Early Life
Mary Elizabeth Jenkins was born to Archibald and Elizabeth Anne (Webster) Jenkins on a tobacco farm near the southern Maryland town of Waterloo (now known as Clinton). Sources differ as to whether she was born in 1820 or 1823. There is uncertainty as to the month as well, although most sources say May.
She had two brothers, John Zadoc, born in 1822, and James Archibal, born in 1825. Her father died in the fall of 1825 when Mary was either two or five years old. Although her father was a non-denominational 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. Mary's maternal aunt, Sarah Latham Webster, was a Catholic, which may have influenced where she was sent to school. Within two years, Mary converted to Roman Catholicism and adopted the baptismal name of Maria Eugenia. She stayed at the Academy for Young Ladies for four years, leaving in 1839, when the school closed. She remained a devout Catholic for the rest of her life.
Read more about this topic: Mary Surratt
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“An early dew woos the half-opened flowers”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)