His Name Is Mudd

[mikegriffith1]

(11-10-2018 10:29 PM)L Verge Wrote:  . . . "his name is mud." Many of our visitors still associate that phrase with our not-so-innocent Dr. Sam. . . .

You still think that Dr. Samuel Mudd was guilty? I think the view that Mudd was guilty was pretty thoroughly debunked at the conspiracy trial by Thomas Ewing. Perhaps partly because of Ewing's powerful response to the military commission's claims, the majority of modern scholars who have written on the subject have argued that Mudd was innocent.

It is interesting to note that when the Army Board for Correction of Military Records examined the case in 1992, all five members concluded that the trial had been a gross miscarriage of justice (John McHale, Dr. Samuel Mudd and the Lincoln Assassination, Dillon Press, 1995, p. 139). Additionally, when President Carter and President Reagan reviewed the case, they both concluded that Mudd had been wrongfully convicted and that he was in fact innocent (McHale, pp. 131-136). It should be noted that they based their conclusions partly on the basis of their staffs' recommendations, which means their respective staffs both concluded that Mudd was innocent and unjustly convicted.

McHale discusses a revealing incident that occurred in December 1867 at the Fort Jefferson prison, an incident that gives us a good idea of how the government obtained so much false testimony. The Radical Republicans in Congress sent one of their trusted aides, a man named Gleason, to Fort Jefferson to talk with Dr. Mudd, Samuel Arnold, and Edman Spangler, mainly Arnold and Spangler. Ostensibly, Gleason's purpose was to take statements from the three men. But when Arnold and Spangler agreed to be interviewed, they discovered that Gleason's real purpose was not to get their side of the story at all but to get one or both of them to falsely implicate President Andrew Johnson in the assassination:

But the next day, when they appeared before Gleason, the men found out what he really had in mind. Congress wasn't interested in either Arnold or Spangler as such, or even the old Booth story as they knew it. What Gleason wanted was someone to lie under oath and tie President Johnson into Lincoln's assassination. If Arnold and Spangler agreed to cooperate, he said, they would be freed from Fort Jefferson and taken back to Washington as witnesses. The offer was a tempting one, and it is to the prisoners' credit that they didn't buy it. At one point in the interview, Major Andrews [the prison commander] threatened to have Arnold shot if he didn't help Gleason, but the former Confederate soldier stood his ground. Andrews backed down when the post surgeon intervened and told them to quit harassing a sick man. (p. 117)​

This is especially revealing because this was during the time when the Radicals and President Johnson were openly at war over Reconstruction and over firing Stanton, and when the Radicals were preparing to try to remove Johnson from office.

Also recall that Sanford Conover, when he thought that the Radicals were going to double-cross him, came clean and admitted to Johnson that the Radicals had asked him to try to get false evidence to implicate him in the assassination. Conover even provided documents, and Johnson showed the documents to his cabinet.