Printing the Legend: John Ford, ‘The Prisoner of Shark Island,’ and the Selling of Dr. Mudd

Ford's 1936 movie tells the story of an innocent country doctor who unwittingly aided John Wilkes Booth, a tale with a tenuous relationship to history.

In the summer of 2015, dozens of visitors descended on Fort Jefferson, a former military prison in the Florida Keys’ Dry Tortugas National Park wearing green shirts emblazoned with the words “Free Dr. Mudd.” The man they sought to “free,” Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, had not been there for 150 years and had been allowed to leave after a four-year stint in 1869 thanks to a pardon from President Andrew Johnson. Mudd was previously convicted by a nine-man military tribunal, convened by Johnson, of playing a role in the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln, whose broken leg the Maryland doctor/farmer set when Booth and his companion David Herold arrived at Mudd’s house at 4 a.m. on April 15th, the morning after Booth shot Lincoln in Ford’s Theater. But a pardon isn’t the same as an exoneration and Mudd’s descendants have been trying to clear his name ever since.

Those attempts seemed to reach a legal dead end in 2003, when the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, a year after the death of Mudd’s most ardent defender, grandson Dr. Richard Mudd. But other Mudds have carried on. The 2015 visitors to Fort Jefferson were Mudd descendants led by Richard Mudd’s son Tom Mudd. “‘We will never win this judicially’,” Tom told the Associated Press his father said to him shortly before his death. But Tom remained undeterred, saying, “But in the court of public opinion, we’re going to win this. As long as there is a Mudd alive, we are going to stand as evidence for the innocence of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd and his historic importance.”

Maybe you already have an opinion about Mudd’s guilt or innocence. Perhaps you remember Stockard Channing’s West Wing First Lady Abby Bartlett using his story as an example of medical obligations overriding politics when she told her husband simply, “You set the leg.” Or you might remember Nicolas Cage’s National Treasure historian Benjamin Franklin Gates recounting how the phrase “Your name is mud” comes from Mudd’s conviction in National Treasure: Book of Secrets. “The evidence was circumstantial and he was later pardoned but it doesn’t matter,” he says. “Mudd’s name still lives in infamy.”

In truth, the phrase “your name is mud” dates back to at least the 1820s. And though nothing else Bartlett or Gates says is technically false, they’re not telling the whole story, either. Here’s the circumstantial evidence that led to the conviction of Mudd (an owner of slaves and a vocal supporter of the Confederacy): Mudd initially claimed not to know Booth when he showed up on his doorstep that night. In fact, they met on three different occasions before the assassination, including a meeting in which Mudd introduced Booth to John Surratt, another conspirator. Booth’s pre-assassination schemes included a plot to kidnap and ransom Lincoln and yet another conspirator, George Atzerodt, told the military tribunal that Mudd’s house was to be used as part of that scheme. Authorities found Wilkes’ boot on Mudd’s property, where Mudd had hidden it. It’s all circumstantial evidence, sure, but it doesn’t paint a picture of a simple country doctor. Nor does the testimony of Mary Simms, a woman once enslaved by Mudd, that he sheltered Confederate agents and once shot her brother in the leg as punishment.

Yet this isn’t the Mudd of legend. That makes Matt Walsh’s depiction of Mudd as an abusive, racist jerk who eagerly gives shelter to Booth and Herold in the new Apple TV+ miniseries Manhunt a bit jarring. Though Manhunt takes its own flights of fancy from the historical record, this seems like a believably accurate depiction. So how did the notion of Mudd as a helpful innocent in the wrong place at the wrong time emerge?