THE EXECUTION OF - Mary Surratt, The First Woman Executed By the US Federal Government

Mary Elizabeth Jenkins, her baptismal name, was Maria Eugenia, she was born to Archibald and Elizabeth Anne, on a tobacco plantation near the southern Maryland town of Waterloo. Her father died in the fall of 1825 when Mary was either two or five years old, and Mary’s mother then inherited their property (originally part of the His Lordship’s Kindness estate). Although her father was a nondenominational Protestant and her mother Episcopalian, Surratt was enrolled in a private Roman Catholic girls’ boarding school, the Academy for Young Ladies in Alexandria, Virginia, on November 25, 1835.