The Assassin's Doctor

Good Friday, April 14, 1865, a little after 10 pm. 32-year old Samuel Mudd and his wife Sara were getting ready to retire at their farm house in Southern Maryland. Their four children, Andrew, Lillian, Thomas, and baby Samuel, were already asleep in an upstairs bedroom. At the same time, 30 miles north in Washington, D.C., John Wilkes Booth crept up behind President Abraham Lincoln in his box at Ford's Theatre and shot him in the head. Three months later, Dr. Mudd arrived under heavy guard at the Fort Jefferson military prison to begin serving a life sentence for conspiring to murder the president. The fort was located on a remote island in the Gulf of Mexico, 70 miles west of Key West, Florida, and 1,000 miles south of Dr. Mudd's home in Maryland.

Dr. Mudd knew John Wilkes Booth fairly well. He had met him at least twice before the assassination. Booth had even stayed overnight at Dr. Mudd's farm house on one of those occasions. But Dr. Mudd knew nothing of the assassination when Booth showed up at his farm house seeking help for a leg he broke while escaping. After Dr. Mudd set his leg, Booth rested at the farm for about 12 hours before setting off again. For reasons still unknown, even though he knew Booth well, Dr. Mudd told those hunting Booth that he didn't know the identity of the man whose leg he had fixed.

The government's position was that any person assisting the escape of the assassin would be treated as an accomplice in the murder of the president. General August V. Kautz, one of the nine members of the Military Commission that tried the eight alleged conspirators, said:

Dr. Mudd attracted much interest and his guilt as an active conspirator was not clearly made out. His main guilt was the fact that he failed to deliver them, that is, Booth and Herold, to their pursuers.

President Johnson said the same thing in his pardon:

I am satisfied that the guilt found by the said judgment against Samuel A. Mudd was of receiving, entertaining, harboring, and concealing John Wilkes Booth and David E. Herold, with the intent to aid, abet and assist them in escaping from justice after the assassination of the late President of the United States, and not of any other or greater participation or complicity in said abominable crime.

In 1867 there was a terrible yellow fever epidemic at Fort Jefferson. Three hundred thirteen soldiers, 54 prisoners, and 20 civilians, a total of 387 people, were at the fort. Two hundred seventy of them contracted yellow fever. When the fort's doctor died immediately after the epidemic began, the fort's commander asked Dr. Mudd to help, and he agreed. A civilian contract doctor from Key West, Daniel W. Whitehurst, also came to help. Thirty-eight people eventually died during the epidemic, but many more would have perished without the work of the two doctors. Towards the end of the epidemic, Dr. Mudd himself contracted yellow fever and almost died.

When the epidemic had finally run its course, the surviving soldiers at Fort Jefferson signed a petition asking President Andrew Johnson to pardon Dr. Mudd for his heroic work during the epidemic. The petition said in part:

He inspired the hopeless with courage, and by his constant presence in the midst of danger and infection, regardless of his own life, tranquilized the fearful and desponding.

President Johnson pardoned Dr. Mudd on March 8, 1869, in large part because of his heroic work during the epidemic. After his release from prison, Dr. Mudd returned home to his wife and children, redeemed in the eyes of many for his life-saving work at Fort Jefferson. He lived 14 more years, dying from pneumonia in 1883 at the age of 49. It was his daughter Nettie's 5th birthday. In 1906, Nettie published The Life of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, containing many of Dr. Mudd's letters home during his time at Fort Jefferson.