Mudd’s claim of knowing Booth only incidentally was already compromised by Weichmann’s testimony. Had the authorities found out about the other meeting that took place in Bryantown in December of 1864 with Harbin, Mudd’s case would surely have been lost. Harbin was well-known to the Federal authorities as a Confederate agent, and his association with Mudd would have completely undermined Mudd’s cover of feigned innocence.

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Faced with the knowledge that the authorities knew of Booth’s being in the Bryantown area and meeting with him in November 1864, Mudd compressed the two meetings into a single meeting in his testimony, hoping that the authorities would never guess that separate meetings had actually taken place. It worked. The other meeting involving Harbin completely escaped the investigators’ attention, although diligent detective work would have uncovered it from the testimony of Thompson and Hardy.²⁵

In statements given prior to his arrest, Mudd lied about virtually every piece of information the authorities were seeking in their effort to capture Booth. Lieutenant Alexander Lovett, the first interrogator, and Colonel Henry H. Wells, the second interrogator, both complained of the doctor’s evasiveness and apparent untruthfulness during their questioning of him.²⁶ This behavior led Wells to place Mudd under arrest and send him to Washington under guard.

Mudd’s attempt to convince the military authorities that he had only met with Booth on one occasion belies all of the facts in his case. Mudd withheld even from his own attorneys information about the meeting at the National Hotel, where he had introduced Booth to Surratt, and the December meeting in Bryantown with Harbin. Ignorant of both meetings, Maj. Gen. Thomas Ewing, one of Mudd’s two defense attorneys, weakened his credibility with the military commission by arguing that Weichmann had lied about the hotel meeting in late December and that Mudd had only met Booth before the assassination but once on Sunday, and once the day following, in November last.²⁷ The commission believed differently.

Mudd’s acquaintance with Booth was anything but incidental. His role in bringing Booth, Surratt, and Harbin together was pivotal. The fact that Dr. Queen chose to pass Booth on to Mudd during the November visit and that Harbin came across the river to meet with Booth at Mudd’s invitation suggests that Mudd was an important figure.

And there is even more to the Mudd story that tightens the noose of incrimination around the doctor’s neck. According to Eaton G. Horner, the detective who arrested Booth conspirator Samuel Arnold at Fort Monroe on Monday, April 17, Arnold had said that Booth carried a letter of introduction when he visited Mudd in November 1864. On cross-examination by Mudd’s attorney, Horner was asked if Arnold had meant to say that Booth had a letter of introduction to Mr. Queen or Dr. Mudd? Horner was explicit in his answer: I understood him [Arnold] to say and Dr. Mudd.²⁸ The implication that Booth carried a letter of introduction to Mudd is obvious.²⁹ Of special significance in this testimony is the fact that Mudd was implicated as a correspondent with Booth by Arnold on April 17, the day before the military authorities first visited Mudd (Tuesday, April 18). There is no way Arnold could have heard about Mudd as a result of the military investigation. Clearly he must have heard of Mudd and the letter of introduction from Booth himself.

George Atzerodt, the man Booth assigned to murder Vice President Andrew Johnson, implicated Mudd more directly in Booth’s plot when he confessed to Marshal McPhail of Baltimore, I am certain Mudd knew all about it, as Booth sent (as he told me) liquors & provisions for the trip with the President to Richmond, about two weeks before the murder to Dr. Mudd’s.³⁰

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