Play the video above to see Dr. Samuel A. Mudd’s Farm and Booth’s escape route.

The question most commonly asked about Dr. Mudd is: “Was he guilty?” The answer is both “No” and “Yes.” Dr. Mudd was not guilty of any involvement in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, but he was guilty of obstructing justice during the hunt for John Wilkes Booth.

During the American Civil War, in the summer of 1864, the 26 year-old actor John Wilkes Booth conceived a plan to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln and carry him to Richmond, Virginia where the Confederate government would presumably free the President in exchange for the Union’s release of captured Confederate soldiers. When Booth was forced to abandon his impractical plan a few months later, he decided to murder the President, and did so at Washington’s Ford’s Theater on Good Friday evening, April 14, 1865, immortalizing Booth as one of America’s early domestic terrorists.

Booth broke his leg while fleeing from the theater, and after riding all night through Southern Maryland, sought medical treatment at the tobacco farm of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, a young 31 year-old doctor with a wife and four small children. Dr. Mudd's farm was located in the heart of Southern Maryland's pro-Confederate slave-owning tobacco-growing country. During the four years of the Civil War, these tobacco farmers had experienced a steady decline in income as the slaves who produced their tobacco ran away to freedom in Washington, D.C., or joined the Union Army. In November 1864, a new state constitution freed all the remaining slaves. Southern Maryland tobacco farmers seethed with anger at the Union Government and its leader Abraham Lincoln, but none were as angry as John Wilkes Booth who had just murdered Lincoln.

Booth sought out Dr. Mudd because he knew him. The two men had met twice before, once while Booth was visiting acquaintances in the area, and a second time when Mudd ran into Booth in Washington. Dr. Mudd claimed to the authorities that he didn’t realize the man with the broken leg was Booth because he wore a disguise, and that he had no way to know that the man with the broken leg had assassinated President Lincoln. It was only after he was released from prison that Dr. Mudd admitted that he recognized Booth at his farm, and that he threw Booth off the farm after learning of the assassination.

After Dr. Mudd treated his broken leg, Booth rested for about 12 hours and then left the farm after Dr. Mudd learned of the assassination and angrily told him to go. Booth was cornered and killed in Virginia a week and a half later.

A large number of people were arrested during the Government’s investigation of the assassination, but ultimately only eight of these, including Dr. Mudd, were put on trial for being part of Booth’s conspiracy.

Historians agree that Dr. Mudd had nothing to do with planning or carrying out the assassination of President Lincoln. He and Edman Spangler, a Ford’s Theater carpenter, were the only persons put on trial who were not members of Booth’s gang of co-conspirators. General August V. Kautz, one of the nine members of the Military Commission that tried the eight defendants, 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... Dr. Mudd was the most intelligent looking and attracted most attention of all the prisoners. There was more work done in his defense. His subsequent career showed him to be a man of more character and intelligence than anyone of the prisoners.”

Dr. Mudd was certainly guilty, as General Kautz said, of not turning Booth over to his pursuers when he had a chance to do so. Other Southern Marylanders also failed to turn Booth over to his pursuers during his 12-day escape attempt, but their identities were not known until many years later. By then, tempers had cooled, and no attempt was made to put them on trial.

All eight defendants were found guilty. Four were hung. The other four, including Dr. Mudd, were sent to Fort Jefferson, a military prison located on a small island in the Gulf of Mexico, about 70 miles west of Key West, Florida. In 1869, President Andrew Johnson pardoned Dr. Mudd who returned home to his family and farm and lived for another fourteen years until his death in 1883.

Dr. Mudd was pardoned in part because of his work during an 1867 yellow fever epidemic at Fort Jefferson. When the fort’s regular Army doctor died at the beginning of the epidemic, Dr. Mudd volunteered to replace him, and the fort’s commanding officer immediately agreed. An elderly doctor from Key West, Dr. Daniel Whitehurst, was also recruited to help. The wife of a Fort Jefferson officer described the conditions under which Drs. Mudd and Whitehurst worked:

“The whole island became one immense hospital. The silence was oppressive beyond description. There were no soldiers for drill or parade, and the gloom was indescribable. Five hundred at one time would scarcely cover the list of sick…. Those able to move about looked like ghosts. The mercury was 104 in the hospital…. We seemed in some horrible nightmare. It was terrible beyond description to be hemmed in by those high, literally red-hot brick walls, with so much suffering. I could see the beds brought out, hoping for a breath of air to fan the burning brow and fever-parched lips. There was nothing to brighten the cloud of despair that encompassed the island.”

Towards the end of the epidemic, Dr. Mudd himself contracted yellow fever and almost died. When the epidemic had finally run its course, 300 soldiers at Fort Jefferson signed a petition testifying to Dr. Mudd’s bravery and asking President Johnson to pardon him. 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.”

Dr. Mudd made a costly mistake in not turning John Wilkes Booth over to the soldiers hunting the assassin, but he redeemed himself by his life-saving work during the 1867 yellow fever epidemic at Fort Jefferson.

Dr. Mudd was still a young man when pardoned - only 35. He returned home, restored his farm and medical practice, became active in local politics, and produced five more children. He died at home in 1883 at the age of 49.  His daughter Stella, at his bedside, said his last words were “It is not hard to die. I am just waiting for the call of the Old Master. God knows best.”

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