Lewis Powell (April 22, 1844 - July 7, 1865)

Lewis Thornton Powell, also known as Lewis Paine (or Payne), attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate United States Secretary of State William H. Seward and was one of four people hanged for the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. Lewis Powell was born in Randolph County, Alabama on April 22, 1844 to a Baptist minister, George Cader, and his young wife Patience Caroline Powell. The youngest of nine children, he spent the first three years of his life in Randolph County before his father was ordained and the family moved to Stewart County, Georgia. Powell and his siblings were all educated by their father who was the local schoolmaster. After some years in Stewart County, the family moved to Worth County, then finally moving to Live Oak, Florida in 1859, when Lewis was 15. On May 30, 1861, at age 17, Powell left home and enlisted in the 2nd Florida Infantry, Company I in Jasper, Florida. Sometime in November 1862 he was hospitalized for sickness at General Hospital #11 in Richmond, Virginia. He went on to fight at numerous battles unscathed before being wounded in the wrist on the second day of fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg, July 2, 1863, from where he was captured and sent to a POW hospital at Pennsylvania College. Powell stayed at Pennsylvania College until September, when he was transferred to West Buildings Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. It was at West Buildings where Powell met and developed a relationship with a volunteer nurse named Margaret "Maggie" Branson. It was believed that it was with Branson's help that Powell was able to escape from the hospital within a week of his arrival, fleeing to Alexandria, Virginia. Back in Virginia, he located Colonel John Singleton Mosby and his cavalry in late fall 1863 and rode with the 43rd Battalion, Company B. After leaving the company, he returned to Baltimore on January 13, 1865, crossing the lines at Alexandria. Powell returned to the boarding house of Maggie Branson. During his time with the Rangers, in 1864, Powell became involved in the Confederate Secret Service. It was in Baltimore that he was arrested for severely beating a black servant at the Branson house. He was arrested and held in jail 2 days on charges of being a spy. Required to sign an Oath of Allegiance, he did so, under the name Lewis Paine. It was also in Baltimore that he met fellow CSS operative John Surratt through a man named David Preston Parr, also with the CSS. On April 13, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, George Atzerodt, and David Herold all met at Powell's room at a boarding house in Washington, where Booth assigned roles. On April 14, Powell, accompanied by Herold, was to go to the home of Secretary of State William H. Seward and kill him. Atzerodt was to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson; he would fail because he lost his nerve and got drunk. Booth was to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, a task he completed. On April 14 Powell was escorted to the Seward residence by David Herold. Powell gained entry into the house by claiming that he had medicine for Seward. (Earlier in the month, on April 5, 1865, Seward had been injured in a carriage accident and suffered a concussion, a broken jaw, a broken right arm, and many serious bruises. He was at home convalescing.) Powell then attempted to kill William Seward by breaking into his bedroom and stabbing him repeatedly. A jaw splint worn by Seward helped to save his life by deflecting the knife away from his jugular vein. Powell also injured Seward's two eldest sons, Augustus and Frederick, his assigned military nurse, Sergeant George F. Robinson, and messenger Emerick Hansell, who arrived right as Powell was escaping.
After the attempt on Seward's life, Powell threw his bloody knife up into the gutter of the Seward house and fled on horseback. He discarded his light-colored coat in a Washington suburb cemetery where he hid. At some point, the horse, purchased by John Wilkes Booth in December 1864, that Powell was riding either threw him or he fell off. The horse was later found near the Lincoln Branch Barracks, close to the Capitol. After hiding out for three days, Powell went to Mary Surratt's boarding house only to arrive at the same time that she was being arrested for her part in the assassination. Although it was night time, when asked why he was there, carrying a pick-axe, Powell claimed that he had been hired to dig a gutter. Mary Surratt denied knowing who he was, despite his having visited and stayed at the boarding house on several occasions. Powell was arrested and taken to the Navy Yard where he was housed aboard the monitor USS Saugus. Powell was tried under the name of Payne by a military tribunal. Thirty two witnesses were called to testify against Powell, including Seward's son, Augustus, and William Bell, who worked for the Seward household as a servant and doorman and who admitted Powell the night of the assassination attempt. The evidence was overwhelming against Powell; it included a performance at Ford Theatre attended by Powell, John Wilkes Booth, and two boarders from Mary Surratt's boarding house, Honora Fitzpatrick and Apollonia Dean. Powell's lawyer tried to argue that Powell was insane at the time of the assassination attempt, an argument refuted by physicians called on behalf of the prosecution. He then argued that Powell was acting as a soldier, attempting to complete his duty as he had been ordered. The commission rejected this defense as well and Powell was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and treason. Powell was executed along with three other conspirators (Mary Surratt, Herold and Atzerodt) on July 7, 1865. Powell went to the gallows calmly and quietly, though at some point he was believed to have pleaded for the life of Mary Surratt shortly before he was hanged. He insisted to his death that Mrs. Surratt was innocent. Powell did not die quickly. After the drop he struggled for life more than five minutes. His body swinging wildly, twice he "moved his legs up into the sitting position" and was the last to die. In January 1992, Powell's skull was discovered and stored at the Smithsonian Anthropology Department. Two years later the skull was re-interred with the rest of his remains at the Geneva Cemetery in Seminole County, Florida, next to the grave of his mother.


When the bodies of the four conspirators were removed from the Arsenal grounds for private burials the newspaper accounts by a James Croggin of The Washington Star indicates that Powell's remains were re-interred at Holmead Cemetery in Washington, D.C. However, Holmead was soon abandoned and sold for development. On September 25, 1884, The National Republican newspaper reported that work had begun on removing all bodies. It was at this time, that Powell's remains appeared to have been lost. In January 1992, Stuart Speaker, an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History found a skull residing by itself in a drawer in a section reserved for Native American remains. An accession tag read, "Cranium of L. Paine hung at Washington, D.C. for the attempted assassination of Secretary of State William H. Seward in 1865." Further paperwork showed that the skull was a gift from the Army Medical Museum on May 7, 1898. The Medical Museum had received it from A.H. Gawler of a very old and prestigious funeral business in Washington, D.C. (still in existence). A notation added that the "specimen received January 13, 1885", which is consistent with the time that Holmead Cemetery was being emptied of its burials.