1865 Mary Surratt - The first woman in the US to be executed. She was hanged for her alleged role as a conspirator in Abraham Lincoln's assassination, although it was later revealed she knew nothing about it. Surratt owned a boarding-house in Washington DC, located a few blocks from Ford's Theatre, where Lincoln was murdered. Her boarding-house was the location where a group of Confederate supporters, including John Wilkes Booth, conspired to assassinate the president. On the day of the assassination, Booth asked Surratt to deliver a package to her old tavern in Maryland. The package was later discovered to contain firearms. On her way home, Surratt ran into John Lloyd, the former Washington chief of police who currently leased the tavern. When authorities first questioned Lloyd about their encounter, he did not mention anything significant and denied that Booth and David Herold had visited his tavern. Yet when questioned later, he claimed that Surratt had told him to have whisky and weapons ready for Booth and Herold, who would be stopping by that night. Louis Weichman, one of the alleged conspirators who delivered the package with Surratt, was released after he testified against her. He later claimed that the government had forced him to testify, and that it plagued his conscience for the rest of his life. Furthermore, Lewis Powell, a conspirator who was hanged with Surratt, proclaimed her innocence to his executioner minutes before his death. Many expected President Andrew Johnson to pardon Surratt because the US government had never hanged a woman. The execution was delayed until the afternoon, and soldiers were stationed on every block between the White House and Fort McNair, the execution site, to relay the expected pardon. But the order never came


Do you think she should have been pardoned?