Assassination Vacation (8 page)

“This was not an ordinary fort,” Mike begins. “It was extraordinarily large.”

Inside the brick perimeter is a vast grassy courtyard dotted with palms. There are brick sidewalks and benches shaded by gnarled trees. It’s breezy, but peaceful. It is so pleasant I can almost imagine taking a vacation here without the extra tourist glamour of presidential killers and mosquito-borne disease. In fact, most of my fellow passengers are presently pulling on snorkel gear or lining up for the picnic; they will return to the boat hours later with sun-chapped smiles, having gone all day without mentioning yellow fever.

Mike says, “I think it’s a paradox that this prison-in-paradise theme’s kind of interwoven through. The contrast makes it so compelling.”

Guiding me through a brick arcade, Mike stands next to a cannon and points down a corridor. “Some of the views that you’ll see today you can’t enjoy anywhere else because of these long, unobstructed views looking down wings of archways.” He says that the arch motif is repeated a couple of thousand times. The loopy curves soften an otherwise oppressive slab.

“It’s pretty funny. They’re building arches inside other arches,” Mike says of the fort’s engineers. “They’re kind of showing off if you think about it. In fact, there are many arches you can’t see because they’re in our foundations.” The two thousand arches, not to mention the moat, endow Fort Jefferson with a medieval mood, more William the Conqueror than U. S. Grant.

“The concept is not that different from a castle,” Mike agrees. “It shows you how fairly static the technology was. We’re still using a castle to protect ourselves. It shows you how unprepared they were for rapid technological changes.”

He is referring to the fact that, by the beginning of the Civil War, Fort Jefferson was technologically obsolete. The U.S. government had been shipping brick out here for a couple of decades, trying to build an impregnable fortress with forty-five-foot-high walls that were eight feet thick, until, suddenly, there were steam-powered warships that were no longer at the mercy of wind and were capable of firing rifled artillery that could blow holes straight through the walls.

The War of 1812 witnessed such national security embarrassments as the British burning down the White House, so in the years following, the United States started building coastal forts like this one. Mike declares, “They not only helped prevent war, but they were powerful symbols that we wanted to be left alone. And they fit in very well with the American philosophy at the time. You know, it’s only since 1898 that we’ve become a world power. Prior to 1898, we were very insulated. What better way of insulating ourselves than to build this thick skin?”

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, but 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?