Samuel Alexander Mudd Sr. (December 20, 1833 – January 10, 1883) was an American physician who was imprisoned for conspiring with John Wilkes Booth concerning the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

He subsequently 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.

A military commission found Mudd guilty of aiding and conspiring in a murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, escaping execution by a single vote.

He grew up on Oak Hill, his father's tobacco plantation of several hundred acres, which was worked by 89 slaves and was located about 30 miles (48 km) southeast of Washington, D.C.[1][2]: 161 At age 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.

Upon graduation in 1856, Mudd returned to Charles County to practice medicine, marrying his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Frances Dyer, one year later.

While the house was under construction, the Mudds lived with Frankie's bachelor brother, Jeremiah Dyer, finally moving into their new home in 1859.

[2]: 164 With the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Southern Maryland's 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.

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 Mudd pondered his alternatives, he was introduced to someone who said he might be interested in buying his property: 26 year-old actor John Wilkes Booth.

Prior to killing Lincoln, Booth had intended to kidnap the president and ransom him and other political affiliates of the Union for a large sum of money.

[citation needed] After Booth shot Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865, he broke his left fibula when he jumped from the presidential box while fleeing Ford's Theater.

Mudd went to Bryantown during the day on April 15 to run errands; if he had not already heard the news of the assassination from Booth, he certainly learned of it on the trip.

"[18] The prosecution presented witnesses who testified that he had shot one of his slaves in the leg and threatened to send others to Richmond, Virginia, to assist in the construction of Confederate defenses.

In September 1865, two months after Mudd arrived, the control of Fort Jefferson was transferred from the 161st New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment to the 82nd US Colored Troops.

[20] He was quickly discovered and placed, along with Arnold, O'Laughlen, Spangler, and George St. Leger Grenfell, in a large empty ground-level gunroom that soldiers referred to as "the dungeon".

However, following a December 22 letter from his wife to President Johnson, the War Department ordered the discontinuance of the shackles and the move to better quarters, which was accomplished by January.

The soldiers in the fort wrote a petition to Johnson in October 1867 stating the degree of Mudd's assistance: "He inspired the hopeless with courage and by his constant presence in the midst of danger and infection.... [Many] doubtless owe their lives to the care and treatment they received at his hands.

"[21] Probably as a reward for his work in the yellow fever epidemic, Mudd was reassigned from the carpentry shop to a clerical job in the Provost Marshal's office, where he remained until his pardon.

He gave one interview to the New York Herald after his release but immediately regretted it, and complained that the article had several factual errors and misrepresented his work during the yellow fever epidemic.

The next year, Mudd ran as a Democratic candidate for the Maryland House of Delegates, but was defeated by the popular Republican William Mitchell.

Over a century after the assassination, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both wrote letters to Richard Mudd in which they argued that his grandfather had committed no crime.

However, others, including authors Edward Steers, Jr. and James Swanson, assert that there is evidence that Samuel Mudd visited Booth three times in the months before the failed kidnapping attempt.

Mudd lied to the authorities who came to his house after the assassination, claiming that he did not recognize the man who showed up on his doorstep in need of treatment, and giving them false information about where Booth and Herold went.

[26]: 211–2, 378 [12]: 234–235  He also hid the monogrammed boot that he had cut off Booth's injured leg behind a panel in his attic, but the thorough search of Mudd's house soon revealed this further piece of evidence which was later used against him.

The testimonies are as follows: One hypothesis is that Mudd was originally complicit in the kidnapping plot, likely as the person whom the conspirators would have turned to for medical treatment in case Lincoln was injured, and that Booth thus remembered the doctor and went to his house to get help in the early hours of April 15.

Mudd attempted several other legal venues, ending in 2003 when the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case because the deadline for filing had been missed.

[33] Mudd's life was the subject of a 1936 film, The Prisoner of Shark Island, directed by John Ford and scripted by Nunnally Johnson.

On the episode "Swiss Diplomacy" on The West Wing, the First Lady and cardiac surgeon, Dr. Abby Bartlet commented on the duty of a physician to treat an injured patient despite potential legal repercussions.

However, according to an online etymology dictionary, the phrase has its earliest known recorded instance in 1823, ten years before Mudd's birth, and it is based on an obsolete sense of the word "mud" meaning "a stupid twaddling fellow.