Dr. Mudd's slave who cooked breakfast for JWB and David Herold

[mikegriffith1]

Here's an article (letter to the editor, actually) that I ran across on the issue of Mudd and his slaves. It was written by John McHale, author of the book Dr. Samuel A. Mudd and the Lincoln Assassination.

Different Picture of Dr. Mudd
John E. McHale, Jr.
Letter to the Editor, The Maryland Independent
August 8, 1997

When I read James O. Hall’s letter in your Aug. 1 issue dealing with Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, my first inclination was to simply ignore it, for it is the same old song Hall and the handful of his associates have been singing for several years now.

But I decided that wouldn’t be fair to either Mudd or Congressman Steny Hoyer, who has been making a good faith effort to set the record straight after more than 130 years.

By way of background, I have spent more than 10 years studying President Abraham Lincoln’s murder and the resulting military commission hearing. In 1985, Simon and Schuster published my Dr. Samuel A. Mudd and the Lincoln Assassination. I am a retired FBI agent who supervised organized crime investigations at bureau headquarters for some 16 years, so I think I know a real conspiracy case when I see one.

Therefore, let me say right up front at no time, during its trial of 1865, did the government ever prove any criminal act on Mudd’s part.

And, when Hall claims that proof of “Mudd’s complicity with (John Wilkes) Booth is adequately covered” in a group of “packages” which he has apparently filed, he is not being completely forthright.

The only so-called “proofs” consist of two statements, one issued 20 years after the fact, and one 30 years afterward, plus an ambiguous statement contained in George Atzerodt’s lost confession, and, while his case was still pending appeal, a statement that Dr. Mudd allegedly made to one of his guards that he had recognized Booth while setting his broken leg.

The arguments against these four “proofs” is overwhelming, but, as Hall said, they are much too long to be quoted here.

In regards to Dr. Mudd’s record as a slave owner, Hall elected to pick and choose his “facts” from the 1865 trial in order to convict him by innuendo when nothing else would suffice.

To begin with, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both slave owners. Does that make them criminals?

Moreover, six former slaves who worked for Mudd, after being freed, testified at his trial that “he treated me first rate,” that he “always treated his servants well” and that “Dr. Mudd was kind to all of us,” to list but some of their endorsements.

In addition, four of the six accused Mary Simms, the principal witness who claimed that Mudd abused his servants, as being a person who was “never known to tell the truth,” as “not a very great truth teller,” as having “a bad name as a story teller,” and as one who was laughed at by the other servants because “she told such lies they could not believe her.”

One of these lies even led Hall to accuse Mudd of whipping the young woman, ignoring the testimony of another servant and former slave, Julia Ann Bloyce, that she never saw or heard of Simms being whipped, but she did know of one occasion when Mrs. Mudd hit a slave but added that “I don’t believe it hurt her.” (I wonder if this is in one of Hall's packages.)

Another story promulgated by the thoroughly discredited Simms and her brother, Sylvester Eglent, was that Mudd had threatened disobedient servants with being sent to Richmond to “build batteries” if they disobeyed him, and Hall appears to have swallowed this fable hook, line and sinker, or else he merely capitalized upon it to promote his cause.

In all honesty, however, I must admit that there is one occurrence in Mudd’s life of which I doubt even he was proud.

As best can be determined, his quiet demeanor finally snapped under the “obstreperous” behavior of still a second brother, Elzee Eglent, and when the latter flagrantly defied Mudd on one occasion and started walking away, Mudd picked up a shotgun and fired some buckshot in Eglent’s general direction to “scare” him. Instead, several pellets inadvertently struck Eglent in the leg, whereupon Mudd laid down his gun, administered first aid and gave the wounded man several days off to recuperate.

After his return from prison, Mudd resumed his practice of medicine, and several years ago my wife and I were told an interesting story by the late Wilson Moore, then patriarch of one of the largest and most distinguished African-American families in Prince George’s County.

According to Moore, his father used to talk about one time when he was a young boy and Mudd had come from Charles County to treat some sick people. While waiting for the medicine to take effect, Mudd sat down in the living room with the young boy and told him the story of Lincoln’s assassination and how he himself had come to be sent to prison. Unfortunately, Moore didn’t remember the details of his father’s conversation after all those years, but I think the incident gives a decidedly different picture of Mudd than the one Hall painted.

No one has ever said that Mudd was saintly, or even “almost saintly,” but he was a good family man, a devout Catholic and a citizen who was entitled to his day in court.

John E. McHale, Jr.
Suitland, Maryland