Semester 1 Research Paper - Doctor Samuel Mudd

Doctor Samuel Mudd and the Lincoln Assassination
Gina Tangelo
AP United States History
Bob Hoch
January 3, 2018
Tangelo 1
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln was a phenomenon that caused all of America to
go into a frenzy. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while watching a play at the
Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.. There were many theories regarding the assassination and
who was involved: the main suspect, John Wilkes Booth, Doctor Samuel A. Mudd, said to have
helped Booth with the assassination, and others who were later executed and also found guilty
for helping to kill the president. Doctor Mudd was a young man who was believed to have been a
part of the plans to kill the president when in actuality he was not aware of Booth’s intentions.
Doctor Samuel Alexander Mudd was born on December 21, 1833 in Charles County,
Maryland.1 He was one of ten children and lived on his father Henry Lowe’s tobacco plantation
of hundreds of acres.2 He was sent to Frederick College in Frederick, Maryland after several
years of homeschooling.3 Two years later, he transferred to Georgetown College in Washington,
D.C. and later went to study medicine at the Baltimore School of Medicine.4 After graduating in
1856, Mudd returned to his hometown to become a doctor and married his childhood sweetheart,
Sarah Frances Dyer Mudd the next year.5 Mudd’s father gave the couple two wedding gifts: 218
acres of land and a new house built on it called Rock Hill Farm that they moved into in 1859.6
He had four children before the assassination7 and became a small scale tobacco grower to add to
1
Stacey Hamilton, "Mudd, Samuel Alexander (1833-1883), alleged conspirator in the assassination of President
Abraham Lincoln | American National Biography," American National Biography, June 16, 2017, accessed
December 24, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.2001833.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Onsite visit 11/12/2017
6
Hamilton, "Mudd, Samuel Alexander (1833-1883).”
7
Onsite visit 11/12/17.
Tangelo 2
his income with the help of slave labor.8 In 1864, Maryland put an end to slavery, this making it
harder for Mudd to continue to manage his plantation after losing his slaves in November on that
same year.9 While considering his options, he was introduced to a twenty-six-year old actor
named John Wilkes Booth who said he may be interested in buying Mudd’s farm.
Booth visited Bryantown, Maryland twice claiming to be looking for horses to be able to
escape after kidnapping the president.10 He had been coming up with the ultimate plan to kidnap
the president, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State and incarcerate them for a great
monetary value for months. Booth’s first encounter with Mudd occurred at St.Mary’s Catholic
Church in November of 1864.11 Booth proceeded to visit Mudd at his farm the next day as well
as staying there overnight.12 The next day, Booth bought a horse and then returned to
Washington, D.C..13 About a month after this, Mudd traveled to Washington where he
encountered Booth again.14 During this visit he introduced Booth to John Surratt, the youngest
son of Mary Surratt, who ran a boarding house as well as being a Confederate courier.15 The
Surratt Tavern was said to be a “safe house” in between Richmond and Washington, D.C.16
8
9
Ibid.
10
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Robert and Marilyn Aitken, "The Long, Strange Case of Dr. Samuel Mudd: The Assassination of Abraham
Lincoln." Litigation 31, no. 3 (2005): 52.
16
Ibid.
Tangelo 3
Louis Weichmann, Mary Surratt's roommate, who was a federal government employee who was
there for the significant meetings that Booth held but did not take part in the assassination.17
On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was watching a play in Ford’s Theater completely
unaware that his assassin was also in the theater. He was planning on executing this plan until the
night of the assassination when he held a meeting with George Atzerodt, David Herold, and
Lewis Payne to tell them that the plan was to kill Lincoln instead.18 John Wilkes Booth shot
Lincoln in the back of the head while Atzerodt and Payne were to kill the Vice President and the
Secretary of State, Atzerodt losing his nerve and Payne severely wounding the Secretary of State
and anyone else who got in his way.
While fleeing from the the theater, he broke his left fibula by jumping from the
president’s box to the stage and met up with Herold on a horse. Booth remembered that Doctor
Mudd lived close by and decided to pay a visit to his farm at around 4 a.m. the following
morning.19 Mudd helped with Booth’s leg and gave him a shoe to wear along with telling his
maid to make them a grand breakfast.20 It is said that Booth and Herold were in disguise and so
there was no way for Mudd to have known that he was helping a murderer.21 The doctor went
into Bryantown that same morning to try and find a carriage for Booth22 when he learned about
17
Ibid.
18
Stephen M. Archer, "Booth, John Wilkes (1838-1865), actor and assassin of President Abraham Lincoln |
American National Biography," American National Biography, June 16, 2017, , accessed December 24, 2017,
https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.0401210.
19
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
Tangelo 4
the assassination by stopping by a neighbor’s house, if he hadn’t already known about it.23
Doctor Mudd didn’t contact the authorities right away and instead waited until the following day
to tell his cousin about what had happened at his house and his cousin called the authorities soon
after.24 When asked, he also initially denied having ever met Booth, this causing problem for him
during his trial.25 On April 26, after the death of Booth, Mudd was arrested as a suspect in the
murder of Lincoln.26
Mudd thought he would be released quickly but realized he was wrong when he was
transferred from the Bryantown Tavern Jail to the Old Carroll Jail in Washington, D.C.27 On
May 1, President Johnson issued a nine-man military committee to try the suspects. Doctor
Mudd was to be represented by General Thomas Ewing, Jr., chosen by his wife.28 Ewing argued
that it was unconstitutional for civilians to be tried by a military commission when civilian courts
were available.29 He also claimed that it was illegal because it was not created by Congress and it
violated the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, “which provided for a grand jury indictment
in a case involving capital punishment”, and the Sixth Amendment, “which called for a speedy
and public trial by an impartial jury.”30 the trial began on May 10,31 366 witnesses testifying
overall.32 The specific charge against Mudd was that:
23
Aitken, "The Long, Strange Case of Dr. Samuel Mudd,” 51.
24
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Robert K. Summers, “The Doctor's Slaves: Samuel Mudd, Slavery, and the Lincoln Assassination” (2015), 49.
28
29
Ibid, 53.
30
Ibid, 53.
Tangelo 5
on the various days between March 6 and April 20, 1865, he did advice,
encourage, receive, entertain, harbor, and conceal, aid and assist John
Wilkes Booth, the Surratts, and the other defendants, with knowledge of
the murderous and traitorous conspiracy aforesaid, and with the intent to
aid and assist them in the execution thereof and in escaping from justice
after the murder of the said Abraham Lincoln.33
Some of the witnesses, his own slaves, said that he shot one of them in the leg and threatened to
send others to help the Confederates as well as sheltering Confederate soldiers.34 He was found
guilty of helping with the murder on June 29. He missed death by one vote and was instead given
a life sentence.35
Mudd and the others suspects who were also given a life sentence were held at Fort
Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas.36 On September 25, Mudd attempted to escape by hiding on a ship
that had recently docked at the fort but was quickly caught by soldiers on duty.37 In the fall of
1867 there was a wave of yellow fever at the fort, causing for the death of Michael
O’Laughlen.38 Because the prison doctor had died, Mudd decided to assume his duties and saved
lives by preventing the spread of the disease.39 The soldiers wrote a petition letter to President
31
32
33
Ibid, 53.
34
Summers, “The Doctor’s Slaves,” 49.
35
36
Ibid.
37
Onsite visit 11/12/2017
38
39
Ibid, 55.
Tangelo 6
Andrew Johnson telling him of what Mudd did during the outbreak, leading to Mudd’s release
later on.40 On March 19, 1869, Mudd was pardoned by President Johnson.41 Three weeks after
Mudd was pardoned, Edmund Spangler and Samuel Arnold were pardoned as well.42 Mudd
resumed his medical practices as soon as he returned and slowly, but surely, brought his farm
back to normal as well as having five more kids.43 Spangler went to visit Mudd and his family in
1873 and lived with them until his death, earning money from carpentry, gardening, and other
farm chores.44 One day Mudd was visiting one of his patients when he caught pneumonia. At the
time, no one knew how to treat it and at the age of 49, he died on January 10, 1883.45
Doctor Mudd’s accountability in the murder has remained a controversy for over a
century. Many of his descendants, mainly his grandson Richard Dyer Mudd, sought justice for
his innocence. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both wrote to Richard concurring
that the doctor was innocent after years of hard work on Richard’s end.46 Mudd, after this, filed a
petition to the Army Board for Correction of Military Records (ABCMR) as well as asking for
them to forget about his grandfather’s sentence.47 Two years later it was recommended that it be
removed completely from army records because Samuel Mudd was tried improperly “before a
40
Ibid, 55.
41
Ibid, 55.
42
Ibid, 55.
43
44
Ibid, 55.
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid. 56.
47
Ibid, 56.
Tangelo 7
military commission instead of a civilian court.”48 The ABCMR finally decided that it “had the
advantage of hindsight and looked at the facts of the case with more detachment than was
possible in the emotionally charged atmosphere in the Civil War.”49 It disputed the military
general’s opinion in 1865 that the crimes were “uniquely military” and made note that none of
the people that Mudd alleged to have collaborated with was a member of the military.50 The
board later found:
no good reason why Dr. Mudd should not have been tried by a civilian court.
It, therefore, unanimously concludes that the military commission did
not have the jurisdiction to try him, and that in so doing denied him his
due process rights, particularly his right to trial by jury of his peers.
This denial constituted such a gross infringement of his Constitutionally protected
rights, that his conviction should be set aside. To fail to do so would be unjust.51
In July 1992, acting assistant secretary of the Army William D. Clark refused the ABCMR’s
suggestions by saying that the board was not in business of settling historical disputes.52 In
August, Mudd filed a petition to the secretary of the army seeking a reversal of Clark’s decision,
the new secretary Sara E. Lister declining his request for reconsideration.53
That December, Mudd decided to take an action in the U.S. District Court for the District
of Columbia to have Lister’s decision reviewed as well as a declaratory judgment that his
48
49
50
Ibid, 56.
51
52
53
Ibid, 56.
Tangelo 8
grandfather had been wrongfully convicted.54 In October 1998, Judge Paul L. Friedman of the
D.C. District of Court dismissed the petition but he ruled that the secretary’s decision was
reached in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner and ordered the army to rethink the
suggestion.55 On March 6, 2000, the army ruled that the commission had the right to try and
convict Mudd because of the Ex Parte Quirin (1942), which states that a “military trial was
justified… [for] those accused of committing offenses against the law of war.” 56 They said that
Mudd’s case fit this definition because the assassination of the president was essentially a
military act and the city of Washington, D.C., was at the time under “threat of invasion.” 57 This
ruling, unfortunately, did not classify whether Mudd was guilty or innocent, and so the fight for
his innocence continues.
Samuel Mudd’s story will never truly be uncovered for obvious reasons, one of them
being that he’s dead and he can therefore be the only one to be able to testify to the true story of
his part in the assassination, if he ever played a part. Though there is plenty evidence that is
being used to try and say that he did play a part, he was still pardoned by multiple presidents
even centuries later who saw the goodness within him. He was a good man who made a
reputation for himself in Charles County, Maryland, and his story is one unlike any other. The
conspiracies may never end and there may never be a conclusive decision amongst historians but
they can all agree on one thing: Doctor Samuel A. Mudd was a man of many talents who did
great things with them and will surely never be forgotten.
54
Ibid, 56.
55
Ibid, 56.
56
57
Ibid.
Tangelo 9
Tangelo 10
Bibliography
Aitken, Robert, and Marilyn Aitken. "The Long, Strange Case of Dr. Samuel Mudd: The
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln." Litigation 31, no. 3 (2005): 51-66
http://www.jstor.org/stable/29760501
Archer, Stephen M. "Booth, John Wilkes (1838-1865), actor and assassin of President Abraham
Lincoln | American National Biography." American National Biography. June 16, 2017.
Accessed December 24, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.04021
0.
“The Assassination.” New York Times, April 16, 1865. Accessed December 24, 2017.
http://hn.bigchalk.com/hnweb/hn/do/document?set=search&start=1&rendition=x-article-i
mage&inmylist=false&urn=urn%3Aproquest%3AUS%3BPQDOC%3BHNP%3BPQD%
3BHNP%3BPROD%3Bx-article-
image%3B78996827&mylisturn=urn%3Aproquest%3A
US%3BPQDOC%3BHNP%3BPQD%3BHNP%3BPROD%3Bx-citation%3B78996827
"Full Report of the Evidence on Saturday." New York Times, May 28, 1865. Accessed December
24, 2017 .
http://hn.bigchalk.com/hnweb/hn/do/document?set=search&start=1&rendition=x-article-
image&inmylist=false&urn=urn%3Aproquest%3AUS%3BPQDOC%3BHNP%3BPQD
%3BHNP%3BPROD%3Bx-article-
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QD%3BHNP%3BPROD%3Bx-citation%3B87241769
Hamilton, Stacey. "Mudd, Samuel Alexander (1833-1883), alleged conspirator in the

assassination of President Abraham Lincoln | American National Biography." American
National Biography. June 16, 2017. Accessed December 24, 2017. https://doi.org/10.109
3/anb/9780198606697.article.2001833.
Lincoln, Abraham. “Lincoln, his words and his world.” Fort Atkinson, WI: Home Library Pub.
Co., 1976.
Summers, Robert K. “The Doctor's Slaves: Samuel Mudd, Slavery, and the Lincoln
Assassination.” 2015.
"Trial of the Assassins." New York Times, May 26, 1865. Accessed December 24, 2017.
http://hn.bigchalk.com/hnweb/hn/do/document?set=search&lastset=&rendition=x-article-
image&start=1&inmylist=false&urn=urn%3Aproquest%3AUS%3BPQDOC%3BHNP%
3BPQD%3BHNP%3BPROD%3Bx-article-image%3B80303595&pagemapurn=urn%3A
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5&abstracturn=urn%3Aproquest%3AUS%3BPQDOC%3BHNP%3BPQD%3BHNP%3B
PROD%3Bx-abstract%3B80303595&returnpage=document&doframe=1
“The Trial of the Assassins.” New York Times, May 30, 1865. Accessed December 24, 2017.
"Trial of the Assassins." New York Times, June 10, 1865. Accessed December 24, 2017.

Semester 1 Research Paper - Doctor Samuel Mudd

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Doctor Samuel Mudd and the Lincoln Assassination

years of homeschooling.3 Two years later, he transferred to Georgetown College in Washington,

and anyone else who got in his way.

overall.32 The specific charge against Mudd was that:

after the murder of the said Abraham Lincoln.33

board later found:

It, therefore, unanimously concludes that the military commission did

This denial constituted such a gross infringement of his Constitutionally protected

his innocence continues.

great things with them and will surely never be forgotten.

Hamilton, Stacey. "Mudd, Samuel Alexander (1833-1883), alleged conspirator in the

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