“Please don’t let me fall.”

— Mary Surratt, convicted of conspiracy to murder, hanging, Washington, D.C.
Executed July 7, 1865

Surratt was convicted as a conspirator in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, along with Lewis Powell (alias Lewis Paine or Payne), David Herold, and George Atzerodt. The prisoners received their death sentences only the day before they were set to hang. Surratt was the first woman executed by the federal government. She was never allowed to testify at her own trial, in which she was accused of using her tavern as a meeting place for the conspirators.

President Andrew Johnson signed her death warrant and was reputed to have said, “She kept the nest that hatched the egg.” In some accounts of the execution, Powell said from the gallows, “Mrs. Surratt is innocent. She doesn’t deserve to die with the rest of us.”

Written:
“Your husband is dying happy! For you I lived, for you I
die! I hear you groan! I hope you may yet be recovered!
If you are, live till it is God’s will to take you, and prepare
to meet me in a better world!”

Your dying husband,
J. O. Beauchamp

— Jereboam O. Beauchamp, convicted of murder, hanging, Kentucky.
Executed July 7, 1826

Beauchamp murdered Kentucky legislator Solomon P. Sharp after the state representative denied paternity of a child by Anna Cooke, whom Beauchamp wed after the birth of the child. Rumors circulated that Sharp claimed the child was a mulatto and the product of a Cooke family slave. Vowing to avenge his wife’s honor, Beauchamp stabbed Sharp to death at his home. But this was not the end of the tragedy. While awaiting execution, Beauchamp was joined in his cell by his wife, at her request. Despite two suicide attempts, the couple was allowed to stay together. On the day of execution, both he and Anna stabbed themselves. The above note was written to Anna as Beauchamp was hauled to the gallows, before he could bleed to death. Anna died of her wounds.

This incident, known as the Beauchamp-Sharp Tragedy, inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished work “Politian” and novelist Robert Penn Warren’s “World Enough and Time.”

“Yes I do. Sir, in honor of a true American hero, “Let’s roll.” Lord Jesus receive my spirit.”

— David Harris, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed June 30, 2004

Harris’s final statement was a reference to the words of Todd Beamer, a passenger who helped fight the hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11. Harris was sentenced to death after shooting a man to death as Harris tried to abduct the man’s girlfriend. Harris is best known for his false testimony that helped convict Randall Dale Adams of killing a police officer; he retracted his statement after the 1988 documentary “The Thin Blue Line proved Adams innocent.

Harris was never charged with the crime. Adams was released from prison in 1989, but by that time Harris had been on death row for three years.