Dr. Mudd's Cell

During and after the Civil War, the US government used Fort Jefferson as a prison for hundreds of military deserters and convicts, but its most famous prisoner was the civilian Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. He arrived in July 1865 with three other conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and spent most of his four years of imprisonment in this casemate, though he lived in several locations within the fort. Serving a life sentence, Mudd swept bastions, worked in the fort's carpenter shop, and in 1867 helped treat many victims of a yellow fever epidemic. He was closely guarded after trying to escape aboard a ship that prisoners were helping to unload and load. Mudd wrote of being loaded with heavy chains and locked in a wet, damp room for twelve hours out of every twenty-four during working days and all day on Sundays and holidays, and after rains he reported that ten and twelve large buckets of water had to be dipped from the cell daily. President Andrew Johnson pardoned Mudd in 1869.