What’s In a Name?

A while back, I was “googling” a particular type of business in the area where I was born and raised, and lived until very recently, when I abruptly ended my search and made an appointment with a local firm. I hadn’t bothered with looking for five-star reviews on Yelp before contacting this establishment because one of the surnames associated with it was also that of a man who had always been remembered and well-respected by my people. That man was a country doctor who answered a knock at his door just before dawn on an Easter Saturday 160 years ago.



The only thing that Dr. Samuel Mudd was likely “guilty” of would be an involvement in the Confederate underground during the North’s occupation of Maryland. In spite of what the rewriters of the past would have us believe, those who resided in the Union-held areas of the Upper South had a right to defend their homeland by covert means. The same historians who praise France’s La Résistance, will villainize the Southern resistance during the War Between the States.


But though rumors concerning his role as a Confederate operative did not help Dr. Mudd as the tumultuous events in the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination played out, his biggest problem would certainly have been his acquaintance with John Wilkes Booth, having been introduced to him on a November Sunday in 1864 at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Bryantown, Maryland. Booth would, also, around that time, make a visit to Mudd’s plantation in connection with buying a horse, and the two would meet once again—by chance, according to Mudd—on a Washington, D.C. street in late December.


Regarding what happened in the hours after the injured Booth fled from Ford’s Theater and made his way across the Anacostia River and southward into Maryland, there are two questions to be answered: Did Dr. Mudd provide medical treatment to a man he knew to be Booth? And even if he did recognize Booth, who was wearing a false beard and a scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face, did he know he was setting the leg of an assassin? Dr. Mudd insisted that he had not recognized the actor and that he had not known at that time what Booth had done.


But the cards, in the form of circumstantial evidence, were stacked against Mudd. His defense counsel, General Thomas Ewing (USA), however, was determined to clear his name, shaming the illicitly convened military tribunal which passed judgement on Mudd. Inveighing against the many irregularities of the proceedings, General Ewing made the case that there was no evidence to prove that Booth’s stopover at Mudd’s house was prearranged. With his pursuers breathing down his neck, Booth, Ewing argued, had he not been in need of a doctor, would have taken a more direct route to the banks of the Potomac and from there over to Virginia. He would have known that there were many people in that part of Maryland who would have helped him to evade the Yankees, whom they despised. Booth only needed to involve Mudd, Ewing put to the judges, because Booth caught his leg in some bunting as he was jumping from the balcony onto the stage after shooting Lincoln.



Ewing’s astute arguments for the most part fell on deaf ears, but they, at least, influenced one of the tribunal judges to vote against hanging Mudd, sparing the doctor the walk up the thirteen steps to the gallows just outside the courtroom at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary. He would live but he would spend four years at Fort Jefferson Prison in Florida until pardoned by Andrew Johnson in February of 1869 for his heroism in saving so many lives at the risk of his own during an outbreak of yellow fever at Fort Jefferson. Thus ended the ordeal that had begun for Mudd that early spring morning when two horsemen emerged from a copperhead snake-infested bog known as Devil’s Nest and headed for his farm.



Johnson’s pardon, though it freed Mudd, was meaningless. There was nothing to pardon. Had Mudd not been denied a legal trial when civil courts at that time, in the words of General Ewing, were “open, unobstructed, without a single impediment to the full and perfect administration of justice,” he would have been found not guilty just as John Surratt was two years later.


Some defenders of Dr. Mudd have been more comfortable with a “respectably” Northern version of the “Prisoner of Shark Island.” The truth is that the real Samuel Mudd said of Yankees that they had “caused the destruction of one of the most glorious nations upon the face of the earth.” Mudd was a “union man” only in one respect: He, just as Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, loved the old, Calhounian union, not the coercive one Lincoln had in mind.

There are some Mudd descendants who, unfortunately, choose not to speak of their ancestry at all, but, one of his kinsmen, Mrs. Louise Mudd Arehart, a true Southern lady, for years happily greeted visitors and conducted tours at Dr. Mudd’s old homeplace-turned-museum. Speaking in what the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson once called “a soft drawl,” Mrs. Earhart would proudly introduce herself as Dr. Mudd’s granddaughter and would tell “Grandpa’s” story, avowing his innocence. What can be said with certainty is that her grandfather, a highly regarded citizen of occupied Maryland, in the blink of an eye, found himself the victim of a miscarriage of justice, the scapegoat of a vengeful and highhanded regime contemptuous of constitutional niceties.

Sources

Nettie Mudd, ed., The Life of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd: containing his letters from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas island, where he was imprisoned four years for alleged complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, with statements of Mrs. Samuel A. Mudd, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, and Edward Spangler regarding the assassination and the argument of General Ewing on the question of the jurisdiction of the Military commission, and on the law and facts of the case ; also "diary" of John Wilkes Booth (New York and Washington: The Neale Publishing Company, 1906).


Andrew Ferguson, “The Last Battle of the Civil War,” The Weekly Standard, December 30, 2002/January 6, 2003, p.17.