To fully understand the case of Mrs. Surratt we must make her acquaintance as early as 1863. We find her at that time living at Surrattsville, in Prince George County, Md., ten miles below Washington City. The villa called Surrattsville consisted simply of a country tavern owned and occupied by Mrs. Surratt. She was a widow with three children, two sons and a daughter. The elder son had gone to Texas and had volunteered in the rebel service. The younger son, John H. Surratt, a young man of nineteen, had left St. Charles College in the summer of 1861, not to volunteer as a soldier, but to engage in the secret service of the Confederacy. There was a United States post-office at Surrattsville; and this young man, in addition to his duties as a Confederate spy and carrier of despatches for the rebel government, handled Uncle Sam's mail and delivered it to his neighbors. From all this we can readily gather the attitude of Mrs. Surratt toward the government. On the trial of John H. Surratt, John F. Tibbetts testified that in 1863 he was carrying the mail from Washington to Charlotte Hall, and that he stopped at Surrattsville to deliver the mail at that office. On one occasion, whilst waiting for the mail there, he heard Mrs. Surratt say that she would give one thousand dollars to any one that would kill Lincoln. He also testified that when there was a Union victory he heard her son say in her presence that, "The d--d Northern army and the leader thereof ought to be sent to hell." Here we see the deep and traitorous hostility to the government of these people who were in its service under the obligations of an official oath. In the fall of 1864 Mrs. Surratt removed to Washington, taking the house 541 on H Street. She rented her Surrattsville property to a man by the name of Lloyd. What prompted this change is not known to the writer. Her son had so won the confidence of Jefferson Davis and Judah P. Benjamin that he had for a considerable time been entrusted by them, not only with important despatches, but also with large sums of money sent to their agents in Canada.[7] Indeed, this seems to have been the only employment in which he was then engaged; and at this time the assassination plot, as we have seen, was engaging the serious attention both of Davis and his agents in Canada, and that both Surratt and Booth were in the confidence of these men, though they were as yet not personally acquainted with each other.