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

Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was asleep when a man banged on his door on April 15, 1865: John Wilkes Booth had just shot President Abraham Lincoln to death, and he needed a splint for his broken leg. What happened next has been debated for the past century and a half: Did Mudd know he was abetting an assassin, or was he simply tending to an injured stranger in the night? Convicted of conspiring to aid an assassin, Mudd endured barbaric conditions on a prison island outside the laws of the United States. Traitor to the North, martyr to the defeated South, Mudd resolved to escape, but his failed attempt earned him the dungeon. What the doctor did later, during an epidemic that killed dozens on the prison island, earned him a pardon from another American president. With new documents forgotten by history, many in Dr. Mudd's own words, THE ASSASSIN'S DOCTOR is the story of a Confederate sympathizer, a celebrity convict, and a hero. And it answers definitively the question of his guilt.