Page 90 - Cousins - Celebrities, Saints & Sinners

Dr. Samuel Mudd

11th Cousin

3 times removed

Common Ancestor

Father: Richard Sneyd
Sandbach, Cheshire, England
1482 - 1538 Born: Died:
20 December 1833 10 January 1883
Mother: Anne Fulleshurst
Sandbach, Cheshire, England Charles County, Maryland Waldorf, Maryland
1462 – 1535 Samuel Alexander Mudd senior (December 20, 1833 – January
10, 1883) was an American physician who was imprisoned for
conspiring with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of
th
President Abraham Lincoln (8 cousin, 4 times removed).
Mudd worked as a doctor and tobacco farmer in Southern
Maryland. The Civil War seriously damaged his business,
especially when Maryland abolished slavery in 1864. That year,
he first met Booth, who was planning to kidnap Lincoln, and
Mudd was seen in company with three of the conspirators.
However, his part in the plot, if any, remains unclear.

After mortally wounding Lincoln on April 14, 1865, Booth rode
with conspirator David Herold to Mudd's home in the early
hours of April 15 for surgery on his fractured leg before he
crossed into Virginia. Sometime that day, Mudd must have
learned of the assassination but did not report Booth's visit to
the authorities for another 24 hours. That appeared to link him
to the crime, as did his various changes of story under
interrogation. A military commission found him guilty of aiding
and conspiring in a murder, and he was sentenced to life
imprisonment, escaping the death penalty by a single vote.

Born in Charles County, Maryland, Mudd grew up on Oak Hill, his father's tobacco. At 15, after several years of
home tutoring, Mudd went off to boarding school at St. John's Literary Institute, now known as Saint John's
Catholic Prep School in Frederick, Maryland. Two years later, he enrolled at Georgetown College in
Washington, DC. He then studied medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, writing his thesis
on dysentery.
With the advent of the American Civil War in 1861, the Southern Maryland slave system and the economy that
it supported rapidly began to collapse. In 1863, the Union Army established Camp Stanton, just 10 miles
(16 km) from the Mudd farm to enlist black freedmen and runaway slaves. Six regiments totaling over 8,700
black soldiers, many from Southern Maryland, were trained there. In 1864, Maryland, which was exempt from
Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, abolished slavery, making it difficult for growers like Mudd to
operate their plantations. As a result, Mudd considered selling his farm and depending on his medical practice.
As Mudd pondered his alternatives, he was introduced to someone who said he might be interested in buying
his property, a 26-year-old actor, John Wilkes Booth.

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