The Final Years
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When Dr. Mudd returned home in March 1869, well-wishing friends and strangers, and inquiring newspaper reporters besieged him. Dr. Mudd was very reluctant to talk to the press because he felt they had misquoted him in the past. He gave one interview to a New York Herald reporter, but immediately regretted it. The reporter’s story contained several factual errors, and Dr. Mudd complained that it misrepresented his work at Fort Jefferson during the yellow fever epidemic. On the whole though, he must have been gratified to find that he continued to enjoy the respect and friendship of his friends and neighbors. Dr. Mudd resumed his medical practice, slowly brought the family farm back to productivity, and became active once again in the life of his community. In 1874, he was elected Master (chief officer) of the local farmers association, Bryantown Grange 47. In 1876, seven years after he returned home, he was elected Vice President of the local Democratic Tilden-Hendricks presidential election committee. Tilden lost that year to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in a hotly disputed election. The next year Dr. Mudd and Samuel Cox, Jr. ran on the Democratic and Conservative ticket for the Maryland House of Delegates. Cox won, but Dr. Mudd was defeated by the popular Republican William D. Mitchell. |
Port Tobacco Times, November 2, 1877
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Before he went to prison, Dr. and Mrs. Mudd had four children – Andrew, Lillian, Thomas, and Samuel. After prison, they had five more – Henry, Stella, Edward, Rose de Lima, and Mary Eleanor, known as ‘Nettie.’ Henry, named after Dr. Mudd’s father, was born a year after Dr. Mudd returned home from prison, but died when only eight months old. The children were:
Andrew Jerome Mudd (1858-1882)
Lillian Augusta Mudd (1860-1940)
Thomas Dyer Mudd (1861-1929)
Samuel Alexander Mudd II (1864-1930)
Henry Mudd (1870-died after 8 months)
Stella Marie Mudd (1871-1952)
Edward Joseph Mudd (1873-1946)
Rose De Lima Mudd (1875-1943)
Mary Eleanor "Nettie" Mudd (1878-1943)
The 1870 census showed twenty people living at the Mudd farm. This included Dr. Mudd (35), Mrs. Mudd (34), their children Andrew (11), Lillian (10), Thomas (8), Samuel (6), and baby Henry , Mary G. Simons, (49), Mrs. Mudd’s sister Betty Dyer (42), their long-time farm worker John Best (70), two domestic servants, Lettie Hall (17) and Louisa Cristie (14), farm laborer William Moore (18), and the Washington family, Frank Washington (32), wife Betty (30), and their children, Edward (13), J.R. (9), Sidney (7), Catherine (5), and William (2).
Betty Washington’s husband Frank who had been a slave on Dr. Mudd’s farm before emancipation remained there afterwards as a paid plowman. His wife Betty, who had been a slave to Mrs. Adelaide Middleton, joined her husband on the Mudd farm after emancipation, working as the family cook. Frank and Betty Washington both testified in Dr. Mudd’s defense at the conspiracy trial.
Dr. Mudd continued to study and write about yellow fever after returning home. An article he wrote on yellow fever was printed in the Baltimore Sun newspaper on June 25, 1873. In the article, Dr. Mudd points out that there is “a wonderful diversity of opinion” about the cause and treatment of yellow fever. It would be almost two decades after he died in 1883 that researchers would discover that yellow fever was transmitted by infected mosquitoes. After that, yellow fever was controllable by mosquito eradication programs, and eventually by a yellow fever vaccine.
The five year period from 1873 to 1878 encompassed the third longest economic depression in U.S. history. Bankruptcies and insolvencies were widespread. In rural areas, the downward pressure on prices reduced farm income and created great hardship. Dr. Mudd and his family were not exempt from this hardship. In February 1878, Congressman Eli Jones Henkle submitted HR 3418, a “Bill for the Relief of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd” during the 2nd session of the 45th Congress, U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Henkle represented the 5th District of Maryland where Dr. Mudd lived. The bill, which died in committee, said:
H.R. 3418
In the House of Representatives
February 25, 1878
Read twice, referred to the Committee of Claims, and ordered to be printed.
Mr. Henkle, on leave, introduced the following bill:
A Bill
For the relief of Doctor Samuel A. Mudd, of Maryland.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that the Secretary of the Treasury be, and is hereby, authorized and directed to pay to Doctor Samuel A. Mudd, of Maryland, or his legally authorized attorney, the sum of three thousand dollars for services rendered to the United States as surgeon and assistant surgeon during the epidemic of yellow fever at Fort Jefferson, Florida, in the year eighteen hundred and sixty-seven.
Also in 1878, despite their own hardships. Dr. and Mrs. Mudd temporarily took in a seven year-old orphan named John Burke. Burke was one of 300 abandoned children sent to Maryland families from the New York City Foundling Asylum run by the Catholic Sisters of Charity. A large number of orphans and abandoned children was one of the legacies of the Civil War. Other local families also took in children. The Burke boy was permanently settled with farmer Ben Jenkins.
Although the rural economy began to recover as the depression of 1873 - 1878 ended, Dr. Mudd’s financial problems continued. On April 28, 1880, the Port Tobacco Times and Charles County Advertiser reported that Dr. Mudd’s barn and its contents, including his tobacco crop, were destroyed by fire. The paper reported:
Heavy Loss by Fire
On Saturday last, a barn belonging to Dr. S.A. Mudd, near Bryantown, was entirely destroyed by fire, together with its contents, between 6000 and 8000 pounds of tobacco, two horses, a wagon and a lot of farm implements. It seems that some hands had been engaged in clearing a piece of new land on the doctor’s farm about a quarter of a mile from the barn, fire being used for the purpose of burning the brush and other growth. The fire it appears was neglected and communicated to the barn, which was totally destroyed in a very few minutes. We understand that there was no insurance upon the barn or any portion of its contents. Thus we have been called upon to chronicle two very heavy losses from fire by citizens of our county within the last few weeks.
Nettie Mudd was just five years old when her father died in 1883. When she wrote The Life of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd in 1906, she turned to her mother for the details of her father’s life. An excerpt from Nettie's book said:
My father regained his liberty on the 8th day of March, 1869, having endured imprisonment for a period of four years, lacking about six weeks. Two days prior to the issue of the above order from the War Department, on the 13th of February, President Johnson wrote a note to my mother and sent it to her home by a special messenger, requesting her to come to Washington and receive my father's pardon. She left for Washington immediately, but being detained on the way, did not reach the city till the following morning. Once there, she repaired, in company with Dr. J. H. Blanford, my father's brother-in-law, to the White House. In a few moments President Johnson sent for my mother to come into the executive office. There he delivered to her the papers for the release of my father. My mother asked him if the papers would go safely through the mails. His reply, before he had signed the papers, was: "Mrs. Mudd, I will put the President's seal on them. I have complied with my promise to release your husband before I left the White House. I no longer hold myself responsible. Should these papers go amiss you may never hear from them again, as they may be put away in some pigeon-hole or corner. I guess, Mrs. Mudd, you think this is tardy justice in carrying out my promise made to you two years ago. The situation was such, however, that I could not act as I wanted to do.
After he had signed and sealed the papers, he handed them to my mother, who took them, thanked him and left. She had intended going to the Dry Tortugas and delivering in person the release to her long-afflicted husband. This, however, she was not permitted to do, as when she reached Baltimore, intending to take the steamer from that port for the Dry Tortugas, she found that the boat had departed a few hours before her arrival, and that another would not sail for two or three weeks. She therefore sent the papers by express to her brother in New Orleans, Thomas 0. Dyer, who paid a Mr. Loutrel three hundred dollars to deliver them to my father at Fort Jefferson.
On the 20th day of March, 1869, sixteen days after President Johnson's term of office had expired, my father arrived home, frail, weak and sick, never again to be strong during the thirteen years he survived. It is needless for me to try to picture the feelings and incidents of his home-coming. Pleasure and pain were intermingled—pleasure to him to be once more in his old home surrounded by his loved ones, and pleasure to them to have him back once more; pain to them to see him so broken in health and strength, and pain to him to find his savings all gone and his family almost destitute.
Again we find him, after a brief period for rest, engaged in the struggle to regain in a measure his lost means and position. This he never accomplished. He found himself surrounded by exacting duties, yet handicapped by innumerable disadvantages. There were no laborers to cultivate the farm; the fences had fallen down or been destroyed by the Federal soldiery, and the fields were unprotected against intrusive cattle; buildings were out of repair, and money almost unobtainable. His hardships in prison, however, had in a measure taught him to be patient. Gradually things became brighter. When the warm glow of summer passed into harvest time, he was encouraged by the fact that a generous yield of earth's products rewarded him for his labor. He only partially regained his practice. While he was confined in prison many of the families he had attended employed other physicians. Many of these families sought my father's services on his return, but some did not. Apart from this, the people of the neighborhood had become comparatively poor by reason of their losses occasioned by the war. A great deal of his attention and skill was therefore given gratuitously.
During the four years they were together in prison Edward Spangler became very much attached to my father. As a consequence, a short time after Spangler's release, he came to our home early one morning, and his greeting to my mother, after my father had introduced him, was: 'Mrs. Mudd, I came down last night, and asked some one to tell me the way here. I followed the road, but when I arrived I was afraid of your dogs, and I roosted in a tree.' He had come to stay.
He occupied himself chiefly in helping our old gardener, Mr. Best, and in doing small jobs of carpenter's work in the neighborhood. My father gave him five acres of land in a wood containing a bubbling spring, about five hundred yards from our dwelling. Here Spangler contemplated erecting a building and establishing for himself a home. This purpose, however, was never to be realized. About eighteen months after he came he contracted a severe illness, the result of having been caught in a heavy rain, which thoroughly saturated his clothing. His sickness resulted in his death—rheumatism of the heart being the immediate cause.
He was a quiet, genial man, greatly respected by the members of our family and the people of the neighborhood. His greatest pleasure seemed to be found in extending kindnesses to others, and particularly to children, of whom he was very fond. Not long after his death my father, in searching for a tool in Spangler's tool chest, found a manuscript, in Spangler's own handwriting, and presumably written while he was in prison. This manuscript contained Spangler's statement of his connection with the great 'conspiracy.' My father died from pneumonia, January 10, 1883, after an illness of nine days. He contracted the disease while visiting the sick in the neighborhood in the nighttime and in inclement weather. He was buried in Saint Mary's cemetery, attached to the Bryantown church, where he had first met Booth. He was in the fiftieth year of his age at the time of his death.
Dr. Mudd’s 11 year-old daughter Stella was at her father’s bedside when he died on January 10, 1883. In a 1950 letter, an elderly Stella (Sister Rosamunda, Catholic nun) wrote to Dr. Richard D. Mudd, the son of Stella’s brother Thomas:
About a year before his death, he was not well and I was left to keep him company. While busy elsewhere he walked the floor. I thought he was saying ‘misery me’ - it was the Misererie. New Year’s Day he went to Mass, visited a very sick patient after Mass - had pneumonia - died Jan. 10th. The day before his death he said to my mother ‘Don’t wait till it is too late, send for the priest, I know I am going to die.’ The priest came, did not think need urgent and had to meet train, so did administer sacraments. The priest of Bryantown parish paid father a visit that day, heard his confession. Tom, your father, went for Father Southgate that night in snow and bitter cold. Father S. came, gave last rites - said prayers for dying and he was gone to God. I was present at death bed. Father said to my Mother - ‘It is not hard to die. I am just waiting for call of the Old Master.’ Mother said to him ‘How can you talk like that and leave me with a house full of children?’ He replied ‘God knows best’ (his last words) and died.
The Port Tobacco Times and Charles County Advertiser ran the following obituary for Dr. Mudd on January 19, 1883:
Death of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd
Dr. Samuel A. Mudd died at his residence near Bryantown in this county on Wednesday of last week after a short illness of pneumonia. So short had been his illness that no information of it had been received here, and being, as he was, in the prime of manly vigor, the sudden intelligence of his death received here on Friday was as great a surprise as it was an unfeigned and universal regret.
In the death of Dr. Mudd, Charles County has lost one of its most honored citizens, the profession a learned and useful member, while his family must endure the loss of a kind, loving and painstaking husband and father. He was ever ready to lend his aid and assistance to the poor and needy, and around the bed of pain and suffering his generous nature was ever ready to extend comfort and solace, with his means and the talents with which God had endowed him.
In the death of Dr. Mudd has passed from earth the last of those who were associated in the assassination of the lamented President Lincoln. As free from any guilty connection with conspirators in this crime, which will ever darken the pages of history, as an unborn babe, he nevertheless, upon bare suspicion was made to suffer from the brutal treatment of an enraged and ungovernable people. Awed by the circumstances of finding the assassin of the President in his house, he having imposed upon his generous nature by false statements as to the origin of his accident, his crime was simply not admitting the service rendered to Booth in setting his leg. Under the excitement prevailing at the time, Dr. Mudd denied any knowledge of Booth, or that he had been at his house. He was afraid to admit service rendered even under the misapprehension that the accident occurred by a fall from his horse while traveling through the county, as he had been told by Booth, would certainly secure his arrest and incarceration, his courage forsook him and he denied his having been with him, when upon search of his house the boot leg was found which had been cut from the broken limb with “J. Wilkes” written within it. To then tell the whole truth availed him nothing. He was tried for conspiracy in the assassination, convicted and sentenced to the Dry Tortugas for life, when after some three years he was pardoned by President Johnson. It is an injustice to the memory of a generous, warmhearted man to associate him with the guilty Booth. His only crime being rendering medical aid to Booth in his suffering, he not knowing Booth to be guilty of any crime, but laboring under the false impression he had sustained his accident in an innocent fall from his horse.
He was in his 48th year at the time of his death. He leaves a widow and six children to mourn his great loss.
Dr. Mudd was just 49 years old when he died. He is buried in the cemetery at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Bryantown, the same church where he first met John Wilkes Booth.
Andrew Jerome Mudd (1858-1882)
Lillian Augusta Mudd (1860-1940)
Thomas Dyer Mudd (1861-1929)
Samuel Alexander Mudd II (1864-1930)
Henry Mudd (1870-died after 8 months)
Stella Marie Mudd (1871-1952)
Edward Joseph Mudd (1873-1946)
Rose De Lima Mudd (1875-1943)
Mary Eleanor "Nettie" Mudd (1878-1943)
The 1870 census showed twenty people living at the Mudd farm. This included Dr. Mudd (35), Mrs. Mudd (34), their children Andrew (11), Lillian (10), Thomas (8), Samuel (6), and baby Henry , Mary G. Simons, (49), Mrs. Mudd’s sister Betty Dyer (42), their long-time farm worker John Best (70), two domestic servants, Lettie Hall (17) and Louisa Cristie (14), farm laborer William Moore (18), and the Washington family, Frank Washington (32), wife Betty (30), and their children, Edward (13), J.R. (9), Sidney (7), Catherine (5), and William (2).
Betty Washington’s husband Frank who had been a slave on Dr. Mudd’s farm before emancipation remained there afterwards as a paid plowman. His wife Betty, who had been a slave to Mrs. Adelaide Middleton, joined her husband on the Mudd farm after emancipation, working as the family cook. Frank and Betty Washington both testified in Dr. Mudd’s defense at the conspiracy trial.
Dr. Mudd continued to study and write about yellow fever after returning home. An article he wrote on yellow fever was printed in the Baltimore Sun newspaper on June 25, 1873. In the article, Dr. Mudd points out that there is “a wonderful diversity of opinion” about the cause and treatment of yellow fever. It would be almost two decades after he died in 1883 that researchers would discover that yellow fever was transmitted by infected mosquitoes. After that, yellow fever was controllable by mosquito eradication programs, and eventually by a yellow fever vaccine.
The five year period from 1873 to 1878 encompassed the third longest economic depression in U.S. history. Bankruptcies and insolvencies were widespread. In rural areas, the downward pressure on prices reduced farm income and created great hardship. Dr. Mudd and his family were not exempt from this hardship. In February 1878, Congressman Eli Jones Henkle submitted HR 3418, a “Bill for the Relief of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd” during the 2nd session of the 45th Congress, U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Henkle represented the 5th District of Maryland where Dr. Mudd lived. The bill, which died in committee, said:
H.R. 3418
In the House of Representatives
February 25, 1878
Read twice, referred to the Committee of Claims, and ordered to be printed.
Mr. Henkle, on leave, introduced the following bill:
A Bill
For the relief of Doctor Samuel A. Mudd, of Maryland.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that the Secretary of the Treasury be, and is hereby, authorized and directed to pay to Doctor Samuel A. Mudd, of Maryland, or his legally authorized attorney, the sum of three thousand dollars for services rendered to the United States as surgeon and assistant surgeon during the epidemic of yellow fever at Fort Jefferson, Florida, in the year eighteen hundred and sixty-seven.
Also in 1878, despite their own hardships. Dr. and Mrs. Mudd temporarily took in a seven year-old orphan named John Burke. Burke was one of 300 abandoned children sent to Maryland families from the New York City Foundling Asylum run by the Catholic Sisters of Charity. A large number of orphans and abandoned children was one of the legacies of the Civil War. Other local families also took in children. The Burke boy was permanently settled with farmer Ben Jenkins.
Although the rural economy began to recover as the depression of 1873 - 1878 ended, Dr. Mudd’s financial problems continued. On April 28, 1880, the Port Tobacco Times and Charles County Advertiser reported that Dr. Mudd’s barn and its contents, including his tobacco crop, were destroyed by fire. The paper reported:
Heavy Loss by Fire
On Saturday last, a barn belonging to Dr. S.A. Mudd, near Bryantown, was entirely destroyed by fire, together with its contents, between 6000 and 8000 pounds of tobacco, two horses, a wagon and a lot of farm implements. It seems that some hands had been engaged in clearing a piece of new land on the doctor’s farm about a quarter of a mile from the barn, fire being used for the purpose of burning the brush and other growth. The fire it appears was neglected and communicated to the barn, which was totally destroyed in a very few minutes. We understand that there was no insurance upon the barn or any portion of its contents. Thus we have been called upon to chronicle two very heavy losses from fire by citizens of our county within the last few weeks.
Nettie Mudd was just five years old when her father died in 1883. When she wrote The Life of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd in 1906, she turned to her mother for the details of her father’s life. An excerpt from Nettie's book said:
My father regained his liberty on the 8th day of March, 1869, having endured imprisonment for a period of four years, lacking about six weeks. Two days prior to the issue of the above order from the War Department, on the 13th of February, President Johnson wrote a note to my mother and sent it to her home by a special messenger, requesting her to come to Washington and receive my father's pardon. She left for Washington immediately, but being detained on the way, did not reach the city till the following morning. Once there, she repaired, in company with Dr. J. H. Blanford, my father's brother-in-law, to the White House. In a few moments President Johnson sent for my mother to come into the executive office. There he delivered to her the papers for the release of my father. My mother asked him if the papers would go safely through the mails. His reply, before he had signed the papers, was: "Mrs. Mudd, I will put the President's seal on them. I have complied with my promise to release your husband before I left the White House. I no longer hold myself responsible. Should these papers go amiss you may never hear from them again, as they may be put away in some pigeon-hole or corner. I guess, Mrs. Mudd, you think this is tardy justice in carrying out my promise made to you two years ago. The situation was such, however, that I could not act as I wanted to do.
After he had signed and sealed the papers, he handed them to my mother, who took them, thanked him and left. She had intended going to the Dry Tortugas and delivering in person the release to her long-afflicted husband. This, however, she was not permitted to do, as when she reached Baltimore, intending to take the steamer from that port for the Dry Tortugas, she found that the boat had departed a few hours before her arrival, and that another would not sail for two or three weeks. She therefore sent the papers by express to her brother in New Orleans, Thomas 0. Dyer, who paid a Mr. Loutrel three hundred dollars to deliver them to my father at Fort Jefferson.
On the 20th day of March, 1869, sixteen days after President Johnson's term of office had expired, my father arrived home, frail, weak and sick, never again to be strong during the thirteen years he survived. It is needless for me to try to picture the feelings and incidents of his home-coming. Pleasure and pain were intermingled—pleasure to him to be once more in his old home surrounded by his loved ones, and pleasure to them to have him back once more; pain to them to see him so broken in health and strength, and pain to him to find his savings all gone and his family almost destitute.
Again we find him, after a brief period for rest, engaged in the struggle to regain in a measure his lost means and position. This he never accomplished. He found himself surrounded by exacting duties, yet handicapped by innumerable disadvantages. There were no laborers to cultivate the farm; the fences had fallen down or been destroyed by the Federal soldiery, and the fields were unprotected against intrusive cattle; buildings were out of repair, and money almost unobtainable. His hardships in prison, however, had in a measure taught him to be patient. Gradually things became brighter. When the warm glow of summer passed into harvest time, he was encouraged by the fact that a generous yield of earth's products rewarded him for his labor. He only partially regained his practice. While he was confined in prison many of the families he had attended employed other physicians. Many of these families sought my father's services on his return, but some did not. Apart from this, the people of the neighborhood had become comparatively poor by reason of their losses occasioned by the war. A great deal of his attention and skill was therefore given gratuitously.
During the four years they were together in prison Edward Spangler became very much attached to my father. As a consequence, a short time after Spangler's release, he came to our home early one morning, and his greeting to my mother, after my father had introduced him, was: 'Mrs. Mudd, I came down last night, and asked some one to tell me the way here. I followed the road, but when I arrived I was afraid of your dogs, and I roosted in a tree.' He had come to stay.
He occupied himself chiefly in helping our old gardener, Mr. Best, and in doing small jobs of carpenter's work in the neighborhood. My father gave him five acres of land in a wood containing a bubbling spring, about five hundred yards from our dwelling. Here Spangler contemplated erecting a building and establishing for himself a home. This purpose, however, was never to be realized. About eighteen months after he came he contracted a severe illness, the result of having been caught in a heavy rain, which thoroughly saturated his clothing. His sickness resulted in his death—rheumatism of the heart being the immediate cause.
He was a quiet, genial man, greatly respected by the members of our family and the people of the neighborhood. His greatest pleasure seemed to be found in extending kindnesses to others, and particularly to children, of whom he was very fond. Not long after his death my father, in searching for a tool in Spangler's tool chest, found a manuscript, in Spangler's own handwriting, and presumably written while he was in prison. This manuscript contained Spangler's statement of his connection with the great 'conspiracy.' My father died from pneumonia, January 10, 1883, after an illness of nine days. He contracted the disease while visiting the sick in the neighborhood in the nighttime and in inclement weather. He was buried in Saint Mary's cemetery, attached to the Bryantown church, where he had first met Booth. He was in the fiftieth year of his age at the time of his death.
Dr. Mudd’s 11 year-old daughter Stella was at her father’s bedside when he died on January 10, 1883. In a 1950 letter, an elderly Stella (Sister Rosamunda, Catholic nun) wrote to Dr. Richard D. Mudd, the son of Stella’s brother Thomas:
About a year before his death, he was not well and I was left to keep him company. While busy elsewhere he walked the floor. I thought he was saying ‘misery me’ - it was the Misererie. New Year’s Day he went to Mass, visited a very sick patient after Mass - had pneumonia - died Jan. 10th. The day before his death he said to my mother ‘Don’t wait till it is too late, send for the priest, I know I am going to die.’ The priest came, did not think need urgent and had to meet train, so did administer sacraments. The priest of Bryantown parish paid father a visit that day, heard his confession. Tom, your father, went for Father Southgate that night in snow and bitter cold. Father S. came, gave last rites - said prayers for dying and he was gone to God. I was present at death bed. Father said to my Mother - ‘It is not hard to die. I am just waiting for call of the Old Master.’ Mother said to him ‘How can you talk like that and leave me with a house full of children?’ He replied ‘God knows best’ (his last words) and died.
The Port Tobacco Times and Charles County Advertiser ran the following obituary for Dr. Mudd on January 19, 1883:
Death of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd
Dr. Samuel A. Mudd died at his residence near Bryantown in this county on Wednesday of last week after a short illness of pneumonia. So short had been his illness that no information of it had been received here, and being, as he was, in the prime of manly vigor, the sudden intelligence of his death received here on Friday was as great a surprise as it was an unfeigned and universal regret.
In the death of Dr. Mudd, Charles County has lost one of its most honored citizens, the profession a learned and useful member, while his family must endure the loss of a kind, loving and painstaking husband and father. He was ever ready to lend his aid and assistance to the poor and needy, and around the bed of pain and suffering his generous nature was ever ready to extend comfort and solace, with his means and the talents with which God had endowed him.
In the death of Dr. Mudd has passed from earth the last of those who were associated in the assassination of the lamented President Lincoln. As free from any guilty connection with conspirators in this crime, which will ever darken the pages of history, as an unborn babe, he nevertheless, upon bare suspicion was made to suffer from the brutal treatment of an enraged and ungovernable people. Awed by the circumstances of finding the assassin of the President in his house, he having imposed upon his generous nature by false statements as to the origin of his accident, his crime was simply not admitting the service rendered to Booth in setting his leg. Under the excitement prevailing at the time, Dr. Mudd denied any knowledge of Booth, or that he had been at his house. He was afraid to admit service rendered even under the misapprehension that the accident occurred by a fall from his horse while traveling through the county, as he had been told by Booth, would certainly secure his arrest and incarceration, his courage forsook him and he denied his having been with him, when upon search of his house the boot leg was found which had been cut from the broken limb with “J. Wilkes” written within it. To then tell the whole truth availed him nothing. He was tried for conspiracy in the assassination, convicted and sentenced to the Dry Tortugas for life, when after some three years he was pardoned by President Johnson. It is an injustice to the memory of a generous, warmhearted man to associate him with the guilty Booth. His only crime being rendering medical aid to Booth in his suffering, he not knowing Booth to be guilty of any crime, but laboring under the false impression he had sustained his accident in an innocent fall from his horse.
He was in his 48th year at the time of his death. He leaves a widow and six children to mourn his great loss.
Dr. Mudd was just 49 years old when he died. He is buried in the cemetery at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Bryantown, the same church where he first met John Wilkes Booth.
Dr. & Mrs. Mudd's gravesite at St. Mary's Catholic Church Cemetery in Bryantown, Maryland.
