The Assassin's Doctor: The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd

At 4 a.m. on April 15, 1865, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd opened the door of his Southern Maryland farmhouse to find John Wilkes Booth outside with a broken leg. He knew Booth, having met him a couple of times before, including once when Booth had stayed overnight at the Mudd farm.

Only hours earlier, Booth had shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. Mudd treated Booth’s injury, fashioned a splint for his leg, and allowed him to rest in an upstairs bedroom. Later that day, Mudd learned that Lincoln had been assassinated and that Booth was the killer. Yet he did not tell the soldiers searching the countryside that Booth had been at his home.

That decision changed his life forever.

Dr. Mudd was arrested, tried before a military commission, convicted of conspiracy in Lincoln’s assassination, and sentenced to life imprisonment at Fort Jefferson, the isolated military prison in the Dry Tortugas off the coast of Florida.

But who was Samuel Mudd? Was he simply a country doctor who treated an injured man and then made the disastrous decision to conceal what he knew? Or did his previous meetings with Booth connect him more deeply to the events surrounding Lincoln’s assassination?

The Assassin’s Doctor tells the complete story of one of the most controversial figures in the Lincoln assassination.

Beginning with Mudd’s childhood in a slaveholding Southern Maryland family, the book examines slavery in Charles County and within the Mudd family, his education and medical career, his encounters with John Wilkes Booth, the assassination investigation, his trial and conviction, his imprisonment and attempted escape from Fort Jefferson, and his remarkable work during the prison’s devastating yellow fever epidemic.

It follows Mudd through his presidential pardon and return to Maryland, and includes an extensive collection of historic documents and testimony relating to Mudd, Booth, the conspiracy, and the people whose lives became entangled in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

More than a story about the doctor who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg, The Assassin’s Doctor is the story of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd and the controversy that followed him for the rest of his life.