Samuel Mudd: Booth's Boot, Yellow Fever and a Pardon From Fort Jefferson

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Dr. Samuel Mudd was born in December 1833 in Charles County, Maryland, and raised on Oak Hill, his father's tobacco plantation worked by 89 enslaved people. Educated at Georgetown College and the University of Maryland, he settled at St. Catherine with his wife Sarah Frances Dyer. This episode follows how emancipation in Maryland in 1864, the nearby Camp Stanton training Black Union soldiers, and Mudd's own written belief that slavery was divinely ordained shaped the man Confederate agents steered John Wilkes Booth toward in late 1864, when the plan was still to kidnap Lincoln.

At 4 a.m. after the assassination, Booth and David Herold arrived at Mudd's door. Mudd splinted Booth's broken leg, then waited a full day after hearing the news in Bryantown before alerting authorities, and told investigators he had never seen the man before. A military tribunal convicted him, and he escaped the gallows by a single vote. Sent to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, he tried to escape, was shackled in the dungeon, and then took over the prison hospital during the 1867 yellow fever epidemic, earning a petition from the soldiers and a pardon from Andrew Johnson in 1869.

The phrase "your name is mud" traces to at least 1823, a decade before Samuel Mudd was born.
Mudd introduced Booth to Confederate agent John Surratt in Washington in December 1864.
Detectives found the boot Mudd cut from Booth's leg with "J. Wilkes" written inside the cuff.
Formerly enslaved workers testified that Mudd shot an enslaved man in the leg and said Lincoln ought to be shot.
His grandson Dr. Richard Mudd campaigned for exoneration, but the Supreme Court declined the case in 2003.

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