Word: mudd
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...clock on a cloudy April morning two horsemen clattered up to the country home of Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd in Charles County, Md., 30 mi. southeast of Washington. One's face was tight with pain and his left leg, booted and spurred, hung limp from the stirrup. The other, a chinless, watery-eyed youth, helped his companion dismount, hobble into the house. Dr. Mudd received them in his nightshirt. A kindly, cultured young physician, he was already well established in his country practice, well-liked and well-to-do. He set the hurt man's broken...
...somehow build a strong navy or conclude an alliance with a potent naval power. Meantime time it served as a Federal penitentiary. At one time its shark-filled moat encircled more than 1,000 prisoners. In July 1865 it received, with a sentence of life imprisonment, Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd of Maryland...
Twice the year before had Dr. Mudd talked briefly with John Wilkes Booth. But on the early morning of April 15, 1865 the actor-assassin, fresh from the Presidential box at Ford's Theatre, went to him in disguise under a false name, played his part so well that the country doctor never suspected his identity. Not until he heard the circumstances of Lincoln's death did Dr. Mudd grow suspicious, notify the authorities. For this service he was arrested as a conspirator. The whole land cried for quick, blind revenge. Booth might or might not have burned...
Best-hated prisoner at Fort Jefferson among the Northern officers in command was Dr. Mudd. Made a hospital orderly, he endured for a few weeks the knowledge of his innocence, of his family's ruin and disgrace, the contempt of his Negro guards. Then he tried to escape. After that he put in twelve hours per day at hard labor under a broiling sun, his legs weighted with heavy irons. The other twelve hours he spent chained hand & foot in a small, solitary dungeon, wet, hot, swarming with mosquitoes and vermin. His legs and arms swelled...
...August 1867 a soldier came down with yellow fever. In a few days the fort was a raging pesthouse, isolated from the world. Gunboats were ordered away, ships were afraid to stop. When the fort physician died Dr. Mudd volunteered his services. Day & night in a hospital where the thermometer stood at 104 he worked heroically among delirious, vomiting patients. Men died by the score and were hastily dumped on nearby Bird Key. "No more respect is shown the dead," wrote Dr. Mudd, "than to the putrid remains of a dead...