Fates and Traitors by Jennifer Chiaverini

Author:Jennifer Chiaverini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-25T13:38:13+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

MARY

1864–1865

Away, and mock the time with fairest show.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

—William Shakespeare,

Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7

Only the most desperate pecuniary circumstances would have compelled Mary to rent out the Surratt Tavern and Inn in Prince George’s County in southern Maryland and move to the Yankee capital, but by the autumn of 1864, she resigned herself to the harsh, bitter truth that she had no other choice.

It seemed that all her life misfortune and cruelty had pursued her from one unhappy home to another. When she was still quite young, she had become unwelcome in her childhood home after abandoning her mother’s Episcopalian faith to convert to Roman Catholicism. As soon as she had come of age, her mother’s smoldering resentment had compelled her to flee into marriage. Though John Surratt had been ten years her elder and had fathered an illegitimate son with another woman, the prospect of future happiness he had dangled before her had been preferable to remaining another night beneath her mother’s roof, so she had seized it, and gratefully.

In the four years that had followed, Mary had borne John three children, but he had despised her Catholic faith so intensely that it had taken many heated arguments and many tears on her part before he had consented to have Isaac, John Junior, and Anna baptized. By then the Church had become her only consolation for a marriage that had turned into a bitter misery. Mary had learned too late that her husband was prone to violent, drunken tirades, but when she had appealed for help, broken and afraid, everyone had looked the other way, ignoring her bruised and swollen face as if they believed it had been more important to spare her from embarrassment than from injury.

Resigned to her fate, strengthened by prayer, Mary had devoted herself to protecting her two young sons and daughter from their father’s violence, sheltering them within the safest, most comfortable home it had been within her power to create. She had been married eleven years when even that was taken from her. In 1851, a disgruntled slave had set fire to their house, and although the family had escaped with their lives, their home had been utterly destroyed. Later, as she, her husband, and the children had raked through the ashes searching for any possessions they could salvage, Mary’s heart had burned with resentment as she imagined Northern abolitionists celebrating the news of her family’s ruin. From the safety of their stone mansions in far-off Boston and New York, those self-righteous Yankees incited colored folk to violence with their pamphlets and their preaching, utterly indifferent to the suffering that innocent Southern women and children would endure as a result.

Mary firmly believed that Northerners ought not to condemn what they did not understand. Slavery had existed since antiquity, and it could not offend God or He would not have established so many rules governing it in the Holy Bible. Mary’s family and John’s had been slave owners going back generations, just like most of their neighbors.

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