Did Secretary of War Edwin Stanton Rush to Judgment?
Mary Surratt glides through the Senator chamber to the little back office of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. She stands in the doorway, staring at him accusingly, until he looks up at her. Then he takes his pen in hand, documenting the fact that the trial of the Lincoln conspirators began on May 10, 1865, a little less than a month after the president’s assassination on April 14, 1865. The scratching of the pen on paper is the only sound in the office. There is no breathing. Mary Surratt’s ghost next confronts President Andrew Johnson during a recess of his Senate impeachment trial and he takes up his pen to explain why he hadn’t granted her mercy. He doesn’t deny his statement that her boarding house was the “nest where the egg was hatched.” Facts as Cold as a Haunted Cemetery at Midnight Some of the stone cold reality issues around Mary Surratt’s conviction include the fact that military tribunals had less strict rules of evidence than civilian trial courts, and it was very unusual f
