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

With all that has already been said and written, what more is there to tell about Lincoln's assassination that is new history of the case? There remains the curious story of the only successful conspirator, John Harrison Surratt, Jr., the son of Mary Surratt - the woman who died on the gallows for her part in the crime. The Last Lincoln Conspirator is the true story of how John Surratt, part of an earler conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln, although possibly not the conspiracy to assassinate him, was the only conspirator who got away with everything. How he did so is a tale of adventure and of mystery. Surratt began his flight the weekend Lincoln died not from Washington, but from Elmira, New York, where he was on a Confederate spy mission scouting out the huge Union prisoner of war camp in the city. Despite an uncontrollable tendency to babble to strangers who he really was and what he had done - exposing one after another each of the half-dozen aliases he'd assumed - Surratt managed to stay at large for the next twenty months during a flight that took him across three continents, over the Atlantic and half the Mediterranean. He was finally captured six thousand miles from Washington. Surratt's adventure was to manage to flee nearly a quarter of the way around the world with no plan and little money - hounded by avenging pursuers while recklessly scattering clues of his whereabouts - to end up alone and penniless in the ancient port of Alexandria, Egypt, sporting a tattered uniform as conspicuous as a clown's suit. The mystery is why the United States, which had tracked down his co-conspirators with such furious determination, five to their graves and another four into an island prison, and had once posted an enormous reward for his capture, seemed so diffident in bagging him. As it turned out, Surratt's flight turned out be successful anyway. He lived comfortably until April 1916, when he died in Baltimore peacefully at the age of 72, leaving a widow and four adult children, after having outlived not only all of John Wilkes Booth's other familiars, but also all the principal witnesses who had testified against him during two years in court.