The Final Days of the Lincoln Conspirators

Innocents Convicted in Haste

Edward Spangler was convicted mostly on questionable testimony from one of his coworkers and he was only loosely involved in the story at all, having been a childhood friend of Booth. Spangler was an employee of the Ford Theater and working the night of the assassination. Spangler was sentenced to 6 years prison time, but 4 years later Spangler was pardoned by President Andrew Jackson.

Among the four conspirators who were convicted and sentenced to prison time was Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who tended to Booth’s broken leg. Along with Spangler and co-conspirators Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen, Mudd was sent to the prison at Fort Jefferson off the Gulf Coast. Mudd, Arnold, and Spangler were both also pardoned.

The Surratts

Four conspirators were tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Among them was first woman ever to be hanged by federal order of the United States government, Mary Surratt. She had run the boardinghouse on H Street where Booth and his conspirators would meet and make plans.

Mary’s son, John, had been a Confederate spy and an actor, just as Booth had been. John fled the country soon after his mother’s arrest and by the time he was captured the statute of limitations had run out on his charges. John’s role in the conspiracy landed him int he courtroom in 1867, a trial which resulted in a hung jury. John walked away scot free even though he could not deny his involvement with Booth.

The Execution

On July 7th, 1865, the four that were sentenced to death were hung in a vey public ceremony at the Arsenal Penitentiary inside what is now Fort McNair in Washington D.C. The day before the execution the four prisoners could hear the scaffold being built and the testing of the mechanism from their cells.

The death sentence had been handed down for Mary Surratt, David Herold, Lewis Payne, and George Atzerodt.

Nearly 1,000 spectators turned out to see the hanging of the folks responsible for the President Lincoln’s death.