The Booth Brothers

On April 14, 1865, just days after the end of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln attended a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. and was shot. He died the next day.

Before the assassination, John Wilkes Booth was well known as a stage actor. He was the son of a famous actor, Junius Brutus Booth, and two of his brothers, Edwin and Junius, Jr., were also actors. Edwin was more famous than John Wilkes, before the assassination.

Months before the assassination of Lincoln, Edwin Booth was on a train platform in New Jersey. A young man was waiting in line to buy a ticket. He was pushed up against the idle train car and as the train began to move, the lad fell into the gap between the platform and the train. Booth grabbed him by his coat collar and brought him safely back onto the platform.

The young man knew who Edwin Booth was, but it was a few months later that Edwin Booth learned that the young man, whose life he saved was Robert Lincoln, the oldest son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. History suggests that Edwin was comforted by his deed as he was a staunch supporter of the North.

His Name is Mudd

Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth and whose shame created the expression, "His name is Mudd." 

He was sentenced to life in prison for splinting the fractured leg, but became a hero to guards and inmates of his island prison when he stopped a yellow-fever epidemic there in 1868 after the army doctors had died. President Johnson, Lincoln's successor, pardoned Mudd in early 1869.