Customer Reviews

The Last Lincoln Conspirator: John Surratt's Flight from the Gallows

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The fateful seconds of a football game are many times determined by the momentum of numerous previous plays. Of course, during ESPN Sportscenter, you only see the scoring plays without the background material. Andrew Jampoler ensures that you get most of the requisite background material to understand the world situation that enabled the escape of John Surratt, "The Last Lincoln Conpirator."

The book opens with eight of the nine Lincoln Conspirators in Federal custody awaiting their court date. Amidst the abundant background material, we learn of the trial and execution of four of the criminals, and life sentences in the Dry Tortugas for the remaining four. Jampoler describes the final hours of the condemned, and finishes the chapter with an analysis of the death penalty in 19th century America.

Surratt was in Elmira, New York on the date of the assassination on a spy mission for the confederacy. As news of the assassination broke across the United States, Surratt knew he was a wanted man. He quickly made the decision to flee the United States and try his luck elsewhere. Along with descriptions of the communities across Canada, England, Italy and the Vatican that were sympathetic to the Confederate cause, Jampoler traces the movements of Surratt through these countries. In many instances, there was no primary source material for Jampoler to draw from, so he uses alternate sources to describe what the times and environment would have been like for Surratt.

With the chapter of the trial, Jampoler finally hits his stride with an excellent summary of the 19th Century justice system in America, with John Surratt as the case study. A disbarment of one of the key lawyers; a mistrial; and a surprise verdict - this case had more twists than a good mystery novel.

Jampoler finishes the book with a post-punishment biography of the remaining 30+ years of Surratt's life in Baltimore, where he married and became a successful businessman.

At the end of 275 pages, I know Surratt was accused of participating in the Lincoln and Seward kidnapping and assassination conspiracies, but John Surratt's exact contributions to the cabal are still unclear. This is not a criticism of Jampoler, but of the lack of substance in the Federal case against John Surratt, Jr. Along with the shipboard boasting to fellow shipmates that served as his "confession", the case was marred by a lack of physical evidence, manufactured witnesses, and suppressed exculpatory evidence. Jampoler does do an excellent job describing the trial against Surratt.

There are a few things that keeps Jampoler's book from being a great book. Jampoler's meandering writing style makes it sometimes challenging to follow the storyline. The book lacks any description of the actual plotting leading up to multiple Lincoln and Seward assassination and kidnapping plots the criminals stood accused of. In spite of the book's description stating much has been written on the subject, it would have been beneficial for readers like me who are new to the subject. I also thought think the failure to discuss the initial investigation that led the Federal agents to the Surratt boarding house to be a serious omission. The book does an outstanding job of documenting the chase through Europe, but there was very little about how John Surratt initially became the most wanted man in America.

If you are looking for a story on crime and punishment, this book will leave you wanting for more. The book does an adequate job of documenting the flight and trial of John Surratt, Jr. It's real strength is in its excellent description of the Southern sympathies in both the social and political history of 19th Century America and Europe.

As a long time student of the Lincoln Assassination, I was very glad to see this study of John Surratt's escape and trial. There is a lot of good information here, but on the whole, the book is a disappointment. Jampoler writes with something of a haughty style. He never uses one word if three or four can be found and at times it seemed like he was just fleshing out the manuscript to make it long enough to publish. An annoying habit is referring to a person by who they are related to, rather than by their name. At one point, John Surratt is termed "Anna's youngest brother." Mary Surratt is once called "Issac and John Surratt's mother." Also, in the note on page 37, Jampoler takes a swipe at actor Charlton Heston for no apparent reason. He goes into great detail explaining how to hang a person, and even refers to the lynching scene in the 1943 movie "The Ox-Bow Incident." Jampoler provides long histories of the ships that Surratt sailed on, and also gives detailed biographies of the captains of those ships. This breaks up the narration of Surratt's escape and indicates Jampoler's tendency to flit from subject to subject. On page 26, the first two full paragraphs discuss Booth's charisma, the third paragraph mentions his escape plans, which include going to Mexico. The following paragraphs are a long description of the political situation in Mexico and a discussion of Emperor Maximilian. Later, Jampoler feels the need to provide a very long sequence giving the details of Jefferson Davis' flight from Richmond and his capture by Union troops. The narration of Surratt's trial is very detailed and was obviously expertly researched by Jampoler. However, a criticism is that he does not mention Honora Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick was a boarder at the Surratt house and was an important government witness at the murder trial in 1865 and John Surratt's trial two years later. In March 1865, she had witnessed a meeting at Ford's Theatre between Booth, Surratt, and Powell/Paine. However, Fitzpatrick does not even rate one mention by Jampoler. The best part of the book is the last, which talks about Surratt's later life. It is very well researched and gives details which have long been overlooked by other historians. All in all, Jampoler obviously did a huge amount of research, but he would have done better to stay on his subject and not dawdle on side issues and personalities. This book should only be purchased by serious students of the Lincoln Assassination. Readers with only a casual interest will be confused as there is very little background on the primary Lincoln conspirators and virtually no discussion of the plotting or the actual assassination. I would recommend the book only to people who want to add to their library of books on this subject.

A most interesting book on the escape, then criminal justice activity involving John Surratt, a son of the first woman executed by the federal government and himself charged with being in on the conspiracy to murder President Lincoln.

Andrew Jampoler writes with wry humor and from a deep fountain of knowledge as he takes the reader along on a brisk tale with many side journeys into interesting bits of historical and cultural information. You learn, among many things, about the Zouves, ship traffic over the Atlantic, the criminal justice system of late 1860s America, and the fate of many of the minor players (witnesses, prosecutors, defenders, etc.) involved in the attempt to wrap up of a crime that shook our nation. This is a volume where one profits by reading the footnotes.

This book does not claim to be a full history of the conspiracy, let alone of John Wilkes Booth. It does help for a reader to have some prior understanding of the events leading to Ford's Theatre. But if you want to know, as I did, how John Surratt ran, was caught, then beat the charge--read this book.

Oh dear. This is one of the most disappointing books I've ever read. It falls into a rare category: books I almost stop reading because they are so bad. Still, I plugged through to the very end, in no small part because it was a gift and the person who gave it to me was so excited about giving it to me. Was it worth it? Absolutely not.

The problem is this book isn't about John Surratt and his odyssey at all. At best, Surratt's flight from Federal agents, subsequent recapture, and trial serve as a (very weak) linking narrative for subjects the author is much more interested in. In no particular order Jampoler covers 19th century steamship trade, anti-Catholic prejudices, Civil War prison camps, Liverpool and the British empire, the War of Italian Unification, Jefferson Davis's bio, Andrew Johnson's impeachment, Mark Twain, the Ottoman Empire, etc, etc.

It quickly becomes apparent that this is a historian suffering from a severe case of ADD. Surratt disappears for whole chapters at a time. Really, his mother Mary Surratt is given better coverage. Jampoler makes no attempt to flesh out Surratt as a living person that the reader might care about; he's just a cipher in his own story. All in all if one took all the pages that solely covered John Surratt, you'd end up with maybe 10-15% of the total book. There's barely enough material on the purported subject to fill a long magazine article, not a whole text.

This book is not worth your time.

President Lincoln was shot 14 April 1865. Secretary of State William Seward was seriously wounded during a separate attempt on his life that night. There was chaos in Washington, but Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, commanded a massive manhunt for the conspirators. It was quickly successful. The president's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, dodged the manhunt for twelve days before being killed near Bowling Green, Virginia. Eight of his fellow conspirators were rounded up, and subjected to a swift trial under a military tribunal because Washington was under military law. They were charged in May, found guilty at the end of June, and sentenced on 5 July. Four were sent to prison, and on 7 July the other four were hanged, including Mary Surratt. After that, there was just one suspect still at large, John Surratt, son of Mary. In _The Last Lincoln Conspirator: John Surratt's Flight from the Gallows_ (Naval Institute Press), Andrew C. A. Jampoler expertly places the pursuit and prosecution of Surratt into the context of the political and social movements of the times. The documentation is impressive, but this is an intriguing story, often exciting. With all the post-assassination revenge focused upon him, Surratt was able to elude capture for over a year, and by the time of his trials, the nation was not as bent on hanging as it had been for the other conspirators.

Surratt had been a Confederate agent, and had done such work as carrying dispatches from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to Southern agents in Canada. Surratt was in Elmira, New York, and was ready to return to Montreal when he learned about the assassination and that he was a wanted man. He did hide out briefly in Canada, aided by Roman Catholic clerics; he would get help from his church throughout his flight. He eluded capture, got to Quebec, and took a steamer to Liverpool, and on to Rome where he served with the pontifical guards. A cardinal who was the secretary of state to Pius IX negotiated with the American consul to have Surratt surrender to the Americans, but he escaped to Alexandria, Egypt. He had no letters of introduction there, no Catholic sympathizers, and he was arrested after his arrival quarantine detention. He was confined below decks and transported back to Washington in February 1867, and his trial began four months later. The great problem the government had with its prosecution is that it was overreaching in attempting to show that Surratt was at the center of the action on the night Lincoln was shot. Eyewitnesses swore that they had seen Surratt with Booth, for instance, in front of Ford's Theater, or that Surratt was the commander in charge of the plot. The testimony just shows how weak an eyewitness account is. Surratt's trial was in a civilian court, not the military one that had speedily taken care of his mother and the other conspirators. It wound up as a mistrial with the jurors unable to agree, and there was not enough energy within a conflicted administration to start up again. In 1869, Surratt was free.

He attempted to join the lecture tours that were a chief entertainment of the age, but he wasn't very good on stage. He tried teaching school. Eventually he went to work for the Baltimore Steam Packet Company, clerking there for nearly fifty years, retiring in 1915, a year before his death at age 72. He had outlived all the conspirators, all the lawyers, all the church officials who had helped hide him. Jampoler's well-referenced text is jammed with discursive asides. Thus readers will learn about the underwater telegraph, prisoner exchanges in the Civil War, the mechanics of a gallows, the impeachment of President Johnson, the attempts to try Jefferson Davis, and much more, each nicely tied to the main story that never gets too far distant. The result is a gripping history of a minor figure in a major drama, the one who got away.

I hate this book. It's not at all what I expected. It's not well written, just contains a bunch of facts and is difficult to follow or enjoy. Would not recommend it to anyone. BORING!

When Jampoler's book was telling the story it set out to tell (and thus telling the story I purchased the book to read) it does a fine job of it. Unfortunately, it does not always tell that story. Certainly the additional details (pertaining to, for instance, Johnson's impeachment and some sidebars on Reconstruction and the escape, capture, and pardoning of Davis) are interesting and lend a sort of tangential context to the story of Surratt, but I felt a bit like these diversions were only included after the fact to flesh the book out to the 274 pages it is. I am sure I would be less negative towards these diversions if there had been an attempt to draw more significant parallels with the Surratt story. It gave the impression of two related, but not linked, newspaper articles side by side. On a positive note, the footnotes were nice additions if one desired more information on a person highlighted in the main text. I was never disappointed to have read one.

In addition, there were several instances where the the text felt too "out of place" in approach. For instance, on page 140 (of the hardcover edition) Jampoler starts a sentence, "Not until television's Seinfeld...". I understand the point he wants to make, but using Seinfeld as a reference point in a work of history seemed quite odd to me.

As a source of information on Surratt and his flight from justice, capture, trials, and later life the book does a good job. It is probably worth buying for that alone (though I do not think I would pay full price for it again knowing what I know now), but be aware that you are definitely getting less of the story you think you are getting.

This is a very well written biography of the subject. Most readers who want to know more about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln already have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the events and individuals involved. They don't require another blow by blow account; they want information regarding the person or persons about whom they're particularly curious. Mr. Jampoler provides just that sort of information about John Surratt without adding redundant filler about the Civil War, the assassination, or John Wilkes Booth to increase the book size.

The Last Lincoln Conspirator provides the reader with a great deal of information on John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirator John Surratt, one of the few to escape the wide spread dragnet intended to capture anyone involved in Lincoln's death. The author not only provides information about the trial, but also the testimony of various individuals regarding Surratt's flight and subsequent life on the run. It adds details regarding the political and social character of the towns and countries to which he fled and where he sought asylum. Liverpool and London, England in general, thus become part of the story, recreating for the reader the setting which served as a backdrop for the drama. France, Italy, the Papal States, and Egypt, their geographies, national character and political situations, all provide an international portrait of the period and make it obvious that the Civil War did not occur in a vacuum. All of this provides the reader with an understanding of how and why Surratt was able to escape and remain at liberty as long as he did.

In studying the case of John Surratt, the author also makes evident the various issues that troubled many with respect to the legality of the military trial of the other eight people believed to have been implicated in the assassination. The anxiety of the established governmental leaders regarding the possible exposure of that trial to public scrutiny should Surratt be acquitted is very evident in their almost absurd efforts to convict him with or without evidence--shades of OJ Simpson, and with a similar outcome. Even at the time, the imprisonment and trial of civilians by a military court rather than that of functioning civil courts, was an issue of no small importance since it abrogated the Constitution and Bill of Rights--it still is an urgent issue as the events at Guantanamo Bay reveal. By the time Surratt himself had appeared back on the scene, the venue of such trials had been moved once more to the civil courts, where specific rules of common law and statutes of limitation were in effect. Already such a case had been brought to court in Ohio producing an acquittal. If Surratt were able to escape by this means, it was sure to cast doubt on the legality of the previous trial which put his mother Mary Surratt on the gallows.

It wasn't even that the trial of the 8 hadn't caused concern among the powerful in government at that time; in fact the legality of the trial was brought up at the time. The effort to remove the surviving 4 of the convicted to a point well beyond the reach of the civil courts, by placing them in the detention of a Federal prison off the coast of the United States and therefore out of the jurisdiction of any state, is an obvious sign that the governmental forces at work were abundantly aware of the tenuous character of the trial. Samuel Mudd and his associates on the Dry Tortugas endured staggering deprivation and abuse, and their only hope of reprieve was a Presidential pardon. It was only through the agencies of his family and his legal counsel, which kept his case continuously in the face of President Johnson, and the fact that the latter was intent on bringing the union back together "the way it was," that Mudd and the others were finally allowed to return home.

More than anything, the trial of John Surratt revealed the degree to which the nation had moved from its Civil War preoccupation to its reconstruction mode. The rush to vengeance over Lincoln's assassination had slowed virtually to a stop--Jefferson Davis, though he served time without a trial, ultimately went free--so the federal authorities might have been less determined to convict at any cost had they not already committed a violation of Civil Rights in the previous trial involving Surratt's mother. The entire thing--including the expense of seeking, capturing, and returning Surratt to the US--might have been dropped entirely with the President's orders of general amnesty had the current government not needed to save face. Ultimately they failed anyway.

The most interesting point that arises from Surratt's case is that the country, after exhausting itself and killing hundreds of thousands of people, ultimately went back to slugging it out on the floors of Congress as it had been before Fort Sumpter. The impeachment proceedings against President Johnson and his stubborn resistance against the "extremists" of his government merely reflected the battle lines that had been drawn up before the war. It suggests that legal and social issues can't be militarily forced; they have to be resolved. It's never easy, and it's never painless.

I especially enjoyed the final chapter regarding the later lives of the protagonists. It ties up loose ends and makes the entire episode more than just a stage drama where the players have only an implied past and no future.

in the first 150 pages, aside from the odd mention of surratt, there is nothing that would make you feel like you were reading about the subject.

we read about the streets of washington dc, the ship building industry in liverpool, the railroad connections of the 1860's, the telegraph, the mail service, the communications between embassies and washington,the clothing styles of the zouaves and various other military outfits, the terrain and history of the italian unification process, the overland and ship routes from various ports in europe to malta and alexandria and on and on and on and on. im about 160 pages in and we've just hit the trial of surratt. now we are learning about military justice v common law justice. i dont know why this book was written. it provides nothing new.the best book on surratt to date, is louis weichmann's memoir. give this one a BIG MISS!!!!!!!!!!!!!