February 12, 2023 is the 214th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States. Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 15. 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate spy from Maryland. Did you know that many Americans thought that Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was a Catholic conspiracy? Author and historian Kevin Schmiesing this and several other unique events in his book A Catholic Pilgrimage through American History: People and Places that Shaped the Church in the United States. Share the story with your students. See also a Teacher Resource Guide that accompanies the book.
Bryantown, Maryland, is an unincorporated community located on State Route 5, a major thoroughfare that leads north to Washington, DC, and south toward the peninsulas of southern Maryland, where the Calverts and other Catholic settlers founded St. Mary’s City (see chapter 2). Bryantown is dominated by its Catholic church, St. Mary’s. The current parish dates to 1793, but there was Catholic liturgy in Bryantown as early as the 1650s.
On the grounds of St. Mary’s is a large cemetery, a testament to the Catholic history of the region. Among the tombs is an unremarkable gray stone engraved with the names Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd and Sarah Frances Mudd. The date of the earlier deceased—Samuel, 1883—belies the contemporary look of the stone. In fact, the original tombstone was replaced in 1940, and it can be viewed at the Samuel Mudd House in nearby Waldorf. Dr. Mudd is the most famous area resident because, in 1865, he participated in what has credibly been called “the most sensational crime in American history.” He helped to kill the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
Or maybe he didn’t.
The guilt of Samuel Mudd is one of the great, unsettled debates of American history, and the Lincoln assassination connects a bewildering array of political, social, and religious factors in a complex web of intrigue. Catholics were in the thick of it.
Samuel Mudd and Jack Booth
Samuel Mudd was born December 20, 1833, in Charles County, Maryland, the fourth of ten children. He was educated at Georgetown College, the Jesuit school in the District of Columbia, and obtained a degree in medicine from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. In the 1850s, Mudd began practicing medicine in Charles County, married his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Frances Dyer, started a family that would eventually consist of nine children, and began managing a small tobacco farm, where he owned five slaves.
A few years later, the nation was torn apart by the Civil War. Maryland was a border state where loyalties were divided, but Mudd was a proslavery stalwart and thus a southern sympathizer. In 1862, he wrote a letter to the well-known Catholic convert and intellectual Orestes Brownson, explaining his reasons for canceling his subscription to Brownson’s Quarterly Journal. Brownson had written vigorously against slavery and in defense of the war aims of the North, affirming the Catholic Church’s disapproval of human enslavement. Mudd objected strenuously to Brownson’s assertions and declared that the South was fighting to defend states’ rights.
Ominously, in light of later events, Mudd targeted Lincoln as the source of the conflict that roiled the nation: “I confidently assert, that if there was any other man at the head of the government of true conservative and constitutional principles, the Revolution would immediately cease so far as the South is concerned.” He further predicted that the South was capable of standing up to the northern bullies. “She is possessed of every ingredient to make her self-sustaining and powerful—all she wants is a little more time,” he insisted, “and if the war should be protracted, all the better for her future, because her resources will be brought out.”
Like many southerners, Mudd’s optimism concerning the capacity of the Confederacy to keep pace with the war machine of the North proved unfounded. His belief in the threat posed to slavery, however, was accurate. In 1864 the state of Maryland abolished slavery, costing him his labor force and undermining the financial viability of his farm. He decided to sell the property and rely on his medical practice.
There was at the time a young actor who was wandering the area, ostensibly intending to purchase real estate. His name was John Wilkes Booth, and he was in fact planning an escape route from Washington, where he and his collaborators intended to kidnap Abraham Lincoln and force the Union to release southern prisoners.
In December 1864, Booth and Mudd met after Mass at St. Mary’s Church. Was their connection innocent, with Mudd merely courting a prospective property buyer—or was it more sinister, with Booth recruiting the doctor to assist in the conspiracy? This is the critical question in the mystery of Dr. Samuel Mudd.
It wasn’t their only meeting. The government’s star witness in its prosecution of the conspirators after the assassination, Louis Weichmann testified that Mudd rendezvoused with Booth at a Washington hotel in January 1865, and there was spotty evidence that they got together on other occasions.
Booth had been active in creating a small circle of dedicated conspirators, including John Surratt, the son of a widowed boardinghouse proprietor. Mary Surratt, whose story was told in the 2010 major motion picture The Conspirator, was the first woman to be executed by the federal government. She and her son were Catholics from southern Maryland. (Mary’s tavern was the main attraction in the town of Surrattsville—which was promptly renamed following the proprietor’s conviction and execution.)
The Surratts were not one of Maryland’s old Catholic families. Much of their ancestry is unclear, but John Surratt’s biographer guesses that the first American Surratts may have been Huguenots fleeing persecution in Catholic France—one of many ironies in this story. As a child, Mary Surratt, born Mary Elizabeth Jenkins, attended the Academy for Young Ladies in Alexandria, Virginia, a school operated by Mother Seton’s Sisters of Charity. Mary decided to convert from Episcopalian to Catholic during her time there. She married John Surratt Sr. in 1840, and their third child, John Jr., was born in April of 1844. Like the other children, he was baptized at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in the District of Columbia.
“From all indications,” historian Kenneth Zanca writes, “Mary Surratt took her Catholicism very seriously.” Through Mary’s influence, her mother, her mother-in-law, and her brother and his family all entered the Church. Priests were among Mary Surratt’s close friends and confidants. She aided Fr. Joseph Finotti, SJ, as he raised funds for the building of a new church in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Fr. Bernadine Wiget helped with her sons when she grew concerned about the influence of their alcoholic father.
In 1859, John Jr. enrolled at St. Charles College, an institution founded by Charles Carroll of Carrollton as a preparatory school for future priests. The young Surratt was there in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was elected president and sectional politics raged in Maryland. A classmate later recalled that the young Surratt “was a pronounced friend of the Southern cause from the start, yet I do not recall that he ever made himself offensive to anyone by the persistency of his views.”
In August 1862, John Sr. died, leaving Mary a widow. She asked her son to come back home, and he left his classmates at St. Charles, never to return. Mother and son devoted themselves to their farm and tavern. Failing to make ends meet, they decided to move into the District and manage a boardinghouse on H Street, not far from Ford’s Theater. Priests and sisters were among its patrons. It was a popular gathering place.
The final meeting between Booth and Mudd occurred on April 15, 1865. On the previous day, Good Friday, Booth had entered Ford’s Theater and shot Abraham Lincoln as he watched the play Our American Cousin. With the surrender of the Confederate Army on April 11, the motive of prisoner exchange had evaporated. In its place welled the frustration and fury of defeat. Booth had vowed to destroy the man who symbolized the end of the Confederacy and the southern way of life.
When Booth leapt from the viewing box—or perhaps in a riding accident during his escape—he broke his leg. He managed to make his way to Mudd’s house in Maryland (the place, now a museum, where the original tombstone is preserved). After Mudd treated Booth, the assassin and his coconspirator David Herold resumed their flight from the relentless manhunt. Booth would be cornered and shot by federal troops a few days later.
Samuel Mudd and Mary and John Surratt were among those implicated and captured in the dragnet of the federal investigation of the assassination. A total of eight conspirators were tried and found guilty. Four, including Mary, were hanged. Four, including Mudd, were imprisoned.
A Catholic Conspiracy?
The Catholic connections of some of the accused were not lost on a distraught, conspiracy-minded public. David Herold, who accompanied Booth on his escape, had attended Georgetown College. The Jesuit link was a suggestive one. Members of the Society of Jesus, champions of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, had been antagonists of Protestantism since the sixteenth century. Shortly after the assassination, a letter addressed to War Secretary Edwin Stanton from a former Protestant Civil War chaplain tried to connect the dots and helpfully suggested where the fugitive might be found:
John M. Surratt is a Roman Catholic, once patronized . . . by the priests of Georgetown. . . . As the Papal government only has shown favor to the Southern Rebellion, and the loyalty of a large proportion of the Catholic clergy is, to say the least, questionable, is not the presumption fair, that Surratt is harbored in some of their secret sanctuaries, more likely in Georgetown?
Surratt was in fact in Canada at the time. He had fled immediately and was the only major conspirator to escape punishment.
Stanton’s tipster, though perhaps motivated by irrational anti-Catholicism and not quite accurate as to either the position of the Catholic Church on the Confederacy or the geographical location of Surratt, did shrewdly guess somewhat close to the mark. Surratt in fact had the assistance of priests during his exile from the United States. Stanton, for his part, directing the search for Booth and his accomplice, had already issued orders to scour the “counties of Prince George, Charles and St. Mary’s” in Maryland, a region “noted for hostility to the Government and their protection to Rebel blockade runners, Rebel spies and every species of public enemies.” Southern Maryland happened to be both the historic heart of American Catholicism and also a hotbed of Confederate sympathy. There was plenty of grist for the mill of those who were determined to view the Lincoln conspiracy as a Catholic plot.
The anti-Catholicism of the 1850s—manifested in the Bedini riot and the affair of the pope’s stone (see chapters 13 and 14)—had been tempered by the Civil War. Indeed, part of the motivation for the nativism of the Know-Nothings—the “American” Party—was to solidify a national American identity and preserve the Union. It didn’t turn out that way, as the pioneering historian of nativism, John Higham, notes: “The division between North and South, which nativists endeavored to submerge, soon submerged nativism.” Nativism, including its anti-Catholic component, would not long remain under water, however. Even as northern Catholic opposition to the war and emancipation kept northern Protestant suspicion toward Catholics kindled during the conflict, Catholic involvement in the Lincoln assassination furnished fresh fuel for antipapist fires afterward.
Mary and John Surratt’s Catholic connections were not merely historical. In Canada, John lived in the house of a priest in a remote village in the province of Quebec. In September 1865, he fled to England, where he lodged at a Catholic oratory in Liverpool. The following spring, he moved again, this time to Italy, where he joined the Papal Zouaves, a short-lived military unit composed of volunteers from around the world who banded together to defend the territorial claims of the papacy as the Papal States were besieged by Italian nationalists during the 1860s.
The anti-Catholic narrative had problems, though. While Maryland was the cradle of Catholicism in the British colonies, it was also a den of anti-Catholic sentiment. Secretary of State William Seward, the other victim of the April 14 plot, was a detested figure in southern Maryland, in part because of his friendliness to Catholics and other immigrants. There is also the fact that, once papal authorities learned the identity of Surratt, they placed him under arrest with the intention of extraditing him for trial in the United States.
But the desperate Surratt escaped from his Roman captors, scrambled into the Italian countryside, and eventually ended up in Egypt. There he was at last apprehended by American officers. In what some continue to view as a miscarriage of justice, the jury—on the strength of testimony that insisted Surratt was not in Washington on the day of Lincoln’s assassination—failed to convict Surratt and he went free. He got married, had children, and taught at a Catholic school in Emmitsburg, Maryland. He lived until 1916 and was buried at a Catholic cemetery in Baltimore.
The Conspiracy Theory Lives On
During Mary Surratt’s trial, five Catholic priests appeared as character witnesses for the accused. Fr. Jacob Walter, her parish priest, joined Mary’s daughter in a frantic final attempt to stay the execution. “You cannot make me believe,” he wrote later, “that a Catholic woman would go to Communion on Holy Thursday and be guilty of murder on Good Friday.” Their efforts failed. On the morning of the hanging, Mary appeared in the company of Frs. Walter and Wiget. They spiritually and physically supported the middle-aged woman, who fainted as she approached the scaffold. They were present as the trap door opened and her mortal life ended. Her body, with those of the other conspirators, remained in government custody for several years but was finally interred in 1869 at Mount Olivet, a cemetery of the Archdiocese of Washington.
Protestant disgust at Catholic involvement in the plot prompted Congress to take action as well. It passed a ban on funding for an ambassador to the Vatican that stood for over a hundred years. The beleaguered Pope Pius IX was in the process of losing the Papal States—the Church’s sovereign possessions for over a thousand years (the efforts of the Papal Zouaves came to naught)—and thus the need for a diplomatic mission to the pope seemed diminished in any case.
The notion of a Catholic assassination conspiracy, far from petering out, actually gained momentum in the postwar era. One of the most flamboyant anti-Catholics of the nineteenth century, ex-priest Charles Chinquy was its chief proponent. His 1885 screed, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, has been called the “main witness” for the prosecution against the Church and the first “systematic development” of the assassination as a “Catholic grand conspiracy.”
There had been rumblings of an unseemly affinity between Catholicism and Confederacy during the war. The southern government made overtures to Pope Pius IX, and he replied in a friendly though diplomatically noncommittal way. The supposition of natural alliance between what they saw as two enemies of freedom was confirmed in the minds of papal detractors by Pius’s sympathetic gesture of sending a letter to Jefferson Davis, the imprisoned former president of the Confederacy, after the war.
Chiniquy heated this simmering controversy to a boil by fabricating Lincoln quotations, which in turn became stock items in the anti-Catholic literature of subsequent decades. “I do not pretend to be a prophet,” the president allegedly said, “but though not a prophet, I see a dark cloud on our horizon. And that dark cloud is coming from Rome.” During the war, Chiniquy claimed, Lincoln declared, “It is not against the Americans of the South, alone, I am fighting, it is more against the Pope of Rome.” In Chiniquy’s telling, Lincoln thought the First Amendment would need to be curtailed for Catholics because they are “sworn and public enemies of our constitution, our laws, our liberties, and our lives.”
The editors of one Lincoln collection describe Chiniquy as “the biggest liar in Lincoln literature,” but no matter: Fifty Years was a huge success. It reached forty editions by 1891, and among its publishers was the major evangelical press Fleming H. Revell. Chiniquy spread his message by spoken as well as printed word. He was a popular draw on the lecture circuit until his death in Quebec in 1899.
A Chiniquy pamphlet summarizing the case for a Catholic conspiracy made the rounds during the election of 1890. The secular Los Angeles Herald denounced it as “too silly for any sane man or woman’s attention,” but conceded that it was “widely circulated.” The nativist American Protective Association rehashed Chiniquy’s claims in its magazine in the same decade. The tale long outlived the teller. In the 1910s, an abridged version of Chiniquy’s account, titled “The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Romanists,” was published in the anti-Catholic periodical The Menace, circulation 1.5 million. The fundamentalist Jack Chick Publications republished the story once again as “The Big Betrayal” as late as 1981, and both Fifty Years and the Jack Chick article remain easily available online, preserving the Catholic conspiracy theory for generations to come.
His Name Was Mudd
Samuel Mudd was sent to an American prison in the Dry Tortugas, west of the Florida Keys. At first he tried repeatedly to escape, but he eventually submitted to his fate. He distinguished himself by his service as a physician during a yellow fever outbreak, and this among other factors was cited in President Andrew Johnson’s pardon decree of February 8, 1869.
Mudd returned to his family in Maryland and lived out the rest of his days in peace. When he died in 1883, he was buried in the parish cemetery. One granddaughter, Cecilia, joined the Congregation of Holy Cross, taking the name Sr. Samuela. She died at the congregation’s convent at Notre Dame, Indiana, in 2003. A grandson, Richard, devoted himself to clearing his grandfather’s name, going so far as to petition Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Both responded similarly, expressing their personal opinion that Mudd was innocent of any serious wrongdoing but also insisting that they had no power to formally overturn a federal conviction. “As President,” Reagan wrote, “there is nothing I can do. Presidential power to pardon is all that is in a President’s prerogatives and that, of course, was done by President Andrew Johnson.”
Did Mudd willingly participate in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln? The definitive answer will likely never be known. It’s a secret Mudd took to his grave—the one that lies in the cemetery of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Bryantown, Maryland.
Grave of Dr. Samuel Mudd
St. Mary’s Catholic Church
13715 Notre Dame Place
Bryantown, Maryland
