In 1880, Rev. Jacob Walter noticed a letter in the popular Century magazine complaining that Mary Surratt’s priest had told her not to assert her innocence from the gallows.

Since he was the priest mentioned, Fr. Walter decided to tell his side. He did it in a Catholic magazine.

Fr. Walter, Mrs. Surratt’s priest for the last week of her life, wrote that he would have told his story earlier, but it takes time for people to lay aside prejudices. The whole country was convulsed with the horror of the assassination in 1865, he wrote, so he decided to wait before making a full statement.

“Very few persons at this date believe that Mary E. Surratt knew anything about the plot to assassinate the president,” he wrote in 1880.

In the article, he called Mrs. Surratt a “quiet, amiable lady.” He actually had met her for the first time after the assassination, when Anna Surratt asked the activist priest to visit her mother. Mrs. Surratt was a devout churchgoer, and her regular priest was also in the loop.

In his article, Fr. Walter said that Mrs. Surratt made a solemn declaration of her innocence to him just  before her execution.

Her told her: “You may say so if you wish, but it will do no good.”

The priest gave her the sacraments in her cell so she would not be “exposed to the public gaze” during her prayers at her final moment.

Fr. Walter witnessed the hanging from the scaffold, looked down to see that Mrs. Surratt had died without a struggle, then immediately went to tell Annie Surratt it was all over and to comfort her.

He planned to take Annie Surratt and her friend home in his carriage, but someone had moved it from inside the prison walls. A general offered him an ambulance to use for the ride to Surratt’s house. As they rode out of the prison, they spotted Fr. Walter’s carriage outside, transferred to it and drove to Mrs. Surratt’s home on H Street.

Source: United States Catholic Historical Magazine, Volume 3, No. 13, 1880

Dr. Richard Stuart was an ardent Confederate supporter and a cousin of Gen. Robert E. Lee, but he wasn’t reckless.

When John Wilkes Booth and Davy Herold showed up on his doorstep after he had already caught wind of the assassination, Stuart turned them away.

The doctor was wealthy enough to have two large homes – Cedar Grove on the banks of the Potomac and Cleydael, near the Rappahannock in Maryland. Booth sought medical treatment for his injured leg at Cleydael.

Stuart refused to treat him on the grounds that he was not a surgeon and Booth was not his patient.

He also refused to take the duo in for the night.

He sent them to the nearby cabin of William Lucas, a free black man.

Booth was so enraged and insulted that he cut a page out of his memorandum book and wrote a note to the doctor. He quoted some lines from Macbeth and said he was paying $5 for the food Stuart furnished. Then Booth decided on a do-over.

He thought it would be even more insulting to leave less money. He wrote a new note, pinned $2.50 into the folder paper and asked Lucas to deliver it to Mrs. Stuart.

Dr. Stuart turned the note over to a Union detective.

Source: John Wilkes Booth’s Escape Route, Notes by James O. Hall, published by The Surratt Society

After the assassination, Mary Lincoln closely monitored everything written about her late husband and her family. A contemporary said no mention of the late president or herself escaped her notice.

She borrowed a copy of “The Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln,” written by New York Times editor Henry J. Raymond. After reading it, she wrote to artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter, saying it was the most correct history of her husband.

Source: Acts of Remembrance: Mary Todd Lincoln and Her Husband’s Memory by Jennifer L. Bach in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association

Julia Adelaide Shepard wrote that she had and her friends had barely choked down their breakfasts on the morning of April 15, 1865, when the church bells tolled to announce President Lincoln’s demise.

Miss Shepard had been part of the audience at Ford’s the prior night.

After John Wilkes Booth jumped to the stage with the bloody dagger and exclaimed, “The South is avenged,” Ms. Shepard’s friend turned to her and said, “Did you hear what he said, Julia? I believe he has killed the president.”

Source: The Century Magazine, April 1909

Mr. Lincoln was an athlete of the first order. He could easily lift 1,000 pounds, 500 in each hand, according to Thomas D. Jones, a Cincinnati sculptor who made a bust of him in 1860.

Mr. Lincoln’s arms were so long and powerful that all he had to do was extend one hand to a man’s shoulder, and, using his own body weight and his strong arms, give the man a trip that would send him sprawling on the ground.

The opponent was usually so astonished by being sent sprawling that he quieted down.

 Source: The Personal Appearance of Lincoln, by John G. Nicolay, The Century Magazine, October 1891

The room where President Lincoln died was warmed by a heating stove in the winter months, but it apparently had been removed before President Lincoln was brought there on April 14. Artist Albert Waud sketched the room as it appeared that weekend.

He showed a portion of a heating pipe protruding from the back wall but no stove.

Source: National Park Service

Louisa May Alcott, who wrote “Little Women” in 1868, spent the Civil War years in Washington as a volunteer for the Christian Commission, a group that supported wartime chaplains and soldiers in the field and hospitals.

After the war, Alcott wrote many stories for girls and earned enough to allow her transcendentalist, abolitionist father Bronson Alcott to live comfortably in Concord, Mass. Unfortunately, exhausted by overwork, she survived her father by only two days.

Source: Reveille in Washington by Margaret Leech

If Vice-President Andrew Johnson had been shot and killed walking up Tenth Street to visit President Lincoln on assassination night, the law of succession in 1865 would have handed the acting presidency to Senator Lafayette S. Foster of Connecticut until the secretary of state could arrange a new election.

Sen. Foster was president of the Senate pro tempore.

If John Wilkes Booth’s plan he worked, it would have thrown the government into chaos because the president, vice-president and secretary of state would have been dead.

Source: John Wilkes Booth’s Escape Route, Notes by James O. Hall, published by The Surratt Society

Dr. Joseph K. Barnes, surgeon general in the Lincoln administration, was present at President Lincoln’s deathbed. He wasn’t the last assassination victim Barnes attended.

He treated President James A. Garfield after he was shot by an assassin in 1881.

The Lincoln deathbed is on display at the Chicago History Museum. Visitors to the room where Lincoln died at Petersen House in Washington, D.C. see a similar walnut spool bed from the same period, circa 1850.

The Petersen House bed was donated by the Society of Dames of the Loyal Legion’s D.C. chapter.

The main difference between the two beds is the shape of the finials on the bedposts. The spools on period piece are like extensions of the posts. The original bed has spools that start wide at the base and rise to a point like a Christmas tree.

Source: National Park Service