Surratt found himself a free man, but most people knew he had only escaped death on a technicality.
Surratt's Life after Lincoln's Death
Surratt tried to turn his experiences into a lecturing career. During his speeches, he admitted a part in attempting to kidnap Lincoln but denied involvement in the assassination. Surratt spoke of his involvement with Booth during a December 6, 1870 speech in Rockville and at the Cooper Union in New York City on December 9. However, when he tried to speak at the Odd Fellows Hall in Washington, it was met with such outrage that the speech was cancelled.
When his speaking tour was cancelled, Surratt took up teaching. Following a stint as a teacher at a school in Rockville, Md., he used his Catholic connections to secure a position in Emmitsburg, Md.
Surratt as an Emmitsburg Teacher
Father Alfred Isaacson wrote that Surratt arrived in Emmitsburg between 1870 and 1872 and was teacher at St. Joseph’s School. Daughters of Charity archivist Sister Betty Ann McNeil said in a Nov. 2007 interview with the author that is unlikely because all of the instructors at the school would have been Daughters of Charity.
It is more likely Surratt taught at St. Vincent’s Hall, a boy’s school that was next to St. Joseph’s Church in Emmitsburg.
Surratt had a reputation as a harsh teacher. “He rattled his classes and resort to physical punishment to maintain discipline. On older boys, some of them twenty or twenty-one, he used his fists. The younger boys John would beat with a paddle after he had stretched them over a special punishment desk which he had designed.” (Frederick Welty to T.R. Sussey, Philadelphia, November 23, 1938.)
Sandra Walia with the Surratt House Museum’s James O. Hall Research Center said in a Nov. 2007 interview with the author that she doubts this could have been Surratt because his students nicknamed him “Old Bear” and Surratt would have only been about 27 years old at the time, barely older than the oldest boys he taught.
Surratt’s Life in Emmitsburg
By 1872, Surratt had wed Mary Victorine Hunter, a second cousin to Francis Scott Key.
A year after his marriage, Surratt was still in Emmitsburg, though he didn’t like life in the small town. In April, he wrote to Father Jolivet who had sheltered him in Liverpool, England, after he fled the United States in 1865. “My greatest desire, Father Jolivet is to leave this abominable country and go to Europe there to spend the balance of my days in peace and quiet. If I could only feel secure of something to do in France or England that would assure me of a moderate living, I would leave here in less than a week.” (John Surratt to Father Jolivet, Emmitsburg, April 26, 1873, in Archivio, Casa Generalizia, Oblati di Maria Immacolata, Roma)
Leaving Emmitsburg
It appears that in January 1874, he resigned his position at St. Vincent’s Academy after being there less than a year.
The January 31, 1874 Catoctin Clarion reported, “Mr. John H. Surratt has resigned the situation of teacher of the Parochial school of this place. He has gone to Baltimore to reside. It is said he is about publishing a book.” (Catoctin Clarion, January 31, 1874)
In Baltimore, Surratt would take a job at the Baltimore Steam Packet Company and worked there until his retirement.
When he died of pneumonia on April 21, 1916 at 72, he was the last surviving member of the Lincoln conspiracy and the only one known to have called Emmitsburg home.
