Mary Surratt: 'An Innocent Woman'

Robin Wright and James McAvoy in The Conspirator (2011)

Robert Redford's latest film, The Conspirator — released just days after the Sesquicentennial of the attack on Fort Sumter, the Civil War's start — stirred many childhood memories.

My great-grandmother, Lillian Webster Keane (pictured left), who was a longtime Washingtonian, frequently spoke about the injustice the film portrays.

Fittingly, The Conspirator opened April 15 — the same day, 146 years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln was celebrating the end of the Civil War.

The bloody conflict that ripped our nation apart for four years, North against South, was now over — ending officially on April 9, 1865, when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

After enjoying a pleasant carriage ride with first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, soaking in springtime Washington, this president, a lover of literature, was soaking in Our American Cousin at his box in the new Ford's Theatre.

Of course, drama of an epic nature would soon envelop the audience, when Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and familiar face at the theater, slipped into Lincoln's box and fatally shot him, yelling, "Sic semper tyrannus" (thus always to tyrants), as he plunged onto the stage and injured his leg, limping to his well-planned escape.

In the ensuing investigation into the tragedy, Mary Surratt, a Maryland Catholic, was accused and convicted of conspiring to kill the president. She was executed by hanging on July 7, 1865. She is played by Robin Wright in Redford's film.

Lillian Webster knew Father Jacob Walter, who was close to Surratt. (In fact, he heard Surratt's last confession before she was executed.) Lillian said Father Walter always contended, "They hung an innocent woman."

Ironically, Lincoln foreshadowed this injustice.

As he wrote to close friend Joshua Speed 10 years earlier, "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'All men are created equal.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'All men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

My great-grandmother's father, Bradshaw Hall Webster, had worked on Lincoln's presidential campaign fresh out of college. In the course of campaigning, this son of the North met my great-great-grandmother, Martha Mungen Starrett, whose family owned a plantation in Jacksonville, Fla.

When Bradshaw's lumber mill in Orono, Maine, burned down, he took up the cause of temperance, as a "writer and orator," traveling up and down the Eastern seaboard. After Martha died in 1881, the 33rd-degree Mason remarried — of all things, a Catholic, whom he met through the convent school his daughters attended.

Lillian, born in 1878, was only 3 at the time of her father's remarriage, and she soon became a Catholic. She noted in her diary how the faith "lightened the burdens of life." In 1888, after President Benjamin Harrison's election, Bradshaw moved his family to Washington.

So it is that my "blue blood" great-grandmother, related to Daniel Webster and President William Henry Harrison, grew up in a social and cultural milieu in which the Civil War conflict still burned brightly so many years later.

She mingled with Washington's Catholic community, which included friends of the wrongfully accused and executed Southern sympathizer Mary Surratt, and dated the son of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set Booth's broken leg.

After Lincoln's assassination, the desire for retribution was so intense, a kangaroo military tribunal, portrayed in The Conspirator, sent Surratt to her death — a fate she faced with faith, clinging to her constantly held rosary beads and praying until the end.

As my great-grandmother always wisely counseled, "Two wrongs don't make a right."

Her daughter, my grandmother Helena (shown left), like Surratt, died much too young — the victim not of injustice, but of a heart weakened by rheumatic fever that just stopped one day, on the way home from grandma's, as she held my mother, then 6 months old, in her arms.

Like Dr. Mudd, whose ancestors have tried in vain posthumously to overturn his conviction — though President Andrew Johnson pardoned him in 1869 largely because of his work saving yellow-fever victims at his military prison, as portrayed in The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) — Mary Surratt's name is still mud — something The Conspirator will hopefully help correct.

Thus would she finally rest in peace right there in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Northeast Washington, not far from where my grandmother Helena is buried.

"The Conspirator" DVD is being released on August 16, 2011.

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This article was originally published under the title, "Mary Surratt, 'An Innocent Woman'" in the National Catholic Register, July 3-16, 2011 Issue 

There Be Saints and Sinners

By Mary Claire Kendall

There Be Dragons, like a fine delicacy, can only be fully appreciated, it seems, through an acquired taste.

This newly released film, written and directed by Roland Joffe, of Oscar-nominated The Killing Fields and The Mission fame, tells the story of St. Josemaria Escriva, who founded “The Work of God” (“Opus Dei” in Latin), a world-wide phenomenon infused with the spirit of early Christians, where God is found in ordinary work.

That Escriva’s approach is utterly grounded in what it means to be human is revealed in the opening Oscar Wilde quote, “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future”—a recurring theme, which provides the rationale for the quest for God, given our weak human nature, and the corresponding role God gives each of us.In Escriva’s case, the role was rather large; thus the epic nature of the film.

When There Be Dragons opens, it’s 1975. Escriva has just keeled over from a heart attack whereupon his cause of canonization surges—the requisite miracle for “beatification” provided when a nun with a tumor prays to God through Escriva’s intercession, and is cured. A journalist, who’s writing about him, realizing his father is from the same town, decides to try and reconnect with his estranged elder to see what, if anything, he knows about Escriva: A mother lode, it so happens.

Some critics have less appreciation for Joffe’s substantial achievement—if not a masterpiece, then certainly masterful—because their base of understanding is limited.

Manolo, St. Josemaria's friend, played by Wes Bentley

But, for those, for instance, whose lives were directly and intimately affected by the Spanish Civil War—Spain devastated; beloved relatives, one of 500,000 souls, lost forever in the fighting—the appreciation is immense. As one Spaniard commented on The Hollywood Reporter review, rating the film full of missing pieces, it had one piece right, namely: “… from most Spanish people’s point of view (it) is the best approach Hollywood has done to our civil war.”

While the film is not without its flaws, as a screenwriter, I marveled at the craft Joffe brought to the story: the element of surprise, conflict, and more conflict—the very essence of drama—and directorial skill and cinematic vision on par with David Lean.

Of course, flashbacks are generally a “no, no.” That’s because the action derives from the storyline—in this case an artifice—from which you are flashing back, lessening the forward-momentum.

And, while Charlie Cox, who played Escriva, gave an overall masterful performance, sometimes he seemed to translate Escriva’s cheerfulness without enough reference to the weight of his human frailty, making that smile he would flash seem more a preternatural gift than a triumph over weakness—for love.

As the current prelate of Opus Dei, Bishop Javier Echeverria, commented on the portrayal of Escriva, while it was impressive, he was “mucho mas!”

All of which means, Escriva’s story will just have to be told free of the artifice, dramatic though it may be.

Joffe certainly whets the appetite for that story!

For more information on There Be Dragons, including cinema locations and times, see http://dragonsresources.com/.

Published in The Wanderer on Sunday, May 26, 2011.

Here’s a PDF version of the published article
http://www.stjosemaria.org/dragons/pdf/ThereBeSaintsandSinners.pdf.