The Last Battle of the Civil War
FERGUSON, ANDREW
The Last Battle of the Civil War In 1865, a military tribunal convicted Dr. Samuel A. Mudd in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Was he guilty? BY ANDREW FERGUSON I One Friday this...
...The soldiers came and took him away that spring morning and he didn't come back for four years...
...Mudd's family had told it for more than a century...
...Samuel Mudd or the trial to Dad or any of his other children," Mrs...
...Here," Nettie wrote of antebellum farm life in Charles County, "may have been seen more than a hundred slaves, who made the evenings merry with song, and who would say of their white friends, after they passed from earth, 'God bless my old Marse and Miss...
...His descendants, and Dr...
...Only four people could ever have answered the question to a certainty...
...The man was an actor...
...The curtains were drawn, but to my left, in the shade of the parlor, I saw the settee...
...became an international bestseller and easily the most influential book ever written about the assassination, spinning off an industry of amateur sleuths keen to elaborate Eisen-schiml's thesis...
...so has the American Medical Association...
...Without a word he put his fist through it, then left the shop and never returned...
...Mudd was released after four years in jail, but his conviction stood unexpunged in the record, and no compensation was ever offered for the damage already done...
...For investigators, the discovery of the Surratt meeting confirmed every suspicion about Dr...
...He didn't try to hide his identity from any of them...
...All fall and for much of the winter Booth elaborated his plan...
...It was his mission to remove this stain...
...Booth wore a shawl...
...My apostasy rankled her...
...Mudd seem to accept the family's version of events—that harrowing story of a gentle country doctor who responded in the dead of night to a stranger's plea, and who saw his kindness repaid by a vengeful government and a hysterical public with prison, penury, a ruined reputation, a life sunk in disgrace...
...On my weekend swings through the capital's historic sites I had met overeager docents pretending to be everyone from Stonewall Jackson to Clara Barton, and their cheerful refusal to break character had long since lost its power to give me the creeps...
...Harbin ran contraband goods and organized underground mail routes throughout Maryland and Virginia for most of the war...
...Booth was in the house for twelve hours after the murder, I said...
...For Hall, Dr...
...How nice you could stop for a visit," she said, in a soft drawl...
...Eight years later, Dr...
...Come on over after lunch tomorrow," he said...
...about how much time he had spent with the man with the broken leg...
...But the soldiers stayed...
...There was never any laughter...
...They didn't ask a lot of questions they should have asked...
...Mudd told investigators that one Sunday after services he had been introduced to Booth, who said he was looking to buy a horse...
...Mudd's cell at Fort Jefferson, and under presidential pressure the Park Service eventually relented...
...Good God...
...The interview had been conducted by the journalist George Alfred Townsend, one of the earliest and most reputable of Civil War researchers, who tracked Harbin down shortly before the old spy's death...
...Mudd's house, a visitor heard Dr...
...Across his face...
...Among them was David Herold, the young man who'd ridden with Booth to Mudd's house that night...
...Mudd was guilty...
...there were none of the over-produced set pieces and pristine exhibits, no piped-in sound effects or muted light shows...
...The docents were ladies from the neighborhood, whose own ancestors had been the friends and patients of Dr...
...Richmond fell and the cause was lost...
...I'm quoting here from the book Ghosts and Haunted Houses of Maryland...
...And it didn't take her long to read his intent...
...He saw the story of what happened to this family, and it suddenly made sense...
...Unfortunately for Mudd, he let drop this vital fact only during his third interview with investigators, as they prepared to take him to Washington, and to jail...
...And they acted quickly in assembling the tribunal, perhaps hastily...
...You saw in the court's opinion where someone quotes that phrase, about the 'ravages of history...
...Nearly a dozen people saw Booth after the assassination...
...Arehart didn't trust electronic cash registers and used a metal box to keep her change...
...I handed the book back to Hall...
...And Dad just vowed to set it right...
...Back in Washington he had told friends he wanted to invest in farm property after the war...
...W W With Dr...
...Mudd with good cause and punished him justly, the story loses its grandeur and pathos...
...I didn't learn it because I was interested in genealogy," he told me...
...But Hall's evidence does show that Mudd, like many landowners in his county, was an ardent secessionist, a member of the loose network of Confederate operatives and sympathizers active there, and an early recruit into Booth's kidnapping plot...
...This is a very long story...
...The farmhouse rests alone on a little rise a quarter mile back from the road...
...Eisenschiml said the evidence pointed in one direction: Stanton himself had ordered Lincoln's murder, framed the vain and dipsomaniacal Booth, and set up a sham trial for his hapless "co-conspirators," including the gentle country doctor from Charles County...
...You know about the visit with Harbin at the Bryan-town Inn, I suppose," he said...
...And with a little clap of her weathered hands, the tour was over...
...Mudd stamp...
...He found the village in high panic, swarming with federal troops...
...He asked me to fetch folders from the file cabinets and arrange them on the desk...
...Mudd's innocence for understandable reasons...
...Arehart, "No kidding," and it was several minutes before I realized she wasn't fooling...
...Mudd had returned in order to prompt someone to save the farmhouse...
...Dick's first great success came in 1927, when he convinced the most influential magazine of the day, the Saturday Evening Post, to run an outraged account of Dr...
...Mudd, as a buff can piece it together today, has been obscured by the actual evidence the military presented against him in a sweltering courtroom during the spring and summer of 1865...
...And you know what...
...She took me over the threshold that Booth had crossed...
...Stitching together a detailed time line from trial testimony, old hotel records, and miscellaneous accounts, Hall has established that Booth and Mudd met at least three times before the assassination, rather than on the single occasion Mudd originally admitted to...
...I worried she might cry...
...Mrs...
...Mudd—great story...
...Appellant's insurmountable problem is that his claim is not arguably within the ^k zone of interests to be protected or reg- A ulated by the statute in question," the U judges wrote...
...One of the two doctors, Arnold told detectives, was named Mudd...
...Being a recruiter for the kidnap plot would have been enough to convict Mudd at the wartime tribunal...
...All in all, Hall told me, the military investigators did a "pretty good" job in their inquiry, given the public's bloodlust and the demands pressing in on them to bring conspirators, any conspirators, to justice...
...Believe me, I'm truly sorry I can do nothing to help you in your long crusade...
...Richard Mudd once—this was privately...
...McHale said: "With a big Hollywood movie, Dad thought here, finally, this will be the real turning point...
...He said the two men had left his farm traveling west, toward the Washington road, which put the search party off their scent...
...He just couldn't understand it...
...They slept the night in the upstairs guest room...
...We know this now, thanks to evidence collected by James O. Hall...
...And as I heard her tell it in the house itself, climbing the creaky stairs that Booth had climbed and gripping the banister he had used to steady himself, the story struck me as plausible, almost...
...I hope dey is in heaven.'") "I remember Aunt Nettie traveled out to Hollywood to be an adviser on the picture, and the family was so excited," Mary Mudd McHale, Dr...
...Mudd's other defenders have had the field largely to themselves...
...Samuel A. Mudd Society to oversee the property's restoration...
...Through a decade of appeals and remands and dilatory pleadings, the case wound its way at last to Courtroom 20 of the D.C...
...By the time she married and - I V moved away, the proper" ^ ty had passed to one of her brothers, who seemed, as some Mudds do, indifferent to the family's legacy and the house's significance.Over the years the paint flaked off the shingles, and inside the floor-^ boards swelled and buckled...
...She persuaded her brother to give up the house...
...A door opens up, and we say At last...
...The family's work would not cease, he often said, until justice was Uk^^A done—until the same federal govern-i" \ ment that had convicted his grandfa-™ ther admitted its mistake, and certi-li fied that this good man had had rf * nothing to do with the most consequential crime in American history...
...The jurisdictional tug of war between the board and the secretary brought Samuel Mudd's case once again to various federal courts, where it had already bounced around during the nineteenth century...
...A federal picket, enjoying the relaxed security that had come a few days before with Appomattox, asked his name...
...He gets around by wheelchair...
...Did prosecutors present evidence in court to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Dr...
...As they chatted on the street amid the scrum of holiday shoppers, Mudd introduced Booth to John Surratt, whose family owned the tavern in Sur-rattsville...
...Harbin gave me all the particulars concerning Booth," Townsend wrote in his Enquirer article...
...She had four children to feed...
...He said: "I remember a friend of mine saying to Dr...
...He was a famous man even then, and his good looks and theatrical air stirred interest wherever he went...
...It lacked the professional sheen the U.S...
...Few qualified observers have ever bothered to make the opposite case...
...Arehart said—as Mudds have for more than a century—the beard explained why her grandfather didn't recognize the stranger at the door...
...Arehart looked stricken...
...The beard, Mrs...
...Mudd has always been a figure of special interest...
...Thomas Mudd was the first of Dr...
...Before too long, "she realized that the man was no stranger to her—he was her grandfather...
...And then, of course, there's the beard...
...More than once she glimpsed him as he passed through the dining room or the kitchen garden...
...Mudd's granddaughter...
...They never use it...
...His co-conspirators were gathered up...
...Next to a page that mentions Dr...
...Dick especially, have worked hard to fix this story in the public imagination...
...Mudd later gave are unclear...
...One of the men had a broken leg—the result, his companion said, of a tumble taken from his horse as they rode hard through the rain on their way to Washington...
...It wasn't—the movie was only a modest commercial success—but Dr...
...McHale swept the table in front of her with the flat of her hand, as though clearing crumbs...
...We still do...
...H Mudd's...
...We know now that Mr...
...Mudd—no story.' "Liberals like Dr...
...She followed me back into the house...
...Mudd and his wife, of course, had both denied it...
...He published his findings in 1937, in a dramatic work of popular history called Why Was Lincoln Murdered...
...At odd moments she heard him knock at the door when no one was there...
...It's a museum now, too, but altogether unique along the well-traveled circuit of Civil War sights in the capital area...
...Why Was Lincoln Murdered...
...This is owing partly to its physical remoteness, several miles off the hard road, but other reasons enter in as well...
...Booth was wearing a false beard," Mrs...
...He would kidnap Lincoln and take him to Richmond, where the president would be held as a hostage till the North resolved the war in the Confederacy's favor...
...Even today southern Maryland does not buzz with entrepreneurial vigor...
...This most recent attempt was the handiwork of Dr...
...The conscience of the country has been hurt...
...Americans are famous for their disdain of history, as our history bears out, but no American has yet summoned the power to kill the case of Samuel Mudd...
...People are drawn to the story of Dr...
...The first time I came upon it, nearly fifteen years ago, it was closed, as it usually is...
...Arehart by Dr...
...But so many people thought he was set up, and I was open to the idea...
...Arehart began having trouble with a ghost...
...He died this spring, Dr...
...that he had recognized Booth in treating his leg early that Saturday morning, and had known by midday following that Booth was Lincoln's assassin...
...Mudd," Hall said...
...After fifty years of thinking about it, he's still riled by the beard...
...An even more interesting question is: Was he guilty...
...McHale said—that runs to 1,800 pages of agate type and weighs eleven pounds...
...Dad told me the house was always dark when he was growing up...
...He lobbied the Post Office for a Dr...
...Samuel Mudd was indeed innocent of any wrongdoing...
...I think he felt he just had to get away from the farm, from that unhappiness, those memories...
...Mudd, Surratt, and Surratt's mother, who hanged as a conspirator, were Roman Catholic, and the younger Surratt fled the country to Rome, where he joined the papal Zouaves...
...There wasn't much he could say, I guess...
...Without luck, the young man returned to the farm to gather up his friend and take their chances with their exhausted horses...
...Dick did, at the age of 101...
...Mudd, Cox had written: "In 1877, after Dr...
...She persuaded the Maryland Land Trust to buy the house and the surrounding ten acres, and then she persuaded the trust to turn it over to her...
...The men seemed unduly excited, and Dr...
...Mudds still live on the farm across the road, and on the farms to the west and north...
...I wrote him," Hall told me, "and I said, 'Do you have anything that might be interesting to someone looking into the assassination?' And he said, 'Oh, I do believe I do!'" Hall pointed to a book on the shelf behind his desk...
...At the trial, Dr...
...In 1936, the great moviemaker John Ford directed The Prisoner of Shark Island, a soupy rendering of The Life of Dr...
...Trying to re-create Mudd's state of mind as it must have been in those moments when he learned what his houseguest had done, you can feel a chill...
...Even more significant is a confession, long thought to be lost, given shortly after the assassination by one of Booth's acknowledged accomplices, George Atze-rodt...
...How Harbin had come to know Booth was, for a long while, unclear to assassination buffs...
...That's the first tip investigators had that Dr...
...One time, in a barbershop in Anacostia, Thomas Mudd came across an engraving of the Lincoln conspirators hanging on the wall...
...Almost certainly, however, he was enlisting recruits for what he called, with characteristic inaccuracy, a "grand and glorious scheme...
...At the end of my tour—I seemed to be the only visitor that afternoon—we stood in the yard behind the house...
...I don't know that I ever believed completely that Dr...
...My name is Louise Arehart," she said...
...She grew up on the farm...
...She gazed out to where the orchard once stood...
...McHale said, understating the case...
...I mentioned, offhandedly, the Harbin visit to the Bryantown Inn...
...Having died in 1883, the UM doctor is no longer around to defend V himself, and the case is showing its age, V too, having begun with Mudd's convic- ^ tion, 137 years ago, of aiding John Wilkes ' Booth in the conspiracy to murder Abraham Lincoln...
...Did the judges stop to ask, Who was hurt by the 'ravages of history...
...McHale about the source of Dr...
...Fooling people into thinking he was someone else is what Mr...
...Some of these men received respectful treatment in books and the press, and made a nice living...
...Even at the time the label struck me as overripe, but down the generations the Mudd family has embraced it, especially Dr...
...They interviewed him there Saturday afternoon, even as Booth dozed in Dr...
...At least twice, and probably more often, he attended church in Bryantown, as the celebrity guest of local Confederate sympathizers...
...I was at the time a Civil War buff, though a buff of low wattage, generally...
...He hobbled to a horse at the stage door and lashed it south, to the Navy Yard Bridge at the Eastern Branch of the Potomac River...
...You need to think about this very carefully," she said...
...Dick, Mrs...
...But once they were gone he grew suspicious...
...His medical practice declined, and he dabbled halfheartedly in politics, and then at the early age of 49 he died, having lived long enough to hear the phrase "His name is Mudd" become a commonplace pejorative among his countrymen, and pleading his innocence to the end...
...I'm sure you've heard them say that over and over...
...Mudd's daughter Nettie, which was pretty soupy to begin with...
...He told me that at the [Bryantown] tavern that Sunday [in December 1864], it was Dr...
...After the doctor was arrested, they discovered that he and the actor had met on still another occasion...
...Park Service routinely lacquers over the historic houses it controls...
...And yet . . . there was even more for investigators to learn about Dr...
...is an interesting question, and the answer to it is no...
...The Surratt House has a small library and several cabinets full of miscellaneous files, along with microfilm of the trial transcript, which runs to many thousands of pages...
...Mudd's story as Dr...
...Within a day or two of Lincoln's murder, investigators had already learned that Booth was well familiar with Charles County...
...Samuel A. Mudd, a biographical sketch written by Dr...
...Of the scores of books published about the assassination, no more than a handful have been written by competent and disinterested historians...
...From his home in Michigan, where he worked as a staff doctor for General Motors, he traveled constantly, with handmade flip charts and diagrams, to give his speech about the Mudd case to Rotary Clubs, elementary schools, chambers of commerce—any civic group that would pay expenses...
...A concoction...
...It was clear to Dad that his own father's unhappiness—Thomas was an alcoholic and so on—all this was traced to what happened to Dr...
...Mudd in the early hours after the assassination, even before they had tracked Booth to Charles County...
...And Dr...
...But why was Booth in Charles County in the first place...
...He'd spent the night here, had supper here, only months before...
...He gave the first of these presentations in the mid-1920s, the last in 1997...
...One witness for the prosecution, who said he had seen the doctor with the conspirators in Washington that spring, admitted on cross-examination that he himself was "bordering on insanity...
...And the answer, pretty much unavoidably, is yes...
...Charles County offered the smoothest avenue of escape from Washington to the south...
...He identified himself to the soldier at the Navy Yard Bridge, for heaven's sake...
...He was tireless," Mrs...
...The Times says this will put an end to your efforts," I said...
...On the phone Tom Mudd spoke to me idly of appealing the decision to a higher panel of the appellate court, and then to the Supreme Court, of course, before he alighted on what really troubled him...
...investigators later learned the fugitives had traveled east and then south in an arc around the troops at Bryantown...
...And the orchard just died away...
...Arehart told the story, however, awkward facts and implausible coincidences faded to nothing...
...I brought it down for him...
...The editor said to me, 'An innocent Dr...
...After mustering out, he took a job as an investigator for the Department of Labor, and pursued his fascination with Lincoln's murder in his off hours...
...From this distance, however, the point seems dryly academic...
...If the government, after relatively sober deliberation, convicted Dr...
...How could setting a stranger's broken leg get a doctor thrown in prison and cause all this unhappiness...
...They never celebrated holidays or birthdays...
...He thought he was serving his country, and he got mixed up in something that turned out horrible...
...Thomas Mudd never once mentioned Dr...
...II After putting a bullet into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head, John Wilkes Booth, a showboat even in homicide, took a theatrical leap from the presidential box at Ford's Theater...
...Sure...
...The wildfire of Washington sprawl has largely passed it by...
...But neither is he a man without fault, maliciously wronged and railroaded by a ruthless government —the image that his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren have clung to, so tenaciously, for so long...
...His method was to trace the family tree of every figure from the assassination, find any living descendants, and write them in hopes that among family heirlooms they might be holding something worthwhile...
...Samuel Mudd had died: photographs of children and grandchildren, framed certificates and awards, turn-of-the-century sheet music, her mother's dinner china...
...I didn't, but I mumbled strategically...
...From then to now, popular interest has stayed at a steady simmer...
...Mudd commenced a campaign on her husband's behalf—the same campaign that continues today...
...Jefferson, a malarial compound thrown up on the Dry Tortugas, at the tail end of a Florida archipelago...
...He wore a vest and old-fashioned blouse with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows...
...Mudd cut a conspicuous figure, well-dressed and self-composed, aloof in manner and distant in appearance from the slouching ragamuffins who were his supposed co-conspirators...
...Mudd was innocent," he told me...
...Mudd's upstairs bedroom, sixty miles to the south...
...five voted to hang him, too, falling a single vote short of the two-thirds necessary for the death penalty...
...When I told her I was, she said: "Good, because the doctor is not in at the moment...
...Before a tribunal of federal officers, hastily assembled in Washington, all eight of the accused were convicted, on one charge or another, after a month-long trial...
...But as my dad always said, and this is much more important, the cause of justice has been hurt...
...By April 1865, however, events had overwhelmed Booth's fantasy...
...But did he recognize Booth at his doorstep, in the rain and the dark that Saturday morning...
...She lifted both palms to her chin...
...Without it Dr...
...But he couldn't...
...It was only a chance meeting, Mudd later explained, along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, shortly before Christmas 1864...
...It opened to the public in 1983...
...had filled the margins of the book with his own notes, more than a century ago...
...Mudd's, and a local Southern agitator...
...This is clear from both Grandmother's account and from Grandpa...
...Before the assassination...
...But it's not abstract...
...She pressed her case with politicians, journalists, and in time even the president...
...Mudd who introduced him to Booth, who wanted some private conversations...
...its ancient whiskers interweave to form the crux of the case...
...He was in it up to his eyeballs...
...Booth kept his face turned to the wall...
...And of course Mr...
...The gift shop was a tumbledown room in the back, with a handful of books, cloth dolls, and postcards stacked on makeshift shelves...
...She really was Dr...
...The book was a biography of Booth, published in 1892...
...Arehart—who died just last spring, a few months before Dr...
...The story, as the Mudd family tells it, begins in the early morning hours of Saturday, April 15, 1865...
...He trolled the streets of Washington and the swamps of Charles County for collaborators, gathering about himself a motley of drunks, rovers, and part-time Confederate spies...
...I started to read it," he told me not long ago, "and I couldn't believe what I was reading...
...Running the length of one wall is a line of metal cabinets containing his files—fifty years of original research into every figure even remotely associated with the murder or its aftermath...
...He moved to Anacos-tia, up the road here...
...Five were sentenced to hang, and did so a week after the trial's close, on July 7. Mudd and three others received a sentence of life at hard labor...
...Hall told me, leaning forward in his wheelchair, spitting the word out...
...And the witnesses who did testify against Mudd performed unevenly...
...I show them what the evidence is...
...This is not the coldblooded conspirator the military tribunal strained to find guilty...
...Mudd because he's a victim," Steers said...
...His bootspur snagged on bunting draped from the balustrade, and when he hit the floor, sidewise, his ankle snapped...
...The ruling was ren- U dered unanimously, and bloodless- H ly—though bloodlessness, in my H opinion, is an odd tone to adopt in a H case so heartfelt and long-lived as Dr...
...It is privately run, staffed by direct and collateral descendants of Dr...
...Mudds, however, are not easily discouraged, as you may already have noticed...
...Not counting his arrest, trial, and imprisonment, this was the worst thing that ever happened to Dr...
...Mudd's version of events becomes unsustainable...
...The nine men on the tribunal voted unanimously to convict Mudd...
...In the early 1970s Hall found a Cox great-grandson living in upstate New York...
...I understand it, I suppose," he said...
...He compiled and published himself a family genealogy—"as a way of restoring family pride," Mrs...
...We know Mr...
...Samuel Mudd was, as the family likes to say, just a country doctor, and probably scared to death...
...He swamped legislators with letters about his grandfather...
...He changed his story in critical ways—about when the two visitors had left his property Saturday afternoon (or was it evening...
...What they lacked in Park Service showmanship they made up for in family tendentiousness...
...I protested as kindly as I could...
...With the ingenuity that sometimes comes to desperate men, he decided to file a claim before the Military Records Review Board, an obscure commission languishing in a cobwebby corner of the army bureaucracy...
...m The court's reasoning, what I ^r could make of it, seemed highly technical...
...A guilty Dr...
...Justice will be done!' And then it slams shut...
...The family like to say that if Booth hadn't broken his leg in the fall at Ford's Theater, the detectives never would have heard of Dr...
...Mudd's son Samuel Jr...
...And then he put on the beard just for Dr...
...That didn't strike me as quite right either...
...Dick, her first cousin, she persuaded the federal government to list it on the National Register of Historic Places...
...At the time of the trial, Booth was dead and Herold never spoke on the matter...
...Go down to the Surratt House," he said...
...It was a newspaper account of an interview with a Confederate spy named Thomas Harbin, clipped from the Cincinnati Enquirer, dated 1892...
...Conservatives like him because he's a victim of a ruthless big government...
...I get reporters calling me about Dr...
...In the 1970s a young researcher associated with the Surratt House found the document among some family papers...
...It has rattled around, in one Andrew Ferguson is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a columnist with Bloomberg News...
...Hall doesn't believe that Mudd knew of Lincoln's assassination in advance—it's unclear, in fact, how many of the kidnap conspirators did, since the idea of murder seems to have seized Booth only a few hours before he acted on it...
...Hall discovered that investigators first heard of Dr...
...Mudd was a cautious man, but after some hesitation he helped the injured rider across the threshold into his front parlor, where he laid him up on a settee, and did his best to splint the leg...
...Dick—was by all accounts a strong-willed woman...
...Mudd, and by their friends and neighbors...
...Mudd and Mr...
...This to them is an abstraction...
...I asked...
...Mudd rode on another four miles or so, to the nearby village of Bryantown, to visit patients and run errands...
...For nearly 80 years he searched for that elusive final turning point...
...But another one will open up again—somewhere, sooner or later...
...He asked it to instruct the secretary of the Army to "correct the military record" by overturning the tribunal's conviction of his grandfather...
...They just want to show that Mudd was innocent, you see...
...His family has worked hard to keep the case alive...
...Dick...
...Thomas was 4 years old when the soldiers came to take his father...
...With money collected from relatives and friends, she founded the Dr...
...Why don't you all just admit it?'" "And what did Dr...
...Mudd and his family...
...Pulled up like this...
...Deception was his stock in trade...
...Maryland was with the Union in the Civil War, but like many border states it partakes more of the spirit of the South than of the North, and this is nowhere more evident than in the claw-shaped region that dangles below Washington, much of which lies farther south than Richmond itself...
...In time, however, Stanton too became the object of conspiratorial speculators...
...Mudd was hurt...
...I am certain Dr...
...Are you feeling all right this morning...
...As Mrs...
...Dick got a letter from another president...
...On Tuesday morning a party of soldiers arrived to question Dr...
...A mile or so into Maryland he met up as planned with Herold, and together they rode ten miles to a tavern at a crossroads called Surratsville, where a package of whiskey and guns had been stashed...
...He had spent most of his life, from the early 1920s onward, arguing his ^^^ grandfather's innocence in newspapers and court-^^^^^^ rooms, on radio and television, in film documentaries and before congressional committees...
...Dick: for it fits so well the Mudds' sense of naked injustice, of an uncauterized wound...
...Dick...
...He returned to his wife and four children and to his devastated farm, disgraced and penniless, in feeble health, a broken man...
...He had to do it, for his father and his grandfather...
...I did it because it was a good way to find things that had been lost...
...With the help of Dr...
...III I don't have any hard data on this, of course, but other buffs I've talked to agree with me: Most people who've heard of Dr...
...None of the accused testified on his own behalf, in keeping with established criminal procedures of the time...
...Here's the meeting at the Bryantown Inn," he said, holding out a smudged slip of paper...
...Mrs...
...Booth announced himself with a flourish and was waved across...
...The case against Dr...
...What could they say...
...We were sitting on her back porch in Prince George's County, ten miles up the road from the farm...
...After his trial and sentencing, by all accounts overcome with despair, Mudd told two federal officers, in separate conversations, that the Christmas encounter with Booth in Washington was not by chance but by appointment...
...Arehart led me from room to room...
...Mudd's benefit, not for Booth's...
...He wanted to see justice done...
...She turned it over to Hall, who was able to authenticate it...
...I said to Mrs...
...From the bulging stacks he handed me weathered Xerox copies of ancient letters he'd collected, old Photostats of newspaper clippings he'd found long ago...
...He had to invent it to get himself off the hook...
...In 1979, President Carter released a letter expressing his "personal opinion" that the military tribunal's conviction of the doctor was illegitimate...
...That was in December," he said...
...Dick, your grandfather was a proud Confederate...
...On Saturday they arrived without warning to take him to Washington, where he was charged with aiding and abetting Booth in his escape...
...the two accounts that Dr...
...It makes a better story for them, I suppose...
...You asked about the beard," she said...
...Here, at least, was one old moviegoer who remembered The Prisoner of Shark Island...
...McHale told me...
...in the days after the murder, more than 300 suspects were taken into custody...
...Two others, former slaves on the Mudd farm, were effectively discredited by multiple witnesses for the defense, and another undermined his own testimony by misremembering a crucial date...
...Suddenly fatherless, Mudd's family despaired...
...Mudd took little note of the men's appearance: One was young and talkative, no more than 20, the other was older and wore whiskers...
...Union troops loitered about the farm for many months, scavenging food, menacing visitors, chasing off what few farmhands remained...
...She was born (I learned much later) in 1917 to Dr...
...Hall keeps an office in a spare bedroom, and the day I visited him it was flooded in midday sunlight...
...More than three dozen congressmen and senators have offered statements on his behalf, and most of these legislators, at one time or another, have lobbied the president to do the same...
...Dick's energy, and she began telling me about his childhood...
...That beard was invented for Dr...
...In Dr...
...I have investigated the situation in regard to your grandfather, Dr...
...Coincidence...
...That was Sunday, April 16...
...that despite this knowledge he had helped the assassin and his accomplice Herold evade the federal troops on their way to the Potomac and to the safehouses of Virginia...
...A month before leaving office, in disgrace himself and with nothing to lose, Andrew Johnson pardoned the surviving conspirators...
...Dick's death, the family duty has fallen to his son Tom...
...They took everything...
...Booth then outlined a scheme for seizing Abraham Lincoln and delivering him up in Virginia...
...My family was hurt...
...it opens for four and a half hours a day, three days a week, during some months of the year but not others...
...Why don't you do some more research," he said...
...but in this newspaper account the journalist Townsend provided an answer...
...Arnold told the detectives that in mid-1864 the actor had traveled to Montreal, a nesting place for Southern diplomats, exiles, and spies...
...Poke around...
...Mudd's imprisonment...
...In trying to reconstruct the crime and its investigation, he made himself expert in genealogy...
...They were busy before Lincoln's body was cold...
...Quickly and quietly they were shipped to Ft...
...Arehart told me, leading me past the parlor, "as Grandpa said...
...Samuel Cox Jr...
...Dick soldiered on...
...I thought, well, all right, I'll ask them myself...
...But he still receives occasional visitors who know his reputation as (in Edward Steers's words) "the man who knows more about the assassination than anyone who has ever lived, including the conspirators themselves...
...a father of four children, who had desultorily offered help in a kidnap scheme cooked up by a famous actor, in hopes perhaps of ending the war, and who suddenly, on a steamy Saturday afternoon, discovered himself implicated in the murder of a president...
...I spent a couple afternoons down there reading through them and talking to Laurie Verge, the director of the museum...
...Otherwise she had stuffed the house with family heirlooms dating from days long after Dr...
...A false beard...
...Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who oversaw the arrest of the conspirators and their trial, considered Booth and the others mere instruments of a much vaster conspiracy reaching back to Jefferson Davis—a theory that has been revived in recent years and earned, with appropriate adjustments, several non-lunatic adherents...
...He lied about how many times he had met Booth before the assassination...
...Dick say...
...Two days later they returned, then again the next day...
...The most moving artifact in the house was the settee, which had been passed down through the family and given to Mrs...
...The dragnet they cast was vast and indiscriminate...
...This is what he did with Samuel Cox Jr., who had been a neighbor and acquaintance of Dr...
...Booth did for a living...
...Dick's daughter, told me one morning last summer...
...From his own written statements, given days apart in the week following Booth's visit, Mudd was self-evidently deceptive...
...Oh for heaven's sakes," he said...
...The museum keeps odd hours...
...Mudd's conviction still stands, but at last count seven state legislatures have issued proclamations declaring his innocence...
...A few months after my first unsuccessful visit, in 1988, I drove out there a second time, and was greeted at the screen door by an elderly woman in a linen bonnet...
...There he met with agents of the Confederate secret service, and returned to Washington bearing letters of introduction to two Charles County doctors who might aid him in his work...
...Sitting in his wheelchair beside his desk, Hall went through the evidence patiently and methodically...
...The purpose seems to have been to introduce Booth to Mudd's acquaintance Surratt, which brought into the kidnap plot Booth's most important recruit...
...He hatched his idea sometime in the summer of 1864...
...Mudd knew all about it," Atzerodt said in the confession...
...As a historian, Eisenschiml was a marvelous chemist, transmuting half-truths, scraps of random evidence, and outright fabrications into a seemingly suggestive case for Stanton's guilt...
...Inadvertent or not, it was a fateful encounter...
...In the 1930s, a retired chemist from Chicago named Otto Eisenschiml got the then-original idea of sifting through the physical evidence and actually reading the transcript of the military tribunal, which for sixty years had lain dusty and undisturbed in a cubby of the National Archives...
...Mudd returned to the farm in the late afternoon...
...Booth died a few days later, chased down to the Virginia peninsula across the Potomac, shot by federal troops as he hobbled on his broken leg through a burning tobacco barn...
...The house smelled of age...
...In his marginalia Cox offered a long and convoluted account of his talks with Mudd, but as I read through it the upshot was clear: Mudd said he recognized Booth that April night, and that the doctor had been shocked, early the next afternoon, to learn of the assassination, and of the assassin's identity...
...Dick was the son of Thomas Mudd...
...One of Hall's most significant finds is also a testament to his tirelessness...
...Another theory fingered Lincoln's son Robert...
...Arehart pointed to a field sloping away in the distance...
...IV James O. Hall had spent the war as a criminal investigator in the European theater, policing allied forces...
...So you ask, will this put an end to our efforts...
...He was a master of make-up...
...That's nothing to be ashamed of, necessarily...
...We've had lots of peaks and valleys...
...Mudd's children to leave Charles County," Mrs...
...When he retired, in the late 1960s, he devoted most of his time to reconstructing the military's original investigation...
...The kidnap plot turned to murder...
...that he had delayed reporting Booth's visit, and had lied to the officers about essential details when he did report it...
...The family says Thomas Mudd lived a melancholy life that cast lingering shadows across the lives of his children...
...Mudd's...
...and Dr...
...I knew the story of the beard...
...He had traveled there several times in the months leading up to the assassination...
...The history writer Doris Kearns Goodwin, working on her own Lincoln book, dropped by not long ago, as did Michael Beschloss, another historian at Jim Lehrer U. When I first rang him up last summer and told him I'd like to come see him, Hall said, "Let's just chat awhile," and after a few minutes I got the idea he was quizzing me...
...Samuel A. Mudd lay sleeping in the back bedroom of his farmhouse in Charles County, Maryland, about twenty miles south of Washington, D.C., when he was awakened by two strangers clamoring at the front door...
...The hearing did not go well, and to most of us who gathered there—including a dozen direct descendants of Sam Mudd, and another dozen friends, neighbors, and buffs—this fall's final ruling could not have come as a shock...
...Well, this door just slammed shut...
...Mudd found him a bay in the neighborhood, then brought him home for supper and to spend the night in the upstairs bedroom, before the actor returned to Washington with the horse the next day...
...Surratt's Tavern, now a museum, squats among office parks and convenience stores, but go further south on Brandywine Road, into Charles County, as Booth did, and before long the "townehome communities" thin out and you can see the country pretty much as he would have known it...
...Dick...
...The secretary of the Army, however, did not...
...This inconsequential encounter, Mudd reckoned, took place in October 1864...
...He said, 'Dr...
...They took everything but the birds in the trees,' Grandmother said...
...Booth...
...Notwithstanding the implau-sibility of Mudd's own version of events, and even discounting for the unreliable witnesses, the evidence presented at trial against Mudd for aiding and abetting Booth is spotty and entirely circumstantial—good enough for a military tribunal in wartime, maybe, but inadequate in a court of law under modern criminal procedure...
...Before the century was out, several men had stepped forward boldly to reveal themselves as the real John Wilkes Booth—older, wiser, and still bearing singe marks from that fire in the tobacco barn...
...Widowed for several years, Hall is 90 now and lives alone in a high-rise apartment in McLean, a Northern Virginia suburb...
...Dick's lifelong efforts to keep the case alive approached a climax of sorts in 1992...
...Mrs...
...Mudd is my grandpa...
...I thought, 'Good God, this is the worst criminal investigation I've ever heard of.' I couldn't believe the government could have been as incompetent as Eisenschiml said...
...Booth sent liquor and provisions for the trip with the President to Richmond [after the planned kidnapping], about two weeks before the murder, to Dr...
...I'm sorry, but this is bigger than our family...
...Oh we never got an answer out of him," Hall said...
...By the time he got home the strangers were gone—or perhaps they were just leaving...
...So I thought I'd poke around a bit on my own...
...The next morning, after church, he asked a cousin headed into town to tell the authorities about his mysterious visitors...
...When he realized what Booth had done, Mudd returned to the farm and ordered him off his property, even as he assured him that he wouldn't turn him over to the federal troops...
...There has been no turning point, yet, and Dr...
...In a brief item the next day, the New York Times noted the ruling's definitive quality, and issued, Times-like, a definitive ruling of its own: The court's decision, the paper said, "effectively ended the decades-long campaign of the descendants of Dr...
...Hall reached out and ran a hand over the folders piled across his desk...
...Years later, however, long after his pardon, the doctor spoke more freely...
...For it turns out that on that April night, when the commotion at the front door roused him from sleep, Dr...
...Mudd's grandson, Dr...
...Mudd was lying," he said...
...An early, and popular, theory held that the assassination was the work of the pope...
...Mudd was an active member of the Confederate underground in Charles County and had been involved in Booth's plot to kidnap Lincoln...
...Arehart herself spoke of him with such vivid intimacy that you could easily see her, a toddler dangling on the old man's knee, listening intently as he recalled the long-ago night when the two strangers came to the door and changed the world forever...
...It was only later, when you did the math, that you realized he had been dead thirty years before she was born...
...The unreliability of these witnesses made it more difficult to establish what the military intended to prove: that Dr...
...Mudd already knew John Wilkes Booth...
...And then one day, shortly after World War II, a man named James O. Hall picked up a copy of Why Was Lincoln Murdered...
...Edward Steers, author of two well-received books on the Lincoln assassination, told me he once asked a newspaper editor why his paper still ran occasional stories about the Mudd case, with the invariable assumption that the doctor had been railroaded...
...When I heard about the court's decision I V^^^^V called him up...
...This was such a big thing in their lives...
...On April 16, not long after Booth left Mudd's house, Harbin helped guide the assassin through the swamps of southern Maryland and across the Potomac...
...He's an American Dreyfus," a historian said to me a few years ago, when I began to nose around the case of Dr...
...Unchallenged frauds and forgeries have long clouded the public record...
...Richard D. Mudd, more commonly known among the family as Dr...
...In my efforts to help, I came to believe as you do that Dr...
...I asked Mrs...
...Samuel A. Mudd's return from Dry Tortugas, and when he and myself were canvassing this county as the Democratic candidates for the legislature, he told me he knew Booth but casually...
...He petitioned President Eisenhower for a plaque on Dr...
...But it's not true...
...As she moved through the doorway the hem of her calico dress swayed around her ankles...
...Then we can talk some more...
...Mrs...
...After lunch the next day, while the older visitor rested in bed, Dr...
...It is far more compelling than the alternative, for one thing...
...Dick was technically the plaintiff in the case (a role Tom later assumed, following Dick's death), but no one doubted that it was his grandfather who was again on trial...
...Wouldn't the doctor have recognized him at some point...
...When a new bridge opened across the Potomac in the 1940s, at the site where Booth had ridden into southern Maryland, he pleaded with Congress to name it after his grandfather—who was, after all, the man Booth was crossing the river to see...
...A soldier told Mudd the president was dead, shot by a man named Booth the night before...
...Please recall this visit transpired by lamplight...
...form or another, in the courts and elsewhere, since the end of the Civil War...
...When I called Hall back, a few weeks later, I made a knowing reference to discrepancies between the first statement Mudd gave to authorities and the second...
...BY ANDREW FERGUSON I One Friday this past November, without much to-do, the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia dismissed the case of Dr...
...Dick's own accounting, there have been more than a dozen dramatizations on radio and television, and at least as many documentary specials...
...and another, Lincoln's widow Mary Todd...
...Well," she said, brightening suddenly, "you might want to visit our gift shop...
...The story of Lincoln's murder, the conspirators who brought it about, their flight, capture, and trial, has been left by default to be told by folklorists, mythmakers, and cranks...
...Circuit Court of Appeals, where on a sunny morning this past September, the judges sat to hear oral arguments...
...But when he was a teenager, Dad came across Aunt Nettie's book...
...There are several possible answers...
...She heard his footsteps on the stairs and strange echoes in the hall...
...By Dr...
...Later he slipped through the dragnet himself, saving his own life...
...The house's uniqueness was apparent as Mrs...
...Unexpectedly, not to say miraculously, the board agreed with Dr...
...Surratt became Booth's chief accomplice in assembling manpower for the kidnapping plan...
...The men who questioned him after the assassination were amateurs...
...Samuel Alexander Mudd," Ronald Reagan wrote...
...Arehart, and Dr...
...I try to lay everything out for them...
...There was a beautiful orchard there once, Grandmother always said...
...Sometime in the •fl J 1960s, at her house in La Plata a few miles from the farm, Mrs...
...Samuel A. Mudd to clear his name...
...they were overwhelmed, or rendered somehow insignificant, by the breadth of the family's subsequent suffering...
...A letter found in a search of the assassin's hotel room led detectives to Samuel Arnold, a friend of Booth's living in Baltimore...
...I did as I was told...
...McHale said...
...In the moonless dark, pelted by rain, they rode another twelve miles, to the farmhouse of Dr...
...Mudd and the young man canvassed the neighborhood for a carriage that could carry them the rest of the way to the capital...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 16
