Six-oh-four H Street Northwest. If you're looking at a Chinese restaurant right now — that's the place.
This three-story townhouse was the headquarters of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. John Wilkes Booth walked through that door dozens of times. He sat in the front parlor. He met with his co-conspirators here — planning, arguing, and occasionally eating dinner cooked by the landlady.
The landlady was Mary Surratt. A forty-two-year-old widow from Maryland who ran the boardinghouse after her husband died. Her son, John Junior, was a Confederate courier — and one of Booth's inner circle. The question of how much Mary herself knew has been argued for a hundred and sixty years, and we are not going to settle it on this sidewalk.
What we CAN talk about is the plan.
Booth didn't start with assassination. His original scheme was to kidnap Lincoln. Grab him during a theatre outing, spirit him out of Washington, deliver him to the Confederacy in Richmond. He recruited a team. Lewis Po
well — a twenty-one-year-old former Confederate soldier, six feet two, built like a wall. David Herold — a pharmacy clerk who knew the backroads of Maryland. George Atzerodt — a German-born carriage painter and ferryman who owned a boat.
The first kidnapping attempt, in March eighteen sixty-five, fell apart when Lincoln changed his plans at the last minute. Then Lee surrendered. The Confederacy w
