century after the assassination, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both wrote letters to Richard Mudd in which they agreed that his grandfather had committed no crime. However, others assert evidence that Samuel Mudd visited Booth three times in the months before the failed kidnapping attempt, including authors Edward Steers, Jr. and James Swanson. The first time was November 1864 when Booth was looking for help in his kidnapping plot and was directed to Mudd by agents of the Confederate Secret Service. In December, Booth again met with Mudd and spent the night at his farm. Later that December, Mudd went to Washington and introduced Booth to Confederate agent John Surratt. Additionally, George Atzerodt testified that Booth sent supplies to Mudd's house in preparation for the kidnapping plan. Mudd lied to the authorities who came to his house after the assassination, claiming that he did not recognize the man who showed up on his doorstep in need of treatment, and giving them false information about where Booth and Herold went. He also hid the monogrammed boot that he had cut off Booth's injured leg behind a panel in his attic, but the thorough search of Mudd's house soon revealed this further piece of evidence which was later used against him. One hypothesis is that Dr. Mudd was originally complicit in the kidnapping plot, likely as the person whom the conspirators would have turned to for medical treatment in case Lincoln was injured, and that Booth thus remembered the doctor and went to his house to get help in the early hours of April 15. Mudd's grandson Richard unsuccessfully tried to clear his grandfather's name of the stigma of aiding Booth. In 1951, he published The Mudd Family of the United States, a two-volume history of the Mudd family beginning with Thomas Mudd, who arrived from England in 1665. A second edition was published in 1969. His papers detailed his attempts to clear his grandfather's name; they were donated to Georgetown University's Lauinger Library after his death in 2002. They are available to the public in the Special Collections Department. In 1992, Representatives Steny Hoyer and Thomas W. Ewing introduced House Bill 1885 to overturn the conviction, but it failed in committee. Mudd then turned to the Army Board for Correction of Military Records, which recommended that the conviction be overturned on the basis that Mudd should have been tried by