Dr. Samuel Mudd at Fort Jefferson

Dr. Samuel A. Mudd and seven others were convicted of conspiracy in the 1865 Lincoln assassination trial. Four of them, David Herold, John Atzerodt, Lewis Powell, and Mary Surratt, were hanged. Dr. Mudd, Samuel Arnold, and Michael O'Laughlen were sentenced to life imprisonment at Fort Jefferson, a U.S. Army military prison located on an island in the Gulf of Mexico.

Fort Jefferson housed Civil War deserters, murderers, thieves, and a host of other unsavory characters. It was a rough place. Standing orders were to shoot any prisoner who refused to obey orders.

Two months after arriving at Fort Jefferson, Dr. Mudd tried to escape by hiding on a visiting Army supply ship, but was found, and spent the next four months in the fort's dungeon.

Two years later, there was a terrible yellow fever epidemic at Fort Jefferson. When it was over, 300 soldiers at the fort signed a petition to President Johnson asking him to pardon Dr. Mudd for his heroic work saving many lives during the epidemic. Johnson pardoned Dr. Mudd in early 1869, in part for his service during the epidemic.

President Johnson's pardon says that Dr. Mudd's guilt lay in not turning Booth over to the authorities who were hunting Booth, but that Dr. Mudd was innocent of any involvement in the assassination itself. The pardon said:

"I am satisfied that the guilt found by the said judgment against Samuel A. Mudd was of receiving, entertaining, harboring, and concealing John Wilkes Booth and David E. Herold, with the intent to aid, abet and assist them in escaping from justice after the assassination of the late President of the United States, and not of any other or greater participation or complicity in said abominable crime."

After returning home to his family, Dr. Mudd resumed the life of a country physician and farmer until passing away on January 10, 1883.

Whatever mistakes Dr. Mudd may have made in his involvement with John Wilkes Booth, he redeemed himself in the eyes of many by his tireless work that saved the lives of so many people during the yellow fever epidemic at Fort Jefferson.