Mudd, Samuel (Alexander)

(1833–83) physician; born in Charles County, Maryland. A Maryland physician and Confederate sympathizer, he set John Wilkes Booth's broken leg after Lincoln's assassination. He was sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of abetting Booth's escape; although he had met Booth at church, he never was implicated in any way in the plot to kill Lincoln. He heroically nursed fellow prisoners at Fort Jefferson (off Key West, Florida) through a yellow fever epidemic before his 1869 pardon and return to Maryland. Continual efforts by his descendants to have his guilty conviction set aside—on grounds that he was only doing his duty as a doctor—continue to this day, but have so far been unavailing.

References in periodicals archive

Samuel Mudd, Samuel Arnold, and Ford Theater carpenter Edmund Spangler.

Samuel Mudd, Samuel Arnold, and Michael O'Laughlen received life prison sentences, though President Johnson pardoned the surviving prisoners before leaving office in 1869.

The assassination plot: conspiracy history, 1865: as Americans face the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, it serves as a reminder that conspiracies have always existed and had a significant impact upon history

(26) Henry Simms was a slave owned by Henry Lowe Mudd, Samuel Mudd's father, and Richard Washington was a slave owned by Samuel Mudd.

DR. MUDD AND THE "COLORED" WITNESSES

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