Every American Ever Convicted Of Treason (And What Happened Next)

It's a word you're guaranteed to hear flooding the airwaves every time a president signs an unpopular bill or a congressperson comes out against bombing some remote nation: "Treason!" But despite what talk radio might have you believe, treason ain't treason in the U.S. unless it meets some specific criteria. Per the Constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." That's pretty precise language, so it should come as no surprise that almost no one has been convicted of treason in U.S. history.

That being said, "almost no one" isn't the same as plain ol' "no one." In the 2.5-ish centuries America has existed as an independent state, a handful of people have managed to do a Benedict Arnold and had it proved in court. Some you probably know. Some — like Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were actually convicted of espionage and not treason — you only think you know. The rest you're about to find out about.

As rebellions go, John Fries' 1799 attempt was almost painfully ineffective. In 1798, the administration of John Adams (above) decided to hike up taxes on everything, having evidently learned no lessons from the Whiskey Rebellion just four years before. The farmers of eastern Pennsylvania took this particularly badly, formed into armed gangs under the leadership of John Fries, and intimidated local jails into releasing all tax evaders. Adams responded by sending in the troops, Fries was arrested without incident, and that was that.

At least, that was it for the rebellion that carried his name. As Britannica describes, Fries himself was convicted of treason and sentenced to hang. He was actually convicted twice and sentenced to hang, which would have made for an uncomfortable spectacle if they'd tried to hang him a second time. Thankfully, Pennsylvania was spared the sight of the federal government trying to hang a dead man in April 1800 when Adams pulled a Washington and pardoned Fries.

John Brown was a guy who hated the concept of slavery, to the extent that he once assassinated five random pro-slavery settlers in Kansas to try and balance the books. By 1858, he was openly planning to spark an insurrection among slaves in the South to force the issue of abolition through bullets and bloodshed. In 1859, he finally felt he had the manpower to do it. On October 16, his 21-man army overran an armory in Harpers Ferry, in what is now West Virginia. Brown planned to spark a slave uprising. Instead, his faux army found itself being steam-rollered by Robert E. Lee's actual one.

According to History, Brown was tried for treason against the state of Virginia and, despite making some powerful speeches attacking slavery, was convicted and hanged on December 2. His follower Aaron Dwight Stevens was hanged for the same raid three months later. Their deaths utterly exploded the issue of abolition, turning what had been simmering tension between North and South into a boiling cauldron of mutual resentment. It's likely not a coincidence that civil war erupted just 13 months after Stevens was hanged.

Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt may not be a household name, but she's got two good claims to fame. She's the first woman to ever be convicted of treason in the U.S., and the first woman the federal government executed (via ThoughtCo). A boarding house owner in the mid-19th century, Surratt made the fateful decision to get involved in one of the grandest conspiracies of her time. She was one of the four people who helped John Wilkes Booth pull off the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Surratt's actual role is murky. History says "it is believed" that Booth hatched his assassination scheme in her boarding house, but it's also possible he never told her about it. Regardless, Surratt was linked to Booth via her husband and was arrested along with three other conspirators. They were tried before a military tribunal and all hanged within three months of Lincoln's death. Interestingly, because the other three could be linked to the conspiracy, they were hanged for more concrete charges like murder. Only Mary Surratt was convicted of treason.

Herbert Hans Haupt (above) was a fully paid-up, "blood and soil," "heil the fatherland" Nazi. In 1942 he was one of a group of pro-German defectors who boarded a U-boat to America and landed on the east coast determined to commit sabotage. Given SS training, explosives, and stacks of U.S. dollars, the eight saboteur-defectors were all determined to cause chaos. They were also all bumbling idiots. Before they could carry out a single act of sabotage, all eight were arrested. Shortly after, the six who didn't cooperate with investigators were sent to the electric chair (via History Net).

It wasn't only the saboteurs who were arrested. Two of them had received support from friends and relatives in the U.S. One man, Anthony Cramer, who had unwittingly stored money for the group, was convicted of treason but then had his conviction overturned on appeal. No such luck for Herbert Hans Haupt's dad, Max. Max Hans Haupt's treason conviction was upheld, and he was sentenced to life in prison. He was finally released in 1957 and deported to West Germany.

Before he got a job working for Joseph Goebbels, Douglas Chandler was a contributor to National Geographic and was known as the magazine's man in Germany. Since this was Nazi Germany, he was considered an invaluable source of information in the pre-war years. The trouble was, Chandler wasn't exactly unbiased. Throughout the late 1930s, he dripped a steady stream of pro-Nazi propaganda stories into National Geographic. When war finally broke out, he simply ditched his cover and started broadcasting Nazi propaganda openly.

Under the name "Paul Revere," Chandler broadcast a radio show to up to 300,000 Americans nightly. He divided his audience into "Jew haters" and "Jew servers." Chandler supported the Final Solution and told his listeners that America would surely soon follow in Hitler's footsteps. Before the war was even over, the FBI had indicted him for treason and, as soon as victory was declared in Europe, they tracked him to a Bavarian village. Chandler was convicted in 1947 and spent 15 years in prison, one of the longest sentences of any defector. Freed by the JFK administration, he returned to Germany. People have reported meeting him on trains as late as the 1970s. His views hadn't changed one bit.

While Tokyo Rose was trapped in Japan at the outbreak of war, Axis Sally had been sitting comfortably in Germany for years by that point. An Ohio actress who moved to Dresden in 1934, Sally (real named Mildred Gillars) was sympathetic to the Nazi cause and joined the propaganda department after war was declared. Her whole schtick was to play nostalgic American songs and then ponder all the things servicemen's wives might be doing with the neighbor while they were away. (Hint: It wasn't playing cards.) Still, she sometimes made more direct threats, as when she broadcast a chilling warning to Allied soldiers just before the D-Day landings.

It was this last broadcast, incidentally, that got her. U.S. counterintelligence tracked Sally down in Berlin after the war and whisked her back to the States for a treason trial. The D-Day broadcast was the one clear act of treason the courts could agree on, and Axis Sally went down for 12 years. Not that this was the end of her life. After her release, the former Nazi spokeswoman enrolled in a convent back in Ohio, where, according to Britannica she taught French, music and, erm, German.

At time of writing, Tomoya Kawakita has holds a minor, yet notable, place in the U.S. history books. Kawakita remains the last American citizen to be convicted of treason. (Yep, the Rosenbergs came later. And again, nope, they weren't convicted of treason.) Like many others, he was a dual U.S.-Japanese national who had the misfortune to be trapped in Japan when war erupted. Unlike many others, Kawakita managed to take the lemons life had handed him and turn them into particularly sadistic lemonade.

Cornell Law School has Kawakita's Supreme Court case on file, and it makes for some seriously uncomfortable reading. In wartime Japan, Kawakita got a job as a translator, interpreting commands for American POWs being used as slave labor. But rather than being an unwilling participant, Kawakita decided torturing Americans looked seriously fun and joined in the Japanese Army's flagrant war crimes. Thankfully for everyone who believes in justice, one of the men he'd abused recognized Kawakita when he returned to the U.S. in 1946, and the Translator of Death was arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to the electric chair. Eisenhower commuted his sentence to life in prison in 1953.