THE CORPSE OF AN INNOCENT WOMAN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 468, 31 March 1882, Page 5

THE CORPSE OF AN INNOCENT WOMAN.

As a newspaper correspondent I had occasion to visit the old capitol prison at Washington, in February, 1869, to witness the exhumation and rendition to their respective friends of the remains of the conspiritors in the Lincoln assassination. President Johnson was about to go out of office. J»nd he issued an order permitting Christian burial to the bodies of five persons implicated in the death of Lincoln — Booth, Mrs. Surratt, Atzerodt, Payne, and Harold. They had been buried in ammunition boxes of common pine wood, six feet lonsr, two feet wide, and two feet deep. When the lid was lifted from Boorh's coffin the face was perfect, with the exception of a small hole about the size of a dime in each cheek. His hair was in as good conditionas if he had just come out of a barber-shop. In taking out the body to place it in a handsome rosewood coffin supplied by his mother, Mrs. Booth, of Baltimore, the head dropped off from the body. Nob bo with Mrs. Surratt. Her face and form were perfect, and she looked like one in a happy dreamless sleep. Her head adhered to the body in the process of transfer. Payne's body was greatly wasted, but Atzerodt's was the worst of all ; for when the armyblanket that covered the remains was lifted up it revealed a shapeless mass of blackened bones and ashes, with a bald and separate skull in the corner. Talking of the Lincoln assassination, I remember asking Andrew Johnson one day when we were travelling through East Tennesse, at the time when he was running for Congressman-at-large against Horace Maynard and Frank Cheatham, why it was he did not pardon Mrs. Surratt. He was in a communicative mood, and be said : " The true history of the case has never been told. It was represented m the papers that I refused to see Annie Surratt (the daughter of Mrs. Surratt) when Bhe came to the Whit* House, the morning of the ext&ution, asking for the pardon of her mother. The fact is that I never knew it was Miss Surratt, because a man named Muzzy, who had general charge of the White Hous2, came to me and said that there was a crazy woman down stairs and wanted to get in to see me, and ahe wouldn't give her name, but was crying and tearing her hair, and exhibiting all the evidences of insanity." — Exchange.