The Conspirator (review)

In 2008, the American Film Company asked a number of historians to serve as consultants on a script the company was considering for production, which dealt with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent trial of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators. I was one of those historians, having come to the company’s attention as a result of my book on the aftermath of the assassination and my ongoing research on the life and work of Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt.¹ I read the script carefully and offered my comments.

Among other things, I pointed out a number of errors in detail: misspellings of individual names, Holt being identified as “chief adjutant general” of the army instead of judge advocate general, the translation of “sic semper tyrannis” as “revenge for the South,” and so forth. I also pointed out some larger problems: the suggestion in the script that Mary Surratt was tried alone rather than as part of a group of eight defendants, at least some of whose complicity with Booth was beyond question; the depiction of John Surratt as wracked with guilt over his mother’s conviction and execution, when in fact he demonstrated no such sentiment over the course of the fifty years he lived after her death; the indication at the end of the script that Lincoln’s successor in the presidency, Andrew Johnson, fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton because Stanton had demanded that Mary Surratt be executed even though the military judges had recommended life in prison for her (I won’t even begin here to sort through the many layers of this particular twist). Finally, I presented strong criticisms of the script’s portrayals of several characters, most importantly Stanton and Holt—who appeared to be motivated purely by vengeance and stunningly disdainful of the law—and Mary Surratt—who seemed simultaneously aggressive and “masculine,” strangely seductive, and emotionally out of control. I believed each of these portrayals needed a serious overhaul to bring it more in line with the historical record and to modify what seemed to me to be the script’s troubling, overarching, Lost Cause–ish message: that the pathological vindictiveness of Stanton and Holt (representing the victorious federal government), and their illegal and immoral maneuverings during the trial deprived the poor, innocent Mary Surratt (representing the vanquished and presumably now helpless Confederacy) of both justice and her life.

Unfortunately, having now seen the film more than once, it is clear to me that many of the concerns I (and others) expressed about the script did not impress the filmmakers as worthy of notice. Certainly a number of the smaller errors have been corrected, and some oddities—for lack of a better term—have been eliminated (just one example here: in the film, Frederick Aiken no longer presses Mary Surratt, as he did in the script, to wear one of his girlfriend’s low-cut floral dresses in court). But far too many troubling aspects remain, even if one makes concessions to the need for “creative license” in order to move the story along. (Here I’m thinking of things like the film’s intense focus on Aiken, about whom in fact so little is known and so much had to be fabricated, not to mention the complete absence of his colleague at the actual trial, John W. Clampitt). But why, one wonders, does it still appear as if Mary Surratt was tried separately, although the seven other defendants are also present in the courtroom, periodically rattling their chains and making obviously villainous expressions and gestures? Why show Aiken hissing to Anna Surratt that she must choose, as she reluctantly gives her testimony, between implicating her brother and implicating her mother, when at the actual trial her testimony implicated neither? Why use the massive and forbidding Fort Pulaski—its surrounding moat suggesting a vast gulf between the mechanics and processes of the military justice system and those of civil society—rather...