The Union vs. Dr. Mudd

 

Introduction

The tour boat skimmed across the waters of the Gulf of Mexico at a speed of 26 knots, nearly 30 miles per hour. At that speed, our trip would take just over two hours. We had left Key West earlier that morning, headed westward toward the Dry Tortugas, a collection of seven, tiny coral islands so named in 1513 by Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon because of a large turtle (tortugas) population and lack of any drinkable water.

But turtles had not drawn me to the Dry Tortugas for what was my second visit. I wanted to see again Fort Jefferson, a mass of masonry, which first appeared on the horizon as a thin, brick red line, then began to dominate it as we drew nearer. The largest coastal fortress in the Western Hemisphere, Fort Jefferson is best remembered as an American Devil’s Island, home after the Civil War for the victorious Union’s most despised prisoners. This included Samuel A. Mudd, M.D., a doctor implicated in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. The Maryland doctor could not hide the fact that he knew assassin John Wilkes Booth, but proclaimed his innocence of any crime. A vengeful federal government, specifically Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, refused to believe him. In a rush to justice, a military tribunal sentenced Dr. Mudd to life imprisonment, shipping him off the continent to Fort Jefferson to keep him out of reach of civilian lawyers trying to free him.

Fort Jefferson proved difficult to reach when I first saw the fort in 1963, researching this book about its most famous prisoner. The Union vs. Dr. Mudd was my first book as a young author, and I wanted to absorb every last detail. This meant (my reportorial instincts told me) traveling to the Dry Tortugas to visit the fort, to walk its balustrades, to visit the clammy cell where Dr. Mudd had suffered.

So in 1963 I rented a car and drove from Miami to Key West expecting that I could find some way out to the fort by boat. But even though Fort Jefferson had been named a national monument in 1935, there was no easy way for historians, much less tourists, to access it. No catamarans bridged the distance at 26 knots. No guides from the National Park Service would be at the dock to greet me. It would take most of a day to get there, most of another day to get back. “Could I stay overnight?” I asked. Key West charter boat captains laughed when I even suggested it.

Not to be denied, but mostly as a symbolic gesture, I chartered a private plane to fly to the Dry Tortugas. With no place to land, we could do little but circle the fort two times, after which I told the pilot to return to Key West. Had I fulfilled my reportorial or historical obligations? Not too well, but a more serious visit to Fort Jefferson would have to await another age.

That age now has come. Although The Union vs. Dr. Mudd was a work of my past, and 32 more books on a variety of subjects followed, I still feel proud of that first book. When several years ago I learned that regularly scheduled ferries now allow easier access to Fort Jefferson, I vowed to visit.

Fort Jefferson might never match Yellowstone Park or Mount Vernon in number of visitors, but perhaps it need not. The mammoth brickwork merely needs to be itself: a military curiosity from which “a cannon ball never was fired in anger,” so explained Jack Hackett, tour guide on the Yankee Fleet, which brought us from Key West. Indeed, our guide hinted, the fort owes much of its fame to the taciturn Maryland physician sent there in anger after President Lincoln’s death, a death many believe he had nothing to do with.

Fort Jefferson was constructed beginning in 1846 to control traffic in the Florida Straits separating Key West and Cuba. After the Louisiana Purchase, the growing United States needed to protect its shipping routes between New Orleans and the Eastern seaboard. Occupying 12 of the 16 acres on Garden Key (Hackett informed our group of tourists), Fort Jefferson boasted 16 million bricks. Its gun ports could accommodate 450 straight-bore cannons capable of hurling iron balls three miles into the surrounding waters—or into the hull of an enemy ship. Merchant boats and vessels of war could moor beneath this protective umbrella confident that they could not be attacked. “Or so thought the fort’s designers,” Hackett suggested.

Alas, within a few decades after construction began, Fort Jefferson had become obsolete, a victim of improved technology. Warships with newly developed rifled cannons could sit safely beyond the three-mile umbrella and fire projectiles that could pierce the fort’s walls and reduce it to rubble, as had been true during the siege of Fort Pulaski in 1862. A two-day bombardment with 5,300 shells reduced that fort at the mouth of the Savannah River to rubble. Although Union troops occupied Fort Jefferson at the beginning of the Civil War to prevent its falling into the hands of the Confederate Army, the fort and its defenders remained far removed from serious battles to the north.

Construction ceased by 1870, partly because of the fort’s obsolescence, partly because Yellow Fever, endemic to the area, made living there risky. For most of the next century, Fort Jefferson remained largely inaccessible to tourists, who might have been attracted by its history or its wildlife. The Dry Tortugas islands were designated a wildlife refuge in 1908 to protect a sooty tern rookery from egg collectors, and Fort Jefferson became a National Monument in 1935, but only a few government caretakers managed its vacant hulk.

In 1992, Fort Jefferson was granted status as a National Park. Meanwhile, Dr. Mudd’s heirs lobbied Congress to declare him innocent of complicity in the Lincoln assassination. The Mudd heirs’ efforts proved only partly successful, but attracted enough publicity to Fort Jefferson so that in the year 2006, 64,122 tourists visited, according to Park Ranger Billy Strasser. Some came mainly to snorkel or fish, but others came to see what truly served as an architectural and historical wonder. Once there, they encountered the story of the Maryland doctor who had set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth and nearly paid for it with his life.

Whether or not because of once having harbored Dr. Mudd and several other Lincoln conspirators, Fort Jefferson finally has emerged at the start of the twenty-first century as an intriguing tourist attraction. So finally did I find myself, accompanied by my wife Rose, able to set foot on Garden Key and roam the vaulted chambers of Fort Jefferson once prison for Dr. Mudd. In tour guide Jack Hackett, we had more than an able leader. A whimsical man with a slouch hat, ruffled beard and eyes that I know twinkled behind his sun glasses, he walked us through the fort, retelling its history from Ponce de Leon to present. He pointed out that the lower bricks were light red in color; the upper bricks, a darker red. “That’s because the bricks first used were acquired from Southern States,” explained Hackett. “Once the Civil War began, construction continued with bricks brought down from Danbury, Connecticut.”

We climbed a circular stairway to a parapet overlooking a parade ground that could have swallowed a half dozen soccer fields. The parapet itself was six-tenths of a mile around, about a kilometer. I talked to several of the fort’s rangers and learned some of them ran for recreation atop the parapet; five laps being the same distance as you would cover in a 5-K race. They knew my name, not merely as the young historian who had written about Dr. Mudd, but as an author who later in life also wrote for Runner’s World, my most successful work not historical, but rather Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide. I figure that more than a quarter million runners have used that book and my online programs to train for marathons. So do our lives suddenly shift in unusual directions. Ironically, that might describe what happened to the life of the physician who set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth.

After a brief tour of the fort, we paused for a picnic lunch. Many from the tour boat then headed for the beach or to cross the short sand bridge to Bush Key to do some birding. Among the birds seen regularly at Fort Jefferson are: black-bellied plovers, cormorants, sooty terns (which nest there in spring), brown noddays, frigate birds and buttonwoods. Of course, I had another mission. Warned of my coming, Ranger Erin Kendrick had promised me a tour of Dr. Mudd’s cell, that end of the island being temporarily off limits to most park visitors because of efforts to remove two fishing boats that recently had gone aground during a storm. As we passed beneath vaulted ceilings, I could not help but be reminded of Rome’s Coliseum, which also had its dark side. Kendrick indicated one chamber, where they suspected Mudd might have been held early during his stay, then brought us to another identified by sign as “Dr. Mudd’s cell.”

“The evidence is clearer here,” Kendrick explained, pointing to a bowl-like depression carved out of the concrete floor. “In his letters home, Dr. Mudd describes digging such a bowl to collect rain water for drinking.”

I had read those same letters, collected by his daughter, Nettie Mudd, in a privately published book: The Life of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. Writing home, Dr. Mudd described the Yellow Fever epidemic that hit the fort in 1867, causing 350 men (prisoners and jailers) to fall ill. Many died, including the fort’s physician, Dr. James Smith. Dr. Mudd was pressed into service ministering the ill. At that time, physicians believed Yellow Fever was spread through noxious fumes, such as those rising from the fort’s rancid moat. We now know that the disease is spread through the bite of specific mosquitoes. Eliminate the mosquitoes, and you eliminate Yellow Fever, though to this day no cure exists for the disease.

Dr. Mudd’s family used his humanitarian efforts during the Yellow Fever epidemic as reason to petition President Andrew Johnson for mercy. Coming from Tennessee, however, President Johnson feared appearing overly sympathetic to the defeated Confederacy. Johonson narrowly avoided impeachment by members in Congress who suspected him of complicity in the Lincoln Assassination. President Johnson pardoned Dr. Samuel A. Mudd as one of his last acts in office on February 8, 1869.

Dr. Mudd returned home to Maryland. He would die in 1883 at age 49, never having quite overcome the suspicion that he knew John Wilkes Booth better than he wanted to admit. “His name was mud,” seems to be an expression owed to Dr. Mudd, but lexicographical evidence suggests that the phrase dates back to 1840, or earlier.

It was during my discussions with the park rangers that I began to consider the fact that in the four decades since publication of The Union vs. Dr. Mudd, what we know about the man in that title has not changed perceptibly despite numerous attempts by book authors to spin the conspiracy in different directions. After shooting President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on the night of April 14, 1965, assassin John Wilkes Booth leaped from Lincoln’s booth to the stage, breaking his leg. Booth limped out of the theatre and lunged onto a waiting horse, fleeing south through Maryland, hoping to escape to Richmond, Virginia, perhaps to be proclaimed a hero.

In the early hours of the next morning, Booth stopped at the farmhouse of the physician he apparently had met on at least two previous occasions. Dr. Mudd set Booth’s broken leg, and the assassin continued his escape. But did Dr. Mudd know then of the actor’s crime and, more important: did he conspire with Booth in planning it? Some historians insist he did; others disagree. “There will always be a question,” conceded his great grandson Thomas Boarman Mudd, when I talked with him recently.

That question is the one I sought to answer when I first set out to write this book, nearly a half century ago. Thanks to the University Press of Florida, publishers of this reprint edition, you can come to your own conclusion. Let me introduce you in the following pages to Dr. Samuel A. Mudd.

--Hal Higdon

Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, 2008

 

 

Books by Hal Higdon