Blood on the Moon

by Edward , Jr. Steers

  So here we have three individuals whose only acquaintance with one another occurred on board the Florida transporting Mudd to Fort Jefferson. Dutton and Dodd filed their claims immediately on their return to Washington. Keeler’s claim came four years later and was in response to his reading that efforts were being made to gain Mudd a presidential pardon.

  There is one more piece to the story of Mudd’s admission that he knew his patient was Booth all along. In 1893 Thomas Jones published his memoir about his effort to hide Booth and Herold in the pine thicket and safely send them across the Potomac River to Virginia.23 Samuel Cox Jr., the adopted son of Samuel Cox, owned a copy of Jones’s book and made annotations on several points mentioned by Jones. Among the annotations is one describing a conversation between the younger Cox and Mudd in 1877 when the two men toured Charles County together as candidates for state office.24 According to the younger Cox, Mudd admitted knowing his visitor was Booth. Mudd also acknowledged there were two meetings between himself and Booth prior to April 15: “He was horrified when told the President had been shot the night before, and, upon asking who had shot him the fellow had answered Booth. He [Mudd] told me his first impulse was to surrender Booth, that he had imposed upon him, had twice [emphasis added] forced himself upon him and now a third time, had come with a lie upon his tongue and received medical assistance.”25 Thus Cox Jr. confirms the statements of Dutton, Dodd, and Keeler that Mudd knew his visitor was Booth and that he had killed Lincoln. To believe Mudd’s claim of not knowing his injured visitor was John Wilkes Booth would require believing that all four witnesses had lied.

  As with most other aspects of Samuel Mudd’s story, his imprisonment in Fort Jefferson has been considerably distorted. In 1935 Paramount Pictures released a movie starring Warner Baxter based on Mudd’s trial and imprisonment under the gripping title of The Prisoner of Shark Island. Fort Jefferson was portrayed as an American “Devil’s Island” where prisoners were subjected to inhumane punishment and even thrown in a shark infested moat surrounding the fort. Dr. Mudd was portrayed as an innocent victim whose life was made unendurable because of the false accusations that he had aided John Wilkes Booth in the murder of President Lincoln. If this was not enough to justify his brutal treatment, his attempt to escape the prison two months after his arrival brought even greater punishment to him. The conditions in the prison and the alleged treatments were all exaggerated.

  Shortly after his arrival Dr. Mudd was assigned to the post hospital where he could put his medical training to some practical use and enjoy living conditions similar to the other employees in the hospital.26 From all indications it appeared that Mudd was pleased with his assignment and the opportunity to use his medical skills. Within six weeks Mudd wrote to his wife, “I have had several opportunities to make my escape, but knowing, or believing, it would show guilt, I have resolved to remain peaceable and quiet.”27 “The several opportunities” that Mudd alluded to stemmed from the casual treatment he received from his jailers. The next few weeks, however, would find a change of heart regarding escape. The 161st New York Infantry was replaced by the Eighty-second United States Colored Troops, a replacement that the southern Maryland doctor found especially disturbing. As a former slaveowner and slave capturer, Mudd viewed the new troops as an insult. “To be lorded over by a set of ignorant, prejudiced and irresponsible beings of the unbleached humanity was more than I could submit to,” he wrote in a letter to his wife.28

  Three weeks after Mudd had written his wife that he would not attempt escape, he did just that. Arriving on September 25, 1865, was a supply ship, the Thomas A. Scott. Mudd later wrote to his lawyer Thomas Ewing, “I had the advice of many and was promised aid by one of the quartermasters on the boat.” The “quartermaster” was a young seaman by the name of Henry Kelly. Precisely who gave Mudd advice and who arranged for Kelly to aid the doctor has never surfaced, but Mudd’s escape could not have been planned and carried out by Mudd alone. The effort raises interesting questions that remain unanswered.

  Mudd’s escape plan was rather simple and showed just how lax his treatment had been. Taking advantage of his ability to move freely about the Fort, Mudd dressed in a clean suit of clothes and simply walked out of the fort and up the gangplank of the Scott. Once on deck he was met by Henry Kelly, who took him below and hid him beneath some loosened floorboards in the hold. A routine check of the prisoners back inside the fort soon revealed that Mudd was missing. No ship left the fort without a check of all of the prisoners. A search of the ship was undertaken and Mudd was soon discovered. When challenged by the fort’s commandant as to who helped him hide in the hold, Mudd gave up the name of the sailor. Kelly denied any role in Mudd’s escape, claiming he was innocent, but Mudd had fingered him as the key man. Kelly was arrested and taken into the fort along with Mudd. In keeping with his character, Mudd criticized the government and all associated with the fort over his treatment following his escape attempt. Others had attempted to flee and upon their capture had had little done to them. In fact, little was done to Mudd. Whatever hardships befell him, his writing privileges were not affected. He was writing home again four days after his capture. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Mudd facetiously described his punishment: “I was placed under a boss, who put me to cleaning old bricks. I worked hard all day, and came very near finishing one brick.”29 In another letter to his brother-in-law dated a week later Mudd wrote: “I am taking my present hardship as a joke. I am not put back in the least. I will soon assume my former position [in the post hospital], or one equally respectable. The only thing connected with my present attitude is the name, and not the reality. I have no labor to perform, yet I am compelled to answer roll-call, and to sleep in the guardhouse at night. This will not last longer than this week.”30

  Mudd’s incarceration at Fort Jefferson was hardly cruel. No longer working in the hospital, Mudd was given privileges in the fort’s carpenter’s shop. On February 20, 1867, Mudd wrote to his wife about his current “occupation”: “I occupy my time principally in making little boxes, ornamenting them with different colors and varieties of wood.”31 Mudd had now become a craftsman. The restored Samuel A. Mudd house has among its many attractive furnishings several fine articles of cabinetry that were made by Mudd while in prison at Fort Jefferson. These items include an “inlaid center table,” a “ladies workbox,” and a “number of shells gathered by him while he was a prisoner and arranged in the form of wreaths of flowers.”32 Such items show that Mudd was given full privileges to the prison’s carpentry shop along with ample time to use the facilities. That cruelties occurred to certain prisoners appears to be true. An investigation into alleged acts of cruelty took place in 1866, and two officers were subsequently court-martialed for mistreating prisoners.33 Mudd’s treatment, however, stands in contrast to that of other prisoners who were not as fortunate.

  Mudd’s attempted escape was real enough. It is how it has become portrayed and the consequences of it that have been so mischaracterized. In 1903, Mudd’s youngest daughter, Nettie Mudd Monroe, published her biography of her father. Mrs. Monroe explained her father’s escape as an effort to reach the safety of the Federal court in Florida for the purpose of seeking protection under a writ of habeas corpus and thereby overturning his wrongful conviction by the justice system.34 Using Nettie’s account of her father’s attempted escape, a television documentary titled, Rewriting History: The Case of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, attempted to explain Mudd’s escape: “Dr. Mudd’s wife tried diligently to have her husband released. But as her efforts appeared fruitless, Dr. Mudd decided that he must try and get to Key West where he could obtain a Writ of Habeas Corpus [emphasis added]. On September 25th, 1865, even though he vowed he would not try to escape, Dr. Mudd attempted an escape from Fort Jefferson aboard the U.S. transport, ‘Thomas A. Scott.’ But before it sailed, he was discovered.”35

  The producers of the documentary only needed to read Mudd’s own account of why he attempted to escape to find the real reason. On O
ctober 18, 1865, twenty-four days after his attempt, Mudd wrote a letter to his wife in which he explained his actions: “My dear Frank, it is bad enough to be a prisoner in the hands of white men, your equals under the Constitution, but to be lorded over by a set of ignorant, prejudiced and irresponsible beings of the unbleached humanity, was more than I could submit to, when I had every reason to believe my chances of escape almost certain, and would be crowned with success.”36

  Mudd further explained his reason for attempting to escape in a letter to his brother-in-law Jeremiah Dyer as “the humiliation of being guarded by an ignorant, irresponsible & prejudiced negro Soldiery, before an Enlightened People as a justification. We are now guarded entirely by negro soldiers & a few white Officers a skins difference.” He then acknowledged, “Could we have had the White Regiment, the 161st N.Y.V. to guard the place no thought of leaving should have been harbored for a moment” (emphasis added).37 Mudd’s explanation for his attempted escape from Fort Jefferson was driven by a deep dislike for Black soldiers. His dislike, however, was not limited to Black soldiers, but for Blacks in general. In a letter to his wife dated December 12, 1865, Mudd wrote, “I am sorry to hear of the death of George Garrico and Mr. Bean. Our white population is wonderfully diminishing by death and other causes. The negroes will soon be in the majority, if not already. Should I be released any time shortly, and circumstances permit, I will use all my endeavors to find a more congenial locality.”38 Mudd’s suggestion of “White flight” shows that his dislike for Blacks goes beyond having to suffer under “unbleached” soldiery. It was Dr. Mudd’s view of Blacks and his dislike for Abraham Lincoln’s policies on emancipation that drove him into the waiting arms of John Wilkes Booth.

  Mudd’s image as an innocent victim whose prosecution was driven by a vengeful government was slow to emerge. It was not until some fifty-five years after his conviction that the public’s acceptance of Mudd’s guilt began to change. This change was due, in large part, to the efforts of his grandson, Dr. Richard Dyer Mudd, who began a crusade on his grandfather’s behalf in the late 1920s shortly after graduating from medical school. Many writers have accepted the sympathetic view put forward by Richard Mudd and other members of the Mudd family.39

  Most writers accept the erroneous claim that we would never have heard of Dr. Mudd if Booth had not broken his leg in jumping from the box at Ford’s Theatre. But a careful reading of the trial testimony of Army Detective Eaton G. Horner clearly shows that Samuel Mudd had been fingered by Samuel Arnold one day before the military authorities first visited Mudd at his home. When Samuel Arnold told Horner on April 17 that Booth carried letters of introduction to Drs. Mudd and Queen, Mudd became a suspect. This information would have sent detectives after Mudd and Queen even if Booth had not broken his leg and had bypassed Mudd’s house on his escape route. The fact that Mudd and Booth were linked was also corroborated by statements by George Atzerodt that appeared in the National Intelligencer: “Booth told Atzerodt about two weeks before the murder that he had sent provisions and liquor to Dr. Mudd’s for the supply of the party on their way to Richmond with the President.”40 If this was not sufficient, Louis Wiechmann linked Samuel Mudd to Booth when he told of the meeting between Booth, Surratt, Mudd, and himself at Booth’s hotel room in Washington on December 23, 1864. Irrespective of whether Booth had broken his leg and stopped by Dr. Mudd’s during the early morning hours of April 15, the government had considerable cause to pick up Mudd and consider him an intimate of John Wilkes Booth.

  If Louis Wiechmann had seriously damaged the defense of Mary Surratt, he proved devastating to Mudd’s case. Mudd had claimed to have met Booth on only one occasion and then only by accident. The government believed differently. Wiechmann’s revelation of the meeting in Washington in December and how Booth invited the three men to his hotel where a conversation took place was devastating to Mudd’s defense.

  Mudd’s attorney attacked Wiechmann from the start. He challenged the witness, discrediting his account of the meeting by proving that Mudd could not have been in Washington on the day Wiechmann claimed the meeting occurred. Ewing was emphatic in his summation: “There is no reliable evidence that [Dr. Mudd] ever met Booth before the assassination but once on Sunday and once the following day in November last” (emphasis added). Mudd had lied to his own lawyer about his meetings with Booth.

  Frederick Stone, who along with Thomas Ewing defended Mudd, came to believe that he too had been duped by Mudd. In 1883 shortly after Mudd’s death, the journalist George Alfred Townsend wrote a column about the doctor from Charles County. Townsend interviewed Stone and came away with an extraordinary quote: “The court very nearly hanged Dr. Mudd. His prevarications were painful. He had given his whole case away by not trusting even his counsel or neighbors or kinfolk. It was a terrible thing to extricate him from the coils he had woven about himself. He had denied knowing Booth when he knew him well. He was undoubtedly accessory to the abduction plot, though he may have supposed it would never come to anything. He denied knowing Booth when he came to his house when that was preposterous. He had been even intimate with Booth.”41

  On January 30, 1869, Frances Mudd wrote her last letter to her husband at Fort Jefferson. She began by writing, “When I last wrote I was hoping that it would be the last letter I would write to you on that miserable island, but I now feel very, very hopeful that this will be my last.”42 Frances was right. It was her last letter to her husband. On February 8 President Johnson granted Samuel Mudd and the two surviving conspirators imprisoned in Fort Jefferson a full and unconditional pardon. Johnson’s pardon specifically referred to Mudd’s humanitarian service during a serious yellow fever epidemic that had occurred at Fort Jefferson in the summer of 1867.43

  In August 1867 the first case of yellow fever appeared among one of the soldiers at the fort. A week later a second case appeared in another soldier from the same company. By the end of the month a third case had occurred. All three involved soldiers of Company K. Within three weeks the epidemic was at its peak, infecting two out of every three persons among the fort’s population. The post doctor and all four of the post’s nurses were dead within three weeks of the first case. On September 7 Dr. Daniel Whitehurst came from Key West to care for the sick. Mudd and Whitehurst had to handle the 270 patients now infected with the deadly virus.

  Yellow fever was among the most widely feared and violent diseases that ravaged the world in the nineteenth century. Historically, it may have first appeared in the Western Hemisphere among members of Columbus’s second expedition to the Americas in 1495. It was first described as an epidemic in Mexico in 1648, where it was believed to have been imported from Western Africa on slave ships. During the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries the disease was prevalent throughout the Caribbean. It steadily spread along the sea lanes of the Atlantic Ocean, eventually reaching South America and Africa. While today we know the biological basis of this disease, the nineteenth-century world did not. They instead believed yellow fever to be spread from one human being to another by physical contact. Yellow fever is a disease that is viral in nature and is only passed between hosts by the mosquito, Aedes aegypti, which lives close to human habitations and reproduces in stagnant pools of water, which were abundant throughout Fort Jefferson.44 The virus is not infectious and is incapable of spreading among individuals without the aid of an intermediary host such as the mosquito. Their misunderstanding of this key fact of how the disease spread led mid-nineteenth-century medical experts to advocate quarantine.

  The virus becomes established in the host, where it circulates in the blood stream. It is then transmitted by mosquitoes sucking the blood from infected individuals and moving on to noninfected individuals. The symptoms of the disease can range from mild to horrific. In its mildest form, yellow fever produces symptoms that are grippe-like, including fever, headache, and nausea. In its severest form, the disease produces high fever, frequent vomiting, severe epigastric pain, and jaundice, which gives the
infected individual a bronze or yellow complexion. Near the end stage of the disease the patient experiences “black vomit” resulting from chronic bleeding into the stomach, which results in shock and death. There is no cure or specific treatment for yellow fever. Up to fifty percent of patients with the severe form of the disease die, primarily due to the primitive conditions where the disease is most prevalent.

  Yellow fever was prevalent throughout the southern United States, and several areas, especially along the Gulf Coast and the Florida Keys, experienced severe epidemics at regular intervals. So severe was one epidemic in 1801 that it became a major factor in convincing Napoleon to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States the following year. By 1900 as many as ninety epidemics had ravaged urban areas throughout the United States.

  Dr. Whitehurst had originally served as post surgeon at Fort Jefferson but left in 1861 because of his wife’s strong allegiance to the Confederacy. When word of the post surgeon’s death in 1867 reached him in Florida, Whitehurst hurried to the Island, offering his assistance to Mudd, who was now in charge of caring for the sick patients. Both Mudd and Whitehurst worked tirelessly as the epidemic raged on. By September 17 both Arnold and O’Laughlen had contracted the disease. On the twenty-third O’Laughlen died. Arnold recovered. Spangler and Mudd escaped contracting the deadly form of the disease, although Mudd appears to have had a mild attack, experiencing fever and headache. The last case of fever was recorded on November 14. In all, thirty-eight people died out of the 270 or more stricken. Mudd had been sick himself for about nine days in October when the wards were filled with patients. While little could be done to actually treat those sick with yellow fever, Mudd performed a great service caring for them and relieving their pain wherever possible. Believing the disease contagious, he placed himself at great risk in treating the sick for as much as fourteen hours a day.