Blood on the Moon

by Edward , Jr. Steers

  As a result of his medical services during the epidemic a petition was drawn up requesting clemency and Mudd’s immediate release from prison. Every noncommissioned officer in the garrison signed the petition. The two officers, however, along with the new post surgeon, did not sign the petition for reasons that can only be guessed or surmised. While there is no record that the petition ever reached President Johnson, he clearly recognized Mudd’s efforts in combating the epidemic as evidenced by the wording of his pardon statement. Johnson cited Mudd’s efforts: “Samuel A. Mudd devoted himself to the care and cure of the sick, and interposed his courage and his skill to protect the garrison, otherwise without medical aid, from peril and alarm, and thus, as the officers and men unite in testifying, saved many valuable lives and earned the admiration and the gratitude of all who observed or experienced his generous and faithful service to humanity.”45

  Mudd’s pardon was dated February 8, 1869, but the bureaucracy took another four weeks to see to Mudd’s release on March 8. He arrived home in Maryland to his wife and four children on March 20, 1869. Mudd had been absent for nearly four years. Nine months and eighteen days after his return his fifth child, Henry, was born. Over the next seven years the Mudds would have four more children, bringing their family to nine children—five boys and four girls.46

  Tragedy continued to visit Mudd after his freedom. Henry died after just eight months, and the Mudds would lose another son, Andrew, in 1882 at the age of twenty-four. Henry Lowe Mudd, Mudd’s father, passed away in 1877 the year Sam ran for the state legislature. Mudd continued to farm tobacco and supplement his income with his medical practice. In January of 1883, Mudd contracted what was thought to be pneumonia and died on January 10 of that year. He was forty-nine years old. At the time of his death he was survived by his wife, seven children, and one granddaughter, Mary Melita Gardiner. Eventually Dr. Mudd would have thirty-two grandchildren, including Richard Dyer Mudd (1901-) and Louise Mudd Arehart (1917-), two grandchildren who devoted considerable effort to crafting an image of a kindly, country doctor who was persecuted by a vengeful government for following his Hippocratic oath in rendering medical assistance to John Wilkes Booth. Their efforts have met with considerable success.

  Samuel Arnold and Edman Spangler survived the yellow fever epidemic and their imprisonment in Fort Jefferson. Three weeks after issuing his pardon to Dr. Mudd, President Johnson issued pardons freeing both Arnold and Spangler. Spangler came out of prison without a home, money, or apparent destination. Befriended by Samuel Mudd during his incarceration, Spangler made his way back to Maryland where he eventually showed up on Mudd’s doorstep. Mudd welcomed his prison mate and invited him to stay on, giving him a small piece of land where he might build himself a house.47 For the next six years Spangler remained a part of the Mudd family using his carpentry skills around the farm.48 In February of 1875 he succumbed to a respiratory ailment and was buried in an unmarked grave in the old St. Peter’s cemetery. In 1983, the Surratt Society and the Samuel A. Mudd Society jointly sponsored a project to mark the grave with a small tombstone that reads, “Edman ‘Ned’ Spangler Aug. 10, 1825–Feb. 7, 1875 erected by the Surratt Society in conjunction with the Dr. Samuel A. Mudd Society.”

  Unlike Ned Spangler, Sam Arnold had a family and a home to which he could return. Arnold became something of a recluse and in his own words was a “misanthrope.”49 His dislike for people was a natural reaction to his conviction and imprisonment for four years in Fort Jefferson. Arnold returned to Baltimore where his father operated a bakery and confectionery store out of his residence on Fayette Street. In 1848 Sam’s father, George Arnold, had purchased a 118-acre farm in a section of Baltimore known as Hookstown. Today, the 118-acre farm that made up a part of the Baltimore community of Hookstown, is home to the famous Pimlico racetrack. George Arnold eventually deeded the farm where Sam Arnold frequently stayed to his wife’s brother, William Bland. Sam appears to have alternated between the two places, at least for a while. In 1894 he was employed as a butcher at Fells Point in Baltimore. By 1902 he was living in Friendship, Maryland, at the home of a close friend, Mrs. Ann Garner. Arnold had written a letter to his mother on July 6, 1865, while imprisoned in the Washington Arsenal in which he described Mrs. Garner as “a second mother.”50 The Garner home in Friendship, located approximately twelve miles south of Annapolis, Maryland, provided a safe haven for the reclusive Arnold.

  Sometime during the 1890s Arnold decided to record a memoir of his relationship with Booth and the conspiracy to capture Lincoln. His intention was to have the document published after his death in an effort to sway public opinion in his favor. When word of his manuscript leaked to the press, however, the Baltimore American contacted Arnold offering to publish his story. Arnold remained adamant about not allowing his manuscript to be published until after he died. Then something quite strange happened. In 1902, another man by the name of Samuel Arnold died and several newspapers, assuming it was the conspirator, wrote lengthy obituaries that gave the real Arnold an opportunity to see just how he would be portrayed by the press after his real death.51 Accounts of his role as a conspirator of Booth were unflattering. Unhappy with what he read, Arnold decided to allow the Baltimore American to publish his story, believing he would be completely vindicated. The manuscript was published in serial form beginning on December 2, 1902, and running through December 20, 1902. As might be expected, Sam’s story was self-serving and filled with righteous indignation toward just about everyone who had been involved in the events of the conspiracy, including Sam’s old school chum John Wilkes Booth. Arnold described the capture effort as “purely humane and patriotic in its principals.”52 While attempting to portray the plot against Lincoln in a patriotic light, Arnold justified James Speed’s approval of a military trial when he admitted that the conspiracy was “legitimate as an act of war.”53 Indeed, capturing the commander in chief of the enemy force was an act of war. In 1943 an antiquarian book dealer who had purchased the memoir published the original manuscript in a limited edition of 199 copies,54 and in 1995, a series of newspaper articles covering much of Arnold’s memoir was republished by Heritage Books, edited by Michael W. Kauffman.55

  Whether Arnold was happy with the response to his memoir is not known, but it seems unlikely. By 1902 when the memoir first appeared there was little sympathy for any of those convicted in Lincoln’s murder. Four years after publication and while still living in the Garner farmhouse in Friendship, Maryland, Arnold became seriously ill. In June 1906 he moved into the Baltimore home of his sister-in-law, where he died, presumably of tuberculosis, on September 21, 1906, at the age of seventy-two. He lies buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore where Michael O’Laughlen and John Wilkes Booth are also buried. Arnold was survived by only John Surratt, who would live for another ten years before dying in 1916.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Life After Death

  Search then the ruling passion: there, alone,

  The wild are constant, and the cunning known;

  The fool consistent, and the false sincere.

  Alexander Pope

  The fire from the burning tobacco barn blazed throughout the early morning hours casting a red glow over the scene unfolding at the Garrett farmhouse. A column of grey smoke rose skyward sending a signal to everyone within a two-mile radius that something was happening. The hidden eyes that had watched Yankee horsemen riding from Port Royal didn’t have to guess who was behind the smoke. It was all too common a scene in the warravaged countryside. By midmorning the troopers were gone leaving the Garrett barn a blackened pile of smoldering embers. The smoke that rose from the barn would eventually subside, only to be replaced by the smoke of conspiracy rising in its place. The conspiratorialists would soon begin obscuring what had taken place that April morning at the Garrett farm.

  On October 24, 1994, a small group of lay historians filed into the large white building that housed the circuit court for the city of Baltimore. They had come in response to
a petition that had been filed with the court requesting permission to exhume the body of John Wilkes Booth from its grave in the family plot in Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery.1 The petitioners claimed a legal right to do so, stating the “public interest” as their justification. The legal right was based on the fact that among the petitioners were several individuals who bore a collateral relationship to John Wilkes Booth. The justification was based on their belief that the body in the grave was not that of the killer of Abraham Lincoln, but another man’s, an innocent victim of a deep and sinister plot.

  The principal movers behind the petition were two avocational historians who claimed that it was not Booth who was killed in the Garrett barn. Booth had escaped earlier and made his way to the small town of Enid, Oklahoma Territory, where he died by suicide in 1903 using the name David E. George. It was an old story retold many times in newspaper articles and dime-store paperbacks. Now it would be heard again, this time in a court of law where the shocking claims of conspiracy would be subjected to legal scrutiny. It was a scrutiny long overdue.

  A book had been published in 1907 that eclipsed all of the previous sensational claims that John Wilkes Booth was never killed in Richard Garrett’s barn.2 Finis L. Bates, a Tennessee lawyer, published his personal account of having heard the confession of a Texas saloon keeper, John St. Helen, who claimed to be the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. According to Bates, John St. Helen and David E. George were names adopted by Booth. Basing their petition on the book’s allegation, the two historians submitted additional “evidence” to support the claim. Their evidence consisted of a resurrection of old tales that had circulated through a half century of newspaper articles.3

  Prior to their attempt to “dig up” Booth’s body, one of the petitioners had convinced the producers of the NBC television series Unsolved Mysteries that the story of Booth’s escape was true and was worthy of a television production. In 1991 NBC aired the program as part of the Unsolved Mysteries show. Flushed with the success of having the story of Booth’s alleged escape viewed by millions of people, the two historians made an effort to convince the Circuit Court for the City of Baltimore that the only sure way to settle the mystery of whether the body in the grave was really that of John Wilkes Booth was to dig it up and subject the bones to forensic examination. Unknown to the presiding judge, and many of the courtroom spectators, the body of John Wilkes Booth had been exhumed before, not once but twice, and his remains positively identified on both occasions. But twice was not enough. Only a third time would satisfy the latest advocates of this strange request for resurrection.

  The court day arrived and the petitioners submitted seventy pages of “evidence” to support their contention that the body in the grave was not that of Lincoln’s killer. The cemetery corporation opposed the petition and requested that the court hold a hearing on the matter. Joining with the officers of the cemetery were several prominent historians whose expertise in the assassination of Lincoln was well established. The strange tale harkened back to the year 1903 and involved a cast of extraordinary characters.

  The story begins on January 13, 1903, with the death of David E. George, an obscure drifter, in Enid, Oklahoma Territory. George, who was prone to bouts of alcoholism, had come to Enid only weeks before from El Reno, Texas, located seventy miles south of Enid. Arriving in Enid, George registered at the Grand Avenue Hotel. It appears he was in his early sixties when he died, which would place his date of birth sometime around 1840.4 There was nothing about his life that would have led anyone to believe that he would be remembered beyond the publication of his obituary, which appeared in the local paper the day following his death. It was at this point that his remarkable saga began.

  A local Enid woman named Mrs. E.C. Harper read of George’s death in a local obituary column. Recognizing the name, she wondered if it could be the same man she had met three years earlier in El Reno, Texas, who, believing he was about to die, told her he was John Wilkes Booth. Mrs. Harper, a twenty-eight-year-old widow named Jessica Kuhn at the time, first met David George while visiting a close friend who lived in El Reno.5 According to Mrs. Harper, George was a boarder in the woman’s house. On the day of Mrs. Harper’s visit, George returned home from work feeling seriously ill. It seems he had taken a heavy dose of a drug that had adversely affected him. He told Mrs. Harper he felt he was going to die. Mrs. Harper became alarmed and sent for a local doctor. While waiting for the doctor to arrive she listened to the dying man’s “confession.”6 Now that he was dying he had to tell someone his incredible secret.

  Miraculously, George did not die that day in 1900 but recovered fully and lived another three years before finally succumbing to a lethal dose of self-administered strychnine. On reading the obituary, Mrs. Harper sent her husband, the Reverend E.C. Harper, over to the funeral parlor to ask about George. The Reverend Harper told the undertaker that he recognized the corpse as that of the man who had “confessed” to his wife in El Reno that he was John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Mrs. Harper, now a resident of Enid, came to the conclusion that the corpse at the funeral home was indeed her David E. George, a.k.a. John Wilkes Booth, of El Reno. The George-Booth story quickly made its way to the editor of the local newspaper, and soon it was sweeping the country.

  The story reached Finis L. Bates at his law offices in Memphis, Tennessee. Reading the story of George, Bates was stunned. He claimed that he also had met a man who confessed to being John Wilkes Booth. In 1872, thirty-one years earlier, while practicing law in Granbury, Texas, Bates was asked to listen to the dying confession of a local saloon keeper named John St. Helen. St. Helen told Bates that he had been part of a plot that Vice President Andrew Johnson had engineered to kill Abraham Lincoln. Fortunately for St. Helen he was not in the barn at the time the Sixteenth New York Cavalry arrived. He had escaped earlier. In his place was another man by the name of “Ruddy.”

  “Ruddy,” it turned out, was Franklin Roby, the overseer for Samuel Cox. It was Roby who Samuel Cox had told to hide Booth and Herold in a pine thicket near the boundary of his plantation. It was Roby who then led Thomas Jones to the thicket and showed him where he had hid the two fugitives. All this, of course, was true. But here the truth ended.

  According to Bates’s story, Ruddy safely piloted Booth and Herold over the Potomac and to Port Royal where the three Confederate soldiers, Ruggles, Bainbridge, and Jett, were waiting for them. At this point, Booth, a.k.a. St. Helen, discovered that he had carelessly left several of his personal items, including his little memorandum book, in William Lucas’s wagon. Booth St. Helen asked Ruddy to return to Lucas’s cabin and retrieve his lost items. Ruddy agreed. In the meantime, Booth, provided with a horse by one of the Confederate soldiers, safely made his escape south. Meanwhile, Ruddy retrieved Booth’s lost articles and made his way to the Garrett farm where he stopped for the evening. Unable to find a place to sleep in the crowded farmhouse of Richard Garrett, Ruddy slept in the old farmer’s tobacco barn. It proved to be a fatal mistake. During the early morning hours members of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry awakened him, and before he could explain who he was he was shot by Boston Corbett. Meanwhile, Booth was making his escape that carried him to Mexico, then Texas and California before winding up in Enid.

  Bates listened intently to the incredible tale of the sick man. But like David E. George, John St. Helen did not die. Bates, unaware of St. Helen’s recovery, decided to pursue a claim for part of the reward money set aside for the capture of Booth. In 1900, some twenty-five years after hearing St. Helen-Booth’s confession, lawyer Bates petitioned the United States government for the reward money. The government placed Bates’s claim in its “crackpot file.” Of course, the government believed it knew that John Wilkes Booth had been killed at the Garrett farm, and it had dispensed all of the reward money to the legitimate claimants. As far as the government was concerned the case was closed. Why Bates had waited twenty-five years after hearing St. Helen’s confession before acting is not cle
ar. Having lost his claim for the reward money, Bates placed it in his files and forgot all about it. That is, until he read the claim by Mrs. E.C. Harper that John Wilkes Booth had only recently died in Enid under the alias of David E. George. Could David E. George be the same man Bates knew as John St. Helen?

  Bates, ever the entrepreneur, hopped aboard the next train out of Memphis and, arriving in Enid, went straightway to the local undertaker, where he asked to see the remains of the man named David E. George. It was the very same man Bates had listened to in 1872 in Granby, Texas, over thirty years before, or so Bates said. David E. George was John St. Helen, and since John St. Helen was John Wilkes Booth, George must be John Wilkes Booth. The man who had confessed to Mrs. Harper was the same man who confessed to Finis Bates. The circle was closed and Bates was ready to go after the government once again for the huge reward offered for Booth’s body, dead or alive. What Bates must have realized, but apparently ignored, was that the reward money had been disbursed thirty-five years earlier. No matter, it was worth a try. At the very least, Bates was sitting on an incredible story that he was ready to pursue with vigor.

  To make matters even better for Bates, the body of George went unclaimed. For years it was kept in the back room of a furniture store owned by the undertaker who had embalmed him. It became one of the special sights in Enid as people would come to the store and ask to see the body of John Wilkes Booth.7 Bates asked the undertaker, who had been appointed administrator of George’s estate, if he could take the body. The undertaker agreed and Bates shipped the body back home to Memphis.

  Bates was not about to let his crucial piece of evidence be buried in some potter’s field. Better it be stored in his house. For the next three years Bates hounded the government, offering to turn over the embalmed remains of the infamous Booth for the reward money. His offer was repeatedly rejected and his claims went nowhere. But Bates was the consummate entrepreneur. If he could not convince the government to make him a wealthy man, he would take his case to the American people and let them make him wealthy.