Assassination Vacation

  Just as technology was compromising Fort Jefferson’s usefulness, the Civil War redeemed it. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln designated the fort as a federal prison for Union soldiers, most of them deserters. Lincoln had a soft spot for deserters, whom he called his “legs cases.” Though many of his military commanders grumbled about Lincoln’s leniency — traditionally, runaways were shot — the president preferred incarceration to execution, asking, “If Almighty God gives a man a cowardly pair of legs how can he help their running away with him?”

  That said, Fort Jefferson was harsh. “Bad diet, bad water, and every inconvenience,” wrote Mudd to his wife. “Without exception,” his cellmate Sam Arnold later recalled, “it was the most horrible place the eye of man ever rested upon, where day after day the miserable existence was being dragged out, intermixed with sickness, bodily suffering, want and pinching hunger, without the additional acts of torture and inhumanity that soon I became a witness of.”

  Yeah, but how’s the food? Arnold described the bread as a “disgusting…mixture of flour, bugs, sticks and dirt.” He also mentioned that the “meat, whose taint could be traced by its smell from one part of the fort to the other” was so rotten dogs ran away from it, and that the coffee was “slop.” As for the accommodations, Arnold portrayed the wall of his cell as “a mass of slime.”

  The Arnold quotations above are taken from the conspirator’s enthralling memoir. Arnold was a recluse for decades after his release from Fort Jefferson. But one day in 1902, he picked up the newspaper and saw his own obituary. Another Samuel Arnold in a nearby county had died and been mistaken for the friend of Booth. Arnold didn’t like what he read. Evidently, helping kill the president gets a guy a surprisingly unflattering obit. So Arnold penned a series of newspaper articles (which were later published as a book) to tell his side of the story.

  Mike is a fan of Arnold’s writing. It’s hard not to be. Arnold described the deprivations of the fort in unflinching detail. For example, he claimed that it was “necessary to dig deep holes and gutters to catch the water, thereby preventing our quarters becoming flooded all over.” At the fort, Mike shows me those very gutters. The little circular drainage ditch dug by the conspirators is still there on the floor of an upstairs cell. It’s a very dramatic moment, seeing the scrapings of Arnold and Mudd. Pointing my camera at the floor and taking a picture, I can’t help but feel for them, how unthinkably demoralizing it must have been, sloshing around standing water that’s a better habitat for mosquitoes than men.

  The Lincoln conspirators were moved around the fort a few times to different quarters. On the way to showing me another one of their cells, Mike stops in the yard, saying, “This is where they would hang men from their thumbs. Another very popular form of punishment was making men carry cannonballs. Can you imagine a frail man eating a poor diet having to carry a hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound projectile?”

  Mike looks down at the green grass, picturing hunched-over cannonball carriers. He says, “They would circle here. They spent two hours on and two hours off, night and day. Depending on the infraction, depending on the whim of the sadistic provost or the officer of the day, this would go on for a couple of weeks. Invariably, the man’s not going to survive. He’s going to pass out. He’s going to collapse.” Mike goes on to mention that the civilian family in charge of keeping the lighthouse complained that they couldn’t get any sleep at night because of the screams.

  We walk past a brown sign announcing “Dr. Mudd’s Cell” in a white typeface that fans of geysers and log architecture know and love as the National Park Service font.

  Inside, the cell is dark and gloomy. Dried leaves clatter around the concrete floor. Hanging above a doorway is a replica of a sign Mudd knew well, reading, “Whoso entereth here leaveth all hopes behind.” It’s cribbed from Dante’s Inferno; these are the words inscribed above the gates to hell.

  We entereth anyway. A framed picture of Mudd hangs on the wall.

  “Even if you hate Dr. Mudd, you’ve got to respect what he did during the epidemic,” Mike states. In describing the 1867 yellow fever outbreak, the ranger is simultaneously so moved and informed, he speaks in complete paragraphs:

  “The army doctor out here died. All four nurses in the hospital died, and that leaves no one but Dr. Mudd. A situation like that takes bravery.

  “Four hundred people are living out here at that time — men, women, children, black and white. There were two hundred and seventy cases of yellow fever. That’s pretty serious. Thirty-eight died that we know of. Back then, they didn’t know what caused yellow fever. They didn’t know how to treat it. You would die a very painful death. They called it ‘bone fever’ or ‘break bone fever.’ Such intense pain in your joints, in your bones, that you felt like you were going to explode. The latter stages of yellow fever were called ‘black vomit,’ literally that.”

  The mention of the black vomit cheers me up. It makes the pale green yogurt I threw up this morning on the boat seem comparatively festive, a thought that causes my mind to momentarily wander to Chicago and fond memories of St. Patrick’s Day and kelly-colored beer.

  Meanwhile, back at Fort Jefferson, Mike says, “Mudd had some experience treating, or at least attempting to treat, yellow fever in Baltimore, where he apparently worked for a period of time. So he had some background. He understands that perhaps the best thing you can do is keep the victims calm. Often he would sit by their sides, hold their hands, offering comforting words, a cold compress if they were hot, a blanket if they had chills.

  “He also understood that they were very susceptible to any kind of stress. What had been a tradition out here was when anyone had yellow fever was to get them off this island, out of Fort Jefferson. There was this small island nearby originally called Sand Key, but they changed the name of it to Hospital Key. It was a hospital in name only. It was really a kind of quarantine. They would take unhealthy inhabitants over there, and oftentimes it was a one-way ticket.

  “That island pretty much filled up with dead bodies. There are none there today. Those graves washed away in the hurricane of 1935.

  “One thing that Mudd did, even though as a prisoner he had no authority to do this, he said, ‘No. No, we’re not going to send any more men over to Hospital Key. It’s too stressful.’ Just the trip alone — you know on a day like today in an open rowboat going about a mile and a half — it’s pretty rough! If they survived the trip they’re going to be worse than they were when they started. So he made sure all the patients were kept here at the fort.

  “The epidemic lasted the better part of two to three months. It essentially ran out of victims. So the deaths just started to decline. But one of those that died was Michael O’Laughlin, one of the Lincoln conspirators.”

  Hanging on the cell’s wall alongside Mudd’s photograph is a plaque, from 1961. The plaque quotes Andrew Johnson’s pardon, issued on his last day in office, February 8, 1869:

  …upon occasion of the prevalence of the yellow fever…Samuel A. Mudd devoted himself to the care and cure of the sick, and interposed his courage and skill to protect the garrison…from peril and alarm, and thus…saved many valuable lives and earned the admiration and gratitude of all who observed or experienced his generous and faithful service to humanity.

  I am standing there reading the plaque and admiring Mudd — forgiving him.

  Mike and I chat about how Mudd had noticed that the epidemic would have been the perfect time to escape, what with the guards laid up with the black vomit, but he resolved to stay and care for the patients. Then Mike asks me, “You know why Mudd tried to escape in September of ’65, right?”

  Nope.

  “Well, it’s in a letter. Mudd was quite a, shall we say, white supremacist. You know he was a slave owner. In September of 1865, the U.S. Colored Unit — that’s what they called those troops then — arrive at the fort. And Mudd describes this to his wife: ‘It is bad enough to be a prisoner in the hands of white men your equals under the Constitution, bu
t to be lorded over by a set of ignorant, prejudiced and irresponsible beings of unbleached humanity, was more than I could submit to.’ ”

  Wincing, Mike continues, “The thought of being guarded by black soldiers was something he felt he could not deal with.” So Mudd tried to stow away in a supply ship but was discovered before it left the dock.

  Now that I have snapped out of my momentary exoneration of Mudd, I ask Mike if he has formed an opinion regarding Mudd’s guilt or innocence in the assassination.

  “Out here, of course, we have to be careful. It’s prudent to be impartial. Some of our visitors, they come out here — it’s like a pilgrimage. They want to see Mudd’s cell. They want to talk about this fascinating story. Where else can you do it? You can go to Mudd’s home maybe, but that’s not really getting to the heart of the matter.”

  “Yes, they’re a little biased there,” I agree. Mike smiles at this understatement, knowing as I do that saying they’re a little biased in Mudd’s favor at the Mudd-family-run Mudd home in Maryland is like saying cheese steaks are kind of associated with Philadelphia.

  “So out here we say that we will not resolve guilt or innocence. We simply want to point out what the conditions were like and allow you, whatever your views are, to take that for what it’s worth. I do try to point out some things that were brought up in Mudd’s trial, how some felt he was simply a country doctor doing his Hippocratic oath. But there was some testimony during the trial that points out that he was probably part of an underground network of Confederate spies. Does that mean he was part of the conspiracy to assassinate the president? Well, probably not. But you know that very damning testimony that Booth had been in his home before?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been to the home. You couldn’t even find it today without roads and signs.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “My friend and I got lost eighteen times and we had MapQuest.”

  “So imagine if it’s three A.M., pitch black. And then what? Booth and Mudd were seen in public together at least twice, right? And in that climate, it was tragic. I mean the first successful assassination. There was so much death and suffering. Mudd could have easily been hanged with that evidence. It’s hard to say. He certainly didn’t pull the trigger. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that he may have been part of the plot to kidnap the president. I’m one of the people who believe that if Booth had never broken his ankle, we never would have heard the name Dr. Samuel Mudd.”

  We go out onto a bastion outside the fort walls to look at the biggest cannon I have ever seen. My father has a thing for cannons, so I ask Mike to take my picture next to it. He says that he ought to take a picture of me inside of it it’s so huge.

  “It’s a fifteen-inch Rodman,” he says. “This weighs twenty-five tons. This might come as a surprise, but it’s almost the size and the weight of a Sherman tank.” The thing can fire a projectile with a diameter of fifteen inches weighing 432 pounds. “Imagine what a four - hundred - and - thirty - two - pound beach ball would do to a wooden sailing ship. This is a nice example of a deterrent.”

  He adds, “We have six of these cannons, one on top of each bastion. This is the largest collection of fifteen-inch Rodmans in existence.”

  I considered putting an exclamation point at the end of the previous sentence to more accurately portray the gusto with which it was delivered. “This is the largest collection of fifteen-inch Rodmans in existence” doesn’t look, on the page, like a sentence full of fun, but it was. Mike’s enthusiasm for the fort and what it has to offer is so catching that even when he points his finger at some corroded stretch of brick I get the same giddy feeling I do when leaping into a subway car a split second before the doors close, that feeling of How lucky am I?

  He gushes, “There are so many superlatives out here. I’ve worked in six coastal forts. I’ve been doing this for about twenty years, and this is arguably the finest coastal fort in the country. And heck, think of all the shipwrecks. We have nearly three hundred shipwrecks in our waters. We have the sooty tern, the birds whose migration is a world treat. People come from around the world to see our spring migration. The turtles, the sharks — some of the most important shark research that’s ever been done in the world has been done right out here less than a mile from where we’re standing. And this lighthouse,” he says, pointing up. “You don’t want to forget about lighthouses. This one was built in 1876.”

  He asks if I’m afraid of heights and would I like to climb the lighthouse. I sigh, telling him that yes of course I’m afraid of heights, not mentioning that of all my phobia (water, driving, snakes, roller coasters, Children of the Corn) and allergies (peanuts, wheat, pet dander, springtime) I’m almost proud of my fear of heights because it seems comparatively ho-hum, sane.

  To buck myself up for the lighthouse I picture Edward R. Murrow during the Blitz, taking the stairs to that London rooftop. If he can deliver an elegant radio report as the Luftwaffe tried to bomb Big Ben, I shouldn’t be such a baby about getting forty feet closer to the occasional migrating bird.

  As we ascend the stairs Mike says, “You can hear the wind blowing.” Yes, I can. It is the sound of fear.

  As Mike unlocks the door he says, “The view’s spectacular up here. It’s a thousand times better than where we just were. Hold on to your hat, hopefully you won’t be blown away.”

  Well, I am blown away. The view is majestic. Looking out to sea Mike is giddy, cheerfully pointing out which tiny island is Long Key, which one is Bush Key, gesturing toward some whitecaps where Hospital Key used to be, narrating a live-action documentary on the miracle of migration that begins, “The neat thing about a sooty tern…”

  Then, turning around to look into the interior of the fort, he says, “The only way to really get a perspective on the size and scale of the fort is to come up here. The inside, well, it competes with Yankee Stadium. You could almost say the Roman Colosseum. You could easily fit a dozen football fields with plenty of room. It’s just a really big place. And remember it’s also a very expensive place, the single most expensive coastal defense fort ever built, and that’s part of the reason why. The cost of shipping these bricks out here was sometimes as much as the cost of the bricks themselves. And several ships didn’t quite make it. There are wrecks — wrecks upon wrecks — within sight of here. The rationale here is, this would have been a really small city on the sea, kind of like having a really big wall around the middle of the ocean. And remember, you’re not only supporting your own remote, very isolated garrison, but you’re providing materials — food, gunpowder, even water itself — to the warships that came here. It helps to explain why the engineers considered this one of the most strategic sites in North America. Yes, we’re out in the middle of the ocean, yet we’re adjacent to the shipping lanes. Roughly speaking, this was the crossroads to the Gulf of Mexico.”

  He concedes that because of the fort’s expense, it was very controversial. He’s not saying whether building it was right or wrong.

  Then, alluding to current national defense controversies, he says, “Today our brave young men are in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the same ongoing effort — protecting our freedom, protecting our peace and prosperity, and our way of life. It comes at a huge price.”

  A current-events lightbulb goes off in my head, one I’d prefer to switch back off. Remembering that little drainage ditch Mudd and Arnold dug into the concrete floor, I turn, looking south. Near here, on the far side of Cuba, more than six hundred prisoners of the War on Terror, a few of them child soldiers under the age of seventeen, are, by executive order, incarcerated at the U.S. base on Guantánamo Bay for who knows how long for who knows what reasons in what Human Rights Watch has called a “legal black hole.” Suicide attempts are epidemic. There are rumors of mistreatment — of constant interrogations, sleep deprivation, of inmates chained up in tiny cells. Some of them, maybe even most of them, are, as government spokesmen keep saying, bad people. And that’s more or less how I thin
k of Dr. Mudd — a bad man who did bad things (but happened to be a good doctor). I haven’t decided if he deserved to eat bread made out of sticks or live in a rancid puddle, probably because I haven’t made up my mind whether anyone deserves such treatment, though I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Convention is the day a person gives up on the human race. So after I get home from the Dry Tortugas — the nicest thing I can say about the boat ride back to Key West is that I only threw up once — I will click on the Guantánamo link at the Amnesty International Web site and see the headline “Human Rights Scandal” and I will think of Dr. Mudd at Fort Jefferson, digging at the swamp that was his floor.

  After leaving Dr. Mudd’s house, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold pushed south toward Virginia, hiding out in the woods where a Confederate agent named Thomas Jones plied them with food and newspapers. Booth’s diary, recovered from his pocket after he died and currently on display in the museum at Ford’s Theatre, records the dismay with which the famous actor reacted to his latest reviews. Booth is shocked that what he thought would be regarded as a courageous act of southern patriotism against a despot is covered in the press as the treasonous crime of an evil lunatic. How ungrateful! On April 21, a week after shooting Lincoln, Booth wrote the following in his journal, comparing himself to Brutus, Caesar’s assassin immortalized by Shakespeare in the play Booth had performed with his brothers, and William Tell, the Swiss hero who warranted the famous overture for slaying an Austrian bully.

  After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gun boats till I was forced to return wet cold and starving, with every mans hand against me, I am here in despair. And why; For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a Hero. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cutthroat…. I struck for my country and that alone. A country groaned beneath this tyranny and prayed for this end. Yet now behold the cold hand they extend to me.