18651776 Club
Four Lincoln conspirators hang at the Arsenal; Surratt is the first woman executed by the U.S. government
Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and Surratt drop from the scaffold eighty-three days after Lincoln died, on sentence of a military tribunal; Booth himself was killed eleven weeks ago in a Virginia barn.
Eighty-three days after Abraham Lincoln died at the Petersen House, four people convicted of plotting his murder stood on a scaffold in Washington. On July 7, 1865, Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt were hanged at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary under sentence of a military tribunal convened by President Andrew Johnson. Surratt, whose boarding house had served as a meeting place for the conspirators, became the first woman ever executed by the United States government. John Wilkes Booth himself never stood trial; he had been killed by a Union soldier eleven weeks earlier in a Virginia tobacco barn…
