Hi there. I'm Washington Post reporter Lillian Cunningham. Stay tuned after the show to hear about my latest podcast, Moonrise. It's the dark but true story of why we went to the moon and what we found there. The full series is available now.

Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

On February 19, 1867, an American gunboat returned to Washington's Navy Yard after a

month's long trip to the Middle East.

Among the sailors on board, outstepped a filthy young man in shackles.

His name was John Harrison Sarat.

He was the most wanted man in the entire world.

Two years earlier, Sarat had been a Confederate spy. In a desperate bid to reverse the

tide of the Civil War, Surat conspired with a fellow named John Wilkes Booth to kidnap President

Abraham Lincoln. The plot failed, of course. Instead, on April 14, 1865, Booth slipped into Ford's theater and shot Lincoln in the head.

Newspapers across the country featured photos of Booth and Surrott under the headline, Assassins.

Booth, as you might recall from history class, was hunted down and killed in a burning

barn in Virginia.

Eight of his alleged co-conspirators, including Surrott's mother, Mary, were arrested,

quickly tried by a military commission, and found guilty.

But Surrott, he was nowhere to be found,

both physically and later in the pages of history.

His remarkable tale in the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination

is a footnote overshadowed by Booth's infamous act.

Surat was born in 1844 and raised in the small Maryland town in Prince George's County that bore

his family's name, Sarattsville, though it is now known as Clinton.

His father was the postmaster and also owned the local tavern, where, hours after Lincoln's assassination, booth stopped for weapons and supplies.

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