When Abraham Lincoln was seeking the Republican nomination for President in 1860, he said: “Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is...” But most Southerners, including Southern Marylanders, didn’t believe Lincoln would “let it alone.” He failed to carry Maryland or a single southern state in the November 6, 1860 presidential election.
 
Feelings against Lincoln were so high in Southern Maryland that shortly after the election was over a group of Charles County citizens gave their neighbor Nathan Burnham, who had voted for Lincoln, two weeks to pack up and leave the county. Four men, including William A. Mudd, were appointed to expel him if he didn’t leave voluntarily.
 
Whites in Charles County also began military preparation in the event Maryland seceded from the Union. Various military units were formed, members acquired uniforms and weapons, and the units began to drill regularly. These included the Smallwood Rifles, the Nanjemoy Rifle Company, the Bryantown Minutemen, and the Mounted Volunteers of Charles County. We don’t know if Dr. Mudd was an active member of any of these military units, but he was undoubtedly sympathetic to their purpose, which was to preserve slavery.
 
Jeremiah Dyer, Dr. Mudd’s brother-in-law, and Jeremiah T. Mudd, a cousin of Dr. Mudd, were active in collecting money to arm and equip the Mounted Volunteers. When asked at the Lincoln assassination conspiracy trial about the purpose of the military unit he belonged to, Jeremiah Dyer said “I do not know what the organization was particularly for.” He then added that “our company broke up immediately on the breakout of the war ... some of them went to Virginia and joined the rebel army.”

Civil War finally erupted on April 12, 1861 when Confederate forces in Charleston, South Carolina opened fire on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Jeremiah Dyer testified that he fled to Richmond with members of his unit after the war began to avoid being arrested for disloyalty. However, after a month in Richmond, he decided not to join the Confederate Army after all, returned home, signed a loyalty oath, and settled back into the life of a tobacco farmer. 

In August 1861, Congress passed the First Confiscation Act which authorized the President to seize any property, including slaves, employed in service to the Confederacy. While this Act allowed the Army to provide refuge to fugitive slaves in the Confederacy, it did not technically apply to fugitive slaves from states not in rebellion, including Maryland. Nevertheless, as Union soldiers began to flood into Southern Maryland, slaves began to run away from their masters and seek refuge in the Army’s camps.
 
More than ten thousand Union troops were stationed along the Charles County shore of the Potomac River opposite Virginia to prevent the Confederate Army from crossing into Maryland. General Joseph Hooker’s corps was stationed at Chicamuxen Creek, about ten miles west of Dr. Mudd’s farm. Its assignment was to protect the Union artillery batteries guarding the Potomac River. Runaway slaves sought refuge at General Hooker’s camp, Camp Fenton, and other Army camps around Charles County, as seen in the following runaway slave ads.

In November 1861, 400 Union soldiers of the 74th New York Volunteer Infantry, commanded by Colonel Charles K. Graham, fought skirmishes with rebel soldiers near Port Tobacco. Colonel Graham reported that when leaving the area “a large number of negroes followed, some on board the gunboats, but a majority in a large launch, which by some means they had obtained.”

One April 16, 1862, President Lincoln signed a bill abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C., enticing more Southern Maryland slaves to run away to freedom there. “These stampedes are becoming common,” reported the June 19, 1862 issue of the Port Tobacco Times.

Three months later, July 17, 1862, Washington became an even greater magnet for Maryland slaves when Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act which declared that slaves owned by disloyal masters were free. Many Maryland slaves thought their masters fit that description exactly. As a result, fugitive Maryland slaves now routinely claimed that their former owners were disloyal when they appeared at Army encampments seeking safe haven.

With slaves running away to freedom in Washington, D.C. or joining the Union Army, Dr. Mudd and other Southern Maryland farmers were unable to raise a crop in the summer of 1864. Farm income and land values in Southern Maryland fell sharply. Several people testified at the conspiracy trial that Dr. Mudd wanted to sell his farm.

As Dr. Mudd pondered whether to continue working his farm by himself, or sell it and move, he was introduced to someone who said he might be interested in buying his property, a 26 year-old actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth.