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ANARCHY'S NEST

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 23, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 43.

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ANARCHY'S NEST.

Parallel between Two Great Crimes along Saloon Lines—The Gin-mill in Two Assassinations.

[From the New Voice Bureau in Washington.]
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19.—In the midst of the national woe, specially marked here at the capital, it is proper to recall the striking similarity in the tools which struck down President Abraham Lincoln and the miserable wretch who ended the life of the late President. Both were the products of the licensed saloon.
Mary E. Surratt, who was hanged for complicity in the assassination of Lincoln, kept a licensed grog shop at Surrattsville, about ten miles south of this city. Her saloon was literally the rendezvous of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” if there ever was such a place. (The Surratts were Catholics.) It was in this rumshop that John Wilkes Booth, Herold, Atzerot, Payne, and O’Laughlin and the others made their headquarters. There they got their education, their ideas and inspiration. There Booth fled after the assassination, and there he got the two bottles of whisky with which to nerve his flight for life.
Shortly before the assassination Mrs. Surratt leased the place to one John M. Lloyd, who barely escaped being hanged for his part in the hellish tragedy.
After Mrs. Surratt’s removal to H street in this city, the bibulous exploits of the precious crew were transferred to the new home, and Mrs. Surratt made periodical trips to her old dive for liquors.
It was at Mrs. Surratt’s house that the daily conferences of the gang were held and the devilish plots made. It was at her saloon at Surrattsville, run by the drunkard Lloyd, that the plans were made for the escape.
The official record of the trial tells us that on that frightful fourteenth of April, 1865, these conspirators drove up and down Pennsylvania avenue, stopping at nearly every saloon on the way for liquor to nerve them for the awful night’s work.
John Wilkes Booth was to visit Ford’s Theater and slay the President. How well he succeeded is known too well.
Lewis Payne was to kill Secretary Seward in his bed of sickness at his home; and he nearly succeeded.
Mike O’Laughlin was detailed to assassinate General Grant. He went to a reception given to the general at the home of Secretary Stanton for this purpose. But fortunately, he had taken too much liquor. He blundered into the Stanton home in a semi-drunken condition and was ejected.
George A. Atzerot’s part in the tragedy was to murder Vice-President Johnson, who was stopping at the Kirkwood house. But during the evening Atzerot went off on a drunk among the neighboring grog-shops, and forgot his part of the program. The military commission remembered it, tho, and hanged him.
Of the four who were hanged,—Mrs. Surratt, George A. Atzerot, Lewis Payne, and David E. Herold,—all save the woman were known to be common drunkards, and the dame was a rum-seller.
O’Laughlin and Sam Arnold, who were sentenced to prison for life, were products of the saloon, both being confirmed drunkards. O’Laughlin’s lawyer even pleaded that his client was such a confirmed sot and natural-born coward that he was constitutionally unable to take part in such a plot as an assassination.
Edward Spangler, who was sentenced to six years’ confinement, was another saloon victim.
John Wilkes Booth himself was accustomed to drink heavily and often. His haunts for years had been in the saloons of Washington and Mrs. Surratt’s rumshop south of the city.
John H. Surratt, who escaped to Europe, got drunk on the voyage and revealed his identity to a passenger, who for some reason did not tell of the occurrence till after it was too late to apprehend the fugitive in Ireland or England.
Of the entire list of conspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln, the trial records show all, with the possible exception of Mrs. Surratt and Dr. Mudd, to be confirmed inebriates, and Mrs. Surratt kept a bar, while Mudd was a frequenter of it.
After the sentences had been pronounced, strenuous efforts were made to induce President Johnson to commute the death sentence of Mrs. Surratt on the ground of her sex. The President refused with the famous remark, “She kept the nest that hatched ‘the eggs.’”
Just so, the murderer of President McKinley was a regular product of the licensed saloon. According to the newspaper reports, his father kept a saloon at Cleveland, Ohio. Young Leon Czolgosz got his education in the saloon. The local anarchists used to have their meetings in the rear of the Czolgosz saloon. Whoever heard of an anarchist meeting anywhere save in the rear of a saloon, or above a saloon with a dumb waiter-connection?
The meetings of Johann Most are invariably held in a saloon. The meetings and “conferences” of Emma Goldman are always held in licensed rumshops. Wherever the murderer of the late president went, he stopped at saloons. When he went to Buffalo on that deadly errand, he made his home in John Nowak’s saloon on Broadway in that city.
The words of Andrew Johnson are as applicable to-day as they were in 1865: “SHE KEPT THE ‘NEST THAT HATCHED THE EGGS.” What a mountain of guilt was described in those words.—New Voice.