Confederate Courier (review)

424CI VIL WAR HISTORY an author who strives, never wholly successfully, to hide her wit and grace behind an academic verbal flow. In sum, Professor Shadgett has produced a well-researched, well-written, and significant book. The rapidly rising University of Georgia Press is also due an accolade for another handsomely executed volume. The book is beautifully printed, proofread nearly to perfection, and covered with a dustjacket which is tastefully "Georgian" in its elegance. University of North CaroUna Joel Williamson Confederate Courier. By Helen Jones Campbell. (New York: St. Martin 's Press, 1964. Pp. xvi, 301. $6.95.) The "Confederate Courier" described here was John Harrison Surratt, Jr., son of "Squire" Surratt and Mary Eugenia Surratt of Prince Georges County, Maryland. The story centers on his trial in the summer of 1867 for participation in the conspiracy to murder Lincoln. Mrs. Campbell is persuaded that this trial, like its more famous predecessor, became an important bardeground in the struggle for power between the Radicals represented by Edwin M. Stanton and the forces of moderation led by Andrew Johnson. Just sixteen years of age at the outbreak of the Civil War, "Little Johnny" Surratt had absorbed the strong southern and secessionist svmpathies of his family and of the neighbors who frequented his father's tavern and cross-roads store. Well educated in a series of parochial schools and academies in Washington and Baltimore, young John preferred the outdoor life with horse and hound. Too young to join the neighborhood boys who were slipping away to enlist in the Confederate army, John soon found adventure and profit in the illegal but lively trade between North and South which flowed up from the crossings of the lower Potomac , through southern Maryland and past his father's door. In time he was a frequent carrier of the irregular mail and toward the end of the war he occasionally carried official dispatches from the Confederate government in Richmond to its agents in Canada. With the death of the "Squire" the family was forced to cut costs. One of the ways it did so was to move into Washington to live in a house where roomers helped to pay the bills. It was there, while between trips as a courier, that Johnny Surratt met John Wilkes Booth and brought him home to meet the family. Wilkes soon persuaded Johnny to join in the enterprise which, in its earlier stages, was apparently no more than a plot to kidnap Lincoln and hustle him off to Richmond. When an attempt to capture Lincoln on the road to the Harewood Hospital proved abortive in mid-March, Johnny Surratt appears to have had some second thoughts. He did not, however, break off relations with Booth, for in BOOKREVIEWS425 early April, when it became apparent that the end of the war was near, Johnny went to New York City in search of the actor. Failing to find Booth, young Surratt proceeded to Montreal where Confederate authorities immediately gave him a new assignment. He was ordered, he later testified, to go directly to Elmira, New York, to survey the prisoner-of-war camps there in preparation for an attempt to rescue the Confederate prisoners. Mrs. Campbell accepts Surratt's contention that he was registered at the Brainard House in Elmira, under the name of John Harrison, on the fateful Good Friday that Booth's bullet found its mark. He subsequendy fled to Canada, to England, and finally to Rome, where he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves. Placed under arrest at the request of American authorities, he escaped but was quickly recaptured. He was returned to the United States in February, 1867, and went on trial in June. After a trial of nearly two months the jury proved unable to render a verdict and Johnny was freed on bail of $30,000. The charges against him were never dropped, but he was not again brought to trial He soon moved to Baltimore and spent the remainder of his life working for the Old Bay Line Steamship Company. In reconstructing this compUcated story, Mrs. Campbell has rehed very heavily on the testimony offered at Johnny's trial, as weD as that produced at his...