The Plot

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the US Women's National Team roster heading into the Shea Beliefs Cup, and the latest on the WNBA CBA negotiations. Check out the latest episode of a Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on new too. In 1863, a widow named Mary Sarot was running a tavern in a small town in Maryland,

“just outside of Washington, D.C. There was a post office in the same building.”

Her youngest son, John, was the postmaster. He was also a spy for the Confederate Army. How much did she know of what John was doing? Oh, I think she knew everything. This is a story in Cape Clifford, Larson.

You know, some people say, "Oh, she couldn't have known what he was doing." Of course, he was like 18 years old. She knew everything he was doing. And she approved of it because she did not want the Union to win. Mary grew up in Maryland on a tobacco farm where her family owned and slaved people.

Her father died when she was two, and after her mother ran the farm, she never remarried.

Mary grew up in Piscopalian, but converted to Catholicism when she was a teenager. Mary met her husband, John Sarot, in 1839. They married the next year. They had three children. Her husband drank and gambled the lot. He racked up a lot of debt. But eventually he saved up enough money to build a tavern.

So he opened this tavern and it became very busy very quickly. They had a wheel right that would take care of people's carriages and, you know, barns for horses. And so it was very, very successful. The bar and the inn itself. And sadly, John became the most frequent customer of the bar in the tavern. In 1862, John Sarot died. By that point, Mary was already doing most of the work,

running the tavern. It was always busy. And often full of Confederate supporters who knew they were safe there.

A family friend said that Mary earnestly and conscientiously defended and justified the Southern cause.

“What was it like in Maryland at that time during the Civil War?”

So Maryland stayed in the Union. There was a lot of negotiating to make that happen because Maryland was a slave state. Now Southern Maryland, the part of Maryland that's closest to Washington, D.C., had the most enslaved people out of any region of Maryland at the time. So it was a mixed state. Northern Maryland, north of Baltimore, had very few enslaved people, more in Northern kind of sympathies. And then Southern Maryland had very strong Confederate sympathies.

So the state was split. But, you know, Lincoln and his administration were able to keep it in the Union. But that didn't mean that people with Confederate sympathies were not trying to thwart the efforts of Lincoln and his administration during the war. The Sarot had also owned enslaved people. One of them had allegedly burned down the Sarot's house, and then ran away. Several of them fled the tavern and took off. So that was very upsetting to

Mary as a white woman, she had more status than in the slave person or a free black person. And she liked that. She was a racist. And she was a, um, she was a Confederate. She wanted slavery to continue. In 1862, Mary's oldest son, Isaac, left to join the Confederate Army. And her younger son, John, started delivering messages for the Confederacy. John used his position at the post office to move coded messages that were sent to him there.

When he got certain letters, he would take out a hidden envelope and bring it to the person it was for. Sometimes he would hide messages between the wooden boards of his carriage, other times in the heel of his boot. He'd sneak out to Confederate boats on the Potomac river

24 hours a day every mile of that river all the time. So people had a great business taking

“Confederate sympathizers, spies, etc. back and forth across the Potomac and the other rivers.”

So, um, you know, it was wartime. It was difficult to watch everybody and keep an eye on everybody. But one day in November 1863, John was caught by federal investigators. He was fired from his job as postmaster for disloyalty. He spent a few days in jail, but was released. A new postmaster was hired, who was not a Confederate supporter. John decided to start carrying the secret letters himself, full time, bypassing the post office.

He would travel to the Confederate capital enrichment, pick up messages, and then take them

north to Canada, where the Confederacy had established a base. Spice like John had coded messages and photographs in buttons, shoes, and clothing, in case they were searched. In 1864, Mary decided to move with John and her daughter Anna to Washington DC,

“where they owned a townhouse. She started running out rooms. I think it was a strategic move on”

her part, and they could have borders and look like a respectable house, and she would be the woman running the boarding house. And I think it made it easier for John to go back and forth and connect

with people in Washington DC who were spies who were in government. There were Confederate spies

who had jobs in the government, and they were sending information to Richmond, Virginia. So I think it worked out for him very nicely that they moved into Washington DC. Soon the boarding house became a meeting place for John and his friends. Some of whom he had met through his work, delivering messages. One man started coming over a lot and became friends with Mary, too. His name was John Wilkes Booth. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

John Wilkes Booth was born in Maryland. He came from a family of actors. His father, Junius, and two of his brothers were also actors. John made his own stage debut when he was 17 years old, after his father died. His brother Edwin was known as the more precise actor in the family, but John was considered the more passionate one. One actor said, he has the fire, the dash, the touch of strangeness. He was cold by some, the handsomeist man in Washington.

Walt Whitman wrote a vas acting, I thought of real genius. How famous is John Wilkes Booth at this point? He is so famous. He's like the most famous actor in the country at the time. He had started acting in the early 1850s. He wasn't very notable at the time, but he really worked on his craft, and he became quite skilled, and he was dashing and handsome, and really that he was a public person, and so he really developed a tremendous following. In April 1961,

when the Civil War began, John Wilkes Booth was performing in Albany. He called the Confederates, attacking Fort Sumter, quote, "heroic." He did not believe in a quality. He thought that African-Americans were supposed to be slaves. He was devoted to that concept, which is kind of odd because his family hadn't been that strongly committed. Particularly one of his brothers was more of a northern sympathizer, a union sympathizer, but he was obsessed. He really was obsessed.

He had promised his mother that he would not enlist in the Confederate army, but by 1864, he wanted to do more. John Wilkes Booth is becoming more and more furious and frustrated, and he wants the union to lose. He wants the Confederacy to win. So he starts kind of dreaming up the scheme of how they're going to get a group of people together to help him execute on this plan

“to kidnap Abraham Lincoln. What did they think they were going to get out of kidnapping Lincoln?”

They were going to ransom him for the freedom of all the Confederate soldiers in northern prisons,

you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of Confederate prisoners. I mean, it was kind of a

“wacky plan, but they were devoted to it. They thought it would work. It certainly would have shocked the”

nation. John Wilkes Booth's plan was to kidnap President Lincoln in Washington and smuggle him through Maryland to the Potomac River, then he and several conspirators would put him on a boat. They knew that Lincoln was a tall guy. They needed a few guys to help them get him into a boat and get him across to Virginia and then ransom him. John Wilkes Booth started spending a lot of time in Southern Maryland, meeting with Confederate spies and looking for places that could be safe houses

along the way to the Potomac. He learned that the Sirauts tavern was known as a safe place for

Confederates. A mutual friend introduced him to John Siraut. It was December of 1864 that John Siraut Jr. met John Wilkes Booth in Washington, D.C. was around Christmas time and from then on the plan

“really took off rather quickly. John Wilkes Booth brought in a couple of his friends from childhood.”

John Siraut brought in some of his friends from childhood. The people that they brought in had no experience really with firearms or planning kidnappings. They didn't have much money. Which now when you think about it is kind of ridiculous, but these are the people that they trusted and they brought in. This is how the plans started to grow. Soon, John Wilkes Booth began arranging for people to stay at the Sirauts boarding house in Washington as they made plans.

Some of them stayed for just a night and others for weeks. One of John Siraut's childhood friends, who also lived at the boarding house, a man named Louis Whiteman, asked Mary who all these new people were. She told him that John was hiring them

“for dirty work. One asked what she meant. She said to clean his horses.”

Kate Clifford-Larson says that John Wilkes Booth came to the boarding house almost every day. If John Siraut was in home, he would sit with Mary. One of the borders in the house said that Mary Siraut and John Wilkes Booth would talk for hours together. Mary's daughter Anna kept a photo of Booth. Her brother complained that when Booth

came to visit, he would always hear the women's scampering to get ready.

It's kind of remarkable when you think about it. The most famous actor in the country is showing up at this boarding house in Washington, D.C. And you know, it's just everybody at the borders in the house and not all of the more Confederate sympathizers in the house, but they just they loved him and they thought this is the coolest thing that John Wilkes Booth is coming and having dinner with us and entertaining us. At the beginning of 1865, John Wilkes Booth started tracking

President Lincoln's schedule. President Lincoln often went to see plays, especially at Ford's theater. John Wilkes Booth had performed there many times and he asked the owner to let him in to look around. He proposed kidnapping Lincoln the next time he went to see a show there, but two of his friends didn't like the idea. They said it could not be done without someone getting killed. On March 16, John Wilkes Booth heard from a friend that President Lincoln was going to see a show

the next day at an army hospital. Booth planned to intercept Lincoln's carriage. John Sirot would take over and drive it to Maryland. Kate says on the 17th of March, everyone met at Mary's boarding house and John Wilkes Booth told them where to go and what to do once they had captured Lincoln. So Booth and his co-conspirators set themselves up along this road on the day that Lincoln was supposed to be there and it turns out that at the last minute Lincoln

changed his mind and didn't go. And it just infuriated the co-conspirators, but a particularly John Wilkes Booth himself. When John Sirot Jr came home, he went to his friend Louis Weikman, who lived at the boarding house. Louis Weikman said that John was waving a gun around and told him, "I will shoot anyone that comes into this room. My prospect is gone. My hopes are blighted." 15 minutes later, John Wilkes Booth came and looking for John Sirot. They went into another room

John Wilkes Booth stayed in Washington for one more day. He was scheduled to perform the next

“day at Ford's Theatre. After the show, he left for New York City, but he hadn't given up on”

trying to help the Confederacy, which was about to lose the war. He just was in a complete panic and so angry that he'd started planning and scheming what his next step was going to be and that turned out to be a plan to assassinate Lincoln and it involved getting married to help. They have 100% organic cotton sweaters, denim made with stretch for comfort and cotton cashmere blends that are perfect for the changing seasons. Quinn says all of their pieces are made

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to corn essentials that fit your unique style and budget. Go to wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Historian Kate Clifford-Barson says when John Wilkes Booth came back to Washington, DC, he began gathering supplies for his new plan to assassinate the president. John Wilkes Booth decided he needed spy glasses, and he wanted liquor, money, and food,

and things like that, and more weapons stored at the Serrat Tavern for the evening. When he decided he was going to assassinate Elinkin. John Serrat had gone to Canada. Before he left, he'd taken weapons, an ammunition to his family's tavern in Maryland. He hid them in the walls and under the floorboards. Mary started making moths of trips to the tavern, too. Once she asked her son's friend, Louis Weikman, who also lived at the boarding house to take her there.

She told them she was going to collect on a loan to a neighbor. But on the way, they stopped on a road just outside of town to talk to a man named John Lloyd. He had rented the tavern from Mary when she moved to Washington. Mary asked John Lloyd about the weapons hidden at the tavern and told him someone would be coming to get them soon. And then, on April 14, John Wilkes Booth went to pick up his mail at Ford's Theatre.

Any heard that President Lincoln would be attending a play there that night. John Wilkes Booth met with two other men to go over their plans. Part of the conspiracy was to kill Lincoln, his vice president, Andrew Johnson, Secretary William Henry Seward, and then General Grant. He wanted to make sure that the leadership of the union

she went to the tavern to deliver the last items that Booth needed. Booth did come by and see her

“at least once during that day and then he took off. He was busy making plans throughout the”

day with people at Ford's Theatre who didn't know what he was planning on doing. But he was such a famous actor and he could go in and out of the theatre and do whatever he wanted and talk to whoever he wanted to because he was so famous. That night, one of them working with John Wilkes Booth, a man who went by the name Louis Payne, went to Secretary of State William Henry Seward's house. Seward was recovering from a horrific, carriage accident and he had broken his shoulder and

his jaw. So he was bedridden and Louis Payne appeared at the door claiming that he was a

delivery person from the pharmacy with medication for the secretary and the servants there in the

“house and Seward's sons were there and they didn't want Payne to come in but he pushed his way through.”

He stabbed a few people and then he got into Seward's bedroom and started attacking him. But Seward fell off the bed between the bed and the wall and it was difficult for Payne to keep attacking him and the brace he had this large metal brace around his head and neck and shoulder to keep it all in place because he had broken so many bones. That prevented the the blade from the knife that Payne was using from penetrating him enough to kill him. So Payne thinking he had killed Seward

a flood the house and went to hide in a cemetery until things had calmed down. Another man was supposed to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson. It also didn't go as planned.

“That co-conspirator got drunk at the bar and didn't wait around to try to kill the Vice”

President who was staying at a local hotel. When John Wilkes Booth arrived at Ford's theater, a stage hand held his horse for him. Booth goes in the theater as the performance is going on and he goes up to the private box where Lincoln and his wife and other people are seated watching the play and he sneaks in and starts attacking the President shoots him in the head. And then he yells out to the audience and he leaps from the box and jumps down to the stage.

Now he had spurs on his boot and it caught the American flag decoration that was spread across the box and he crashed sort of on the stage and you know everyone isn't shocked they're not sure what's happening. Booth broke his leg but he limps off he goes behind and out into the alley and Booth jumps on his horse and races away and inside they realize that Lincoln has been shot and other people have been hurt. Lincoln was badly wounded. Doctors took him to a boarding house across

the street from the theater to treat him. That night Mary Sirot was at home. Some of the borders noticed she seemed nervous. She just seems odd and she says strange things

and finally she tells everybody they must go back to their rooms that she needs quiet.

So they all go to bed. Now once Lincoln has been shot the police are out looking for any clues and who these people were that caused this and where John Wilkes Booth because people did recognize him when he jumped down on the stage. So the police actually come to her door at about 11 30 that night and ask to search the house because they had heard that Booth had visited the house and that there might be other co-conspirators there but they found nothing.

So they left. But the next day Mary's border, Louis Weikman, would be gone to suspect something strange about her friendship with John Wilkes Booth decided to go to the police. Louis Weikman realized, "Uh oh, this is more serious." And the following morning, Saturday morning Lincoln had just died and he went and reported what he knew. He told police all about the visitors to the Sirot's boarding house including John Wilkes Booth

and Louis Paine. Two days later the police came back to the boarding house and they

didn't know anything. Well then there's a knock on the door and it's like 11 o'clock at night so

“one of the detectives opens the door and there's Louis Paine and he had been hiding out in the”

cemetery since his attack on Seward two nights before and they said to him who are you and what do you hear for him? He tried to lie. He said that he was there to check with Mrs. Sirot because he had been hired to do some yard work for her and so he thought he'd get an early start and of course the detectives are like early start. It's like 11 30 at night what are you doing? So they make him come in the house and they bring Mary Sirot over into the hallway and they ask her does she know

him and she very dramatically raises up her arm and her hand and says I swear to God that I

do not know who this person is and the detectives thought that that was so bizarre her behavior they knew immediately that she knew who the guy was and she was lying. We'll be right back.

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When they took Mary in for questioning, what did she say? She was very defiant and haughty and she was trying to protect her son so she had no concern that she would be in trouble so she obfuscated and she just danced around and that of course infuriated some of the police detectives, but they just felt the answers weren't adequate. The police asked her about John Wilkes Boose visits. She said he didn't discuss politics much. She said she was shocked by his

attack on President Lincoln. While she was being interviewed, the police searched Lewis Payne. They found blood stains on his clothing and that he was wearing boots with the name John Wilkes Booth inside. The police brought a servant from Secretary of State William Suerd's house to the station. He sees Payne and he says that's the man, that's the man who attacked Secretary Suerd. So it just started snowballing from there. Mary Serod was arrested and jailed at a prison at the

old capital building. It had been used for military prisoners during the Civil War. The police had

he was in Canada. John Wilkes Booth had been on the run since he shot Lincoln. He had stopped at

“Mary Serod's tavern and picked up a bottle of whiskey, spy glasses and guns. He reportedly said”

I am pretty certain that we've assassinated the president. Almost two weeks later, on April 26th, he was discovered hiding in a tobacco barn in Virginia. He was quickly surrounded by federal detectives and a cavalry regiment from New York. After two hours, one of the detectives decided to light the barn on fire. Soon after, a soldier shot him. He died a few hours later. Three days later, the government announced that they were going to indict eight people

for conspiracy to assassinate the president. Mary Serod was one of them. They would be tried

together by a military tribunal. And the argument that the government made was that the war wasn't over, even though Lee had surrendered, they were still fighting going on in Texas and other western

“states. And so the government used that as an excuse not to have the trial become a civilian trial.”

That we were still at war, they said. And so it should be a military trial. Now military trials are very different than civilian trials. The protections for the defendants are not the same. They're not quite as rare. And at that time, defendants still had a tough time, whether it was a civilian court or not. But there were protections for civilian defendants. But in a military tribunal, it's the judges and the jury are all the same people. The trial was held at Fort McNair in Washington.

In court, Mary wore black veil over her face. And occasionally she would have to lift the veil so that people could identify her. And so the press really latched on to Mary as this vicious, mean, terrible, evil woman. And there was even a publication that had drawings of all the conspirators.

“And Mary is at the center of it. It was like an oval with the different images of the co-spirators,”

the men, but she was center of this drawing. And it was very surprising because she didn't plan everything. She was not the center of the conspiracy. But the press made it sound like she was. Mary was seated away from the rest of the male defendants. She didn't say anything during the proceedings. At that time, defendants weren't allowed to testify in their own trials. Sometimes Mary had to remove her veil so that a witness could identify her. A reporter said that

her expression for the several hours she was under our eyes was that of a deeply somber gentleness. She is doing her best to make a favorable impression by dress and aspect upon her judges. But one newspaper called her a Tigress, and another said that there was something repulsive about her. People in the court were more heard saying she looks like a devil. One woman said, "I hope they'll hang her."

What is Mary's defense strategy? That she didn't know anything. She didn't know that that booth was going to assassinate the president. And Mary was kind of hotty because she expected that her Victorian womanhood and her deep, Catholic faith would protect her that there was no way people would believe that she was involved in a plot to assassinate the president.

Lewis Weikman, Mary's border and John Sirauts friend, was one of the first witnesses called to testify.

He described Mary as sweet and caring, and someone he was fond of. He said he didn't understand why she was friends with John Wilkes Booth. He testified that he'd seen several of the arrested conspirators at the boarding house and that he'd been with Mary when she went to the tavern in the days before the assassination. Mary's lawyers weren't able to explain what Mary was doing in the week leading up to the assassination.

They also said that Mary had bad eyesight. That was why she hadn't recognized Lewis Pain. The man who had tried to kill the secretary of state when he showed up at the boarding house. But Mary's borders testified that Mary didn't seem to have any problems with recognizing people by the dim gas lamps in the parlor. The prosecution brought several witnesses who

and supplies for Booth. The man who ran the tavern in Maryland for Mary testified that she'd

asked him to get the weapons hidden in the tavern, ready to be picked up. Anna Siraut was called to the stand to testify for her mother's defense, afterwards she fainted. She attended every day of the trial after that. The newspapers reported that she had had a cheering effect on Mary. Later Mary's health started to decline and the court let Anna stay with Mary in her cell during the day.

In their closing arguments, Mary's lawyers called Mary widowed over natural protectors and that her son John was really the one who had been involved. They also argued that the military trial was unconstitutional. Two days later, the commission decided that all eight defendants were guilty. Four were sentenced to prison and the rest were given a death sentence. Mary Throck was one of them. Five of the commissioners from the trial wrote in their decision

that they thought Mary's sentence should be commuted to life in prison because of her sex and age. She was 42. Their recommendation went to President Andrew Johnson who had the final say in approving the sentences. On July 5, Andrew Johnson approved the execution of Mary Siraut. He said that Mary's sex did not make her any the less guilty and that she kept the nest that hatched the egg. The execution was scheduled for two days later.

“Do you think Mary ever thought that you would get a death sentence? I think Mary never thought”

that my million years that she would get a death sentence. I think she thought she might get a

couple years in prison and that's it. Mary's lawyer said, "So sudden was the shock, so unexpected the result we hardly knew how to proceed." They went to the White House to try to speak with President Johnson. He wouldn't see them. They brought Anna Siraut to see one of the President's military advisors to see if he would talk to the President. Later that morning, he told them he had tried, but the President would not change his mind. He said, "I can do nothing."

On July 7, thousands of people came to Washington for the execution. Mary was being hanged with three other men. When the executioner put the news around Mary's neck,

some people in the crowd got upset. It was the first time a woman had been executed by the federal

government. Oddly as soon as the hanging happened within a couple of days, the public sort of

“sourd on the idea. And I think it's sort of like trauma from the civil war to begin with that”

with the just tired of all of this and they wanted to move on as a country and to put everything behind them and everyone was uncomfortable with the hanging of a woman, particularly because they were photographs available of the hanging and people who saw them it was shocking. People began to say that Louis Weikman had lied on the stand that he was actually part of the assassination conspiracy. Two weeks after her execution, one newspaper reported that conviction is strengthening

that Mrs. Mary E. Sirot was innocent of any complicity in the murder of Mr. Lincoln. Everything in her personal character repels the idea that she could have lent her aid to the atrocious deed. President Johnson was later criticized for signing off on Mary's death sentence.

“There was so much drama I think that the newspapers loved printing it all and so they just kept”

feeding into this idea that the government had hanged this innocent woman and the images are just so appalling that people, you know, bought into it. Mary's son, Johnson, Jr., had been in hiding in Canada during his mother's trial. After her execution, he went to Europe. He goes to France and then Italy, he joins the papal guards. He's traveling through Europe, trying to escape. Federal detectives that are they're getting clues from different people that he's in England.

Then he's in Paris, he's in France and Italy and then he goes to Egypt and eventually he does get captured and brought back to the United States in 1867.

dropped. He began touring the country, giving lectures about his mother's innocence.

“And those who supported Mary, I mean they kept campaigning for 40 years until they ended up”

all dying of old age, et cetera, to convince the world that she was innocent and to have her

pardoned posthumously, which she never was. And some of them had the evidence but they just

would not accept that Mary as a woman was involved. Historians have debated about what Mary Sarat did or did not do for over 100 years. Kate Clifford-Larson says she's looked at the documents from the trial and it interviews from witnesses and the conspirators. There's no way that a person can come away thinking she was not informed that she was not a co-conspirator that she, you know, that she couldn't have helped John Wilkes' booth. After Mary's execution, the New York Times wrote

that she had paid the penalty of her crime and the wisest thing is to let her name be as far

“forgotten as the magnitude of that crime with allow. I think, you know, when it comes to the story of”

Lincoln and Booth, it's such a neat story. This handsome, wonderful actor loses his mind over losing to the union and he kills Lincoln and that's it. It's kind of a complicated story when you realize how many Confederate spies there were and how many co-conspirators were there and how many people hated Abraham Lincoln who becomes this martyr figure for all of us and then to have a woman be part

of it. It's such a complicated story but I think everyone should know about Mary Sarat.

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talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal. More on Facebook at this iscriminal and Instagram and TikTok at criminal_podcast, we're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media podcast network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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Moment, I check that's good. Oh, ha! Home of the Gewent, bring about 150 € per year.

Yeah, really, but how do you know what you know?

“Why? Why do you like the start of life? That's just the soil for all fields.”

Yeah, I'm asked, but it's also worth it.

2047 and unobamment German, that's just the one who understands us. Stonyfield? Say, with this soil. Now you can try it out.