Dr. Samuel Mudd

Nearly 150 years later, debate continues to swirl around Dr. Samuel Mudd and his role in the Booth conspiracy. Was he merely a country doctor in the wrong place at the wrong time—attending to Booth’s shattered ankle and allowing him to spend the night at his home near Bryantown, Maryland? Or was Dr. Mudd part of the conspiracy from the beginning?
Recent scholarship has revealed that the two men knew each other long before their fateful encounter the night of April 14 and that Mudd himself may have introduced Booth to John Surratt. At his trial the doctor’s insistence that he had met Booth only once was quickly disproved. Judged guilty, he escaped hanging by a single vote. Convicted of conspiracy, Mudd was sent to the remote Fort Jefferson prison in Florida's Dry Tortugas.
Mudd did much to redeem his reputation by caring heroically for victims of a yellow fever epidemic that struck the garrison at Fort Jefferson, where he was imprisoned until pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1869. Returning home to his farm, he resumed his medical practice until his death in 1883 at the age of 49.