Hanged! by Sarah Miller

Author:Sarah Miller [Miller, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2022-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Two days later, Secretary of War Stanton granted Mary the privilege of a visit with her daughter.

The task of escorting Anna Surratt in and chaperoning the meeting fell to none other than Captain Rath. Rath’s instructions were to remain in the room and monitor their conversation, but after witnessing how Anna Surratt reacted to the reunion, Rath had not the heart to do it. “When Annie saw her mother, she threw herself on her neck, and such a torrent of weeping I have never seen,” he would remember. For a full ten minutes, Anna sobbed in her mother’s arms. Rath could not even make himself watch. “I will let you have your visit alone,” he told Mary and Anna. “Do as you like.”

Two hours later, Rath forced himself to inform Anna that her time was up. “She didn’t say a word, but bade her mother good-by, weeping all the time.” Mary’s composure in the face of this tide of emotion left Rath stupefied. In his presence she showed not one hint of distress. Rather than offer any tender words, she told Anna to “keep up.”

“That woman is like a rock,” Rath marveled to General Hartranft later that day. “When she saw her daughter, she acted as though she hadn’t any heart.”

“You think so?” Hartranft replied. “Then you have to have been there when I went to take her to her cell. She collapsed, cried terribly, and we had to carry her bodily from the room.”

Moments like these imbued Rath with a certain respect and sympathy for his sole female prisoner. “Mrs. Surratt was a woman of unusual nerve,” he said. “She bore her imprisonment without complaint and was stoical.” Every time Anna visited, the captain found himself wishing that Anna would take her mother’s fate into her own hands. Just a few drops of “something she could administer to her mother so that the dreadful hangman’s noose would not have to be placed about her neck.”

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