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, a most forlorn island prison located about 70 miles west of Key West, Florida. Mudd was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson and released from prison in 1869, the same year as the reburial of the four hanged conspirators.
Mudd was just 49 years old when he died of pneumonia on January 10, 1883. He is buried in the cemetery at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Bryantown, the same church where he once met with John Wilkes Booth. In contrast to the others, his grave rests in an open, airy, almost cheerful area near his neighbors, patients and friends. Buried nearby in a neighboring graveyard is Mudd’s fellow conspirator Ned Spangler, a carpenter/handyman at Ford’s Theatre, whose only crime seems to have been that Booth asked him to hold his horse in the alley behind the theatre on that fateful night. He was sentenced to six years at Dry Tortugas. Spangler and Mudd became friends while in prison. Ned, a sympathetic simpleton with a low IQ, would ultimately accept an offer to live at Dr. Mudd’s farm in Bryantown, Maryland in exchange for work on the farm.
In February 1875, Spangler became ill with tuberculosis after working in a winter rainstorm. He died on February 7, 1875. Ironically, Ned’s death came almost 10 years to the day after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. He died a pauper and was buried in St. Peter’s Church graveyard about two miles from Dr. Mudd’s home. In 1983, the Surratt and Mudd societies raised the funds to place a marker on Ned’s grave site. His isolated gravestone rests near a fence line which surrounds a modern neighborhood. One of those homeowners has moved, and securely planted his TV cable dish just a few feet from Ned’s grave. Like Ned Spangler’s role in the assassination, it seems randomly disconnected and oddly out of place.
Next week, I’ll conclude 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.
