Page:The life of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd (1906).djvu/2

 THE LIFE OF DOCTOR SAMUEL A. MUDD.

It is the morning of April 15; 1865; In-Washington a wounded man, chief of a great and suffering nation, lies unconscious. Twenty-five miles away, in a Maryland country home, the inmates are sleeping, for the dawn is only a dull glow in the east.^ There is a loud rapping at the door; it is opened by a man in his night-clothes; a stranger standing in the gray light says he has with him a friend who has broken his leg. Will Dr. Mudd set the leg and give him a bed? The doctor responds promptly and cheerfully, the broken leg is set, the injured stranger put to bed. In ten hours the two men leave the quiet Maryland home. In Washington Abraham Lincoln lies cold in death, and in Bryantown Dr. Mudd, a country doctor, happy, useful, upright, goes his daily round, unconscious that history will call him one of the Lincoln conspirators.

It was an entirely innocent, natural and himune act, but the injured man was John Wilkes Booth, and an infuriated and outraged nation hounded everybody who seemed connected with the assassin. The story of Dr. Mudd's trial, in which false witnesses swore without let or hindrance; his sentence to life imprisonment on a lonely island in the ocean; of his attempted escape and the augmented tortures inflicted on him after his capture; of the constant efforts of his wife to secure him justice and freedom; of President Johnson's promise to release Dr. Mudd before he left the White House; how, finally, on February 14, 1869, Johnson signed the papers and how the broken man arrives home, "frail, sick and weak, never again to be strong during the thirteen years he survived"—all the piteous story is written here.

The story is told mainly by letters, court testimony, documents, official reports and orders. These are presented without comment and are effective and adequate. Dr. Mudd's letters, written to his wife, describe the prison life at Fort Jefferson, and, in unconscious revelation, oive him his rightful place among his fellows, an honorable and law-abiding citizen. He himself is his best advocate; the man's character is his best jury. One closes the book convinced anew that courts and decrees do not make and unmake men; that character is a thing apart and nobler than them all.