Samuel Mudd
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Samuel Alexander Mudd I, M.D. (December 20, 1833 – January 10, 1883) was a Maryland physician implicated and imprisoned for aiding and conspiring with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of President of the United States Abraham Lincoln.
Mudd, O'Laughlen, Arnold and Spangler were imprisoned at Fort Jefferson located in the Dry Tortugas about 70 miles (110 km) west of Key West, Florida. The fort was used to house Union Army deserters and held about six hundred prisoners when Mudd and the others arrived. Prisoners lived on the second tier of the fort, in unfinished open-air gun rooms called casemates. Dr. Mudd and his three companions lived in the casemate directly above the fort's main entrance, called the Sally Port.
In September 1865, two months after Dr. Mudd arrived, control of Fort Jefferson was transferred from the 161st New York Volunteers to the 82nd United States Colored Infantry. As a recent slave owner and a person convicted of conspiring to kill the president whose presidency led to the freeing of the slaves, Dr. Mudd was fearful of his treatment by the incoming 82nd United States Colored Infantry. On September 25, 1865, he attempted to escape from Fort Jefferson by stowing away on the transport Thomas A. Scott. He was quickly discovered and placed in the fort's guardhouse. On October 18, he was transferred along with Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, Edman Spangler, and George St. Leger Grenfell to a large empty ground-level gunroom the soldiers referred to as "the dungeon". Dr. Mudd and the others were let out of the dungeon six days a week to work around the fort. On Sundays and holidays they were confined inside. The men wore leg irons while working outside, but the irons were removed when inside the dungeon.
After three months in the dungeon, Dr. Mudd and the others were returned to the general prison population. However, because of his attempted escape, Dr. Mudd lost his privilege of working in the prison hospital and was assigned to work in the prison carpentry shop with Spangler.
There was an outbreak of yellow fever in the fall of 1867 at the fort. Michael O'Laughlen eventually died of it on September 23. The prison doctor died and Mudd agreed to take over the position. In this role he was able to help stem the spread of the disease. The soldiers in the fort wrote a petition to President Johnson in October 1867 stating of Mudd's assistance, "He inspired the hopeless with courage and by his constant presence in the midst of danger and infection... doubtless owe their lives to the care and treatment they received at his hands."[13]
Probably as a reward for his work in the yellow fever epidemic, Dr. Mudd was reassigned from the carpentry shop to a clerical job in the Provost Marshall's office, where he remained until his pardon.
On February 8, 1869, Mudd was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson. He was released from prison on March 8, 1869 and returned home to Maryland on March 20, 1869. On March 1, 1869, three weeks after he pardoned Dr. Mudd, President Johnson also pardoned Spangler and Arnold. (Michael O'Laughlen had died during the yellow fever epidemic.)
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Dry Tortugas National Park
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Active Use: 1860s - 1930s
The fort remained in Federal hands throughout the Civil War. With the end of hostilities in 1865, the fort's population declined to 1,013, consisting of 486 soldiers or civilians and 527 prisoners. The great majority of prisoners at Fort Jefferson were Army privates whose most common transgression was desertion while most civilian prisoners transgressed by robbery. However, in July 1865 four special civilian prisoners arrived. These were Dr. Samuel Mudd, Edmund Spangler, Samuel Arnold, and Michael O'Laughlen, who had been convicted of conspiracy in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Construction of Fort Jefferson was still under way when Dr. Mudd and his fellow prisoners arrived, and continued throughout the time they were imprisoned there and for several years thereafter, but was never completely finished. Mudd provided much-praised medical care during a yellow fever epidemic at the fort in 1867, and was eventually pardoned by President Andrew Johnson and released. By 1888, the military usefulness of Fort Jefferson had waned, and the cost of maintaining the fort due to the effects of frequent hurricanes and the corrosive and debilitating tropical climate could no longer be justified. In 1888, the Army turned the fort over to the Marine Hospital Service to be operated as a quarantine station.
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