His name is Mudd — got a problem?

The Historical Society of Greater Lansing and local partners are pulling out all the stops for a monthlong series of event and exhibits, turning up a surprising number of Lansing-area connections to one of the bloodiest and most fateful of our national dramas.

There will be a plenty to absorb all month, from emotionally fraught displays of battle flags and artifacts to historical quibbles and quirks. But the first lesson to take in is that the war isn´t over for everyone.

One man who´s still fighting is Thomas Mudd, a direct descendant of the late Dr. Samuel Mudd, one of the most famous (and infamous) names of the Civil War. Mudd will talk at the East Lansing Public Library at 7 p.m. Thursday.

Mudd´s great-grandfather is known as the man who set a broken leg for John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln´s assassin. Booth probably broke his leg jumping onto the stage at Ford´s Theater after shooting Lincoln.

Mudd was a civilian doctor, but he was arrested and tried by a military tribunal on the grounds that Lincoln was commander-in-chief. He was convicted of aiding and abetting the assassin and sentenced to life in prison.

Civilians caught up in wartime sinkholes of justice is just one of the Civil War themes that resonates down the years to the present day.

“The problem with the laws of war is that they´re not codified,” Thomas Mudd said in a phone interview. “You can make them up as you go. The trial (of Dr. Mudd) was highly irregular.”

Mudd also sees a lot of parallels between John Wilkes Booth and his ilk, who were outraged by the tyranny of the federal government as personified by Lincoln, and the extreme right-wingers of today. He pointed out that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, wore a shirt on the day of the bombing that depicted Lincoln with the words Booth shouted after killing the president, “Sic semper tyrannis” — “thus always to tyrants.”

Most of Mudd´s talk, however, will be devoted to proving that his ancestor was not of that ilk. While interned at the Fort Jefferson military prison in Florida´s Dry Tortugas islands, Samuel Mudd helped fight an outbreak of yellow fever. Lincoln´s successor, President Andrew Johnson, pardoned him at the behest of officers stationed on the island.

But Mudd´s conviction, however, still stood. The old saying, “his name is mud,” — already in currency before the Lincoln assassination — picked up another “d” and a lot more traction. Even President Richard M. Nixon complained that his enemies were pulling a “Mudd” on him in one of his White House tapes.

Mudd´s descendants embarked on a multi-generational quest to clear his name that goes on to this day.

Things got worse for the Mudd name in the early 1980s, when a series of sensational books, including Edward Steers Jr.’s “His Name is Still Mudd” and “Blood on the Moon,” painted Dr. Mudd as complicit in Booth´s unrealized plot to kidnap Lincoln.

“They´re very compelling books,” said Thomas Mudd. “After reading all the books on this, I´m sincerely convinced that Dr. Mudd was not complicit. But Americans love conspiracy.”

Samuel Mudd did have reason to be unhappy with Lincoln´s policies. He owned slaves on his Maryland tobacco plantation. The Civil War put a crimp in his fortunes when Maryland abolished slavery in 1864. Mudd was seen with Booth twice before the assassination, when Booth was planning to kidnap Lincoln.

In the late 1980s, a military board ruled that Dr. Mudd was illegally tried by a military commission and that his conviction should be expunged. The Army brass did not accept the ruling and let the conviction stand.

Thomas Mudd and his father, Dr. Richard D. Mudd, pursued a court appeal that wound its way through the system until 2002, when they were caught up in a classic Catch-22. The Mudd family was told it had no standing to sue because Dr. Mudd wasn´t in the military.

For a final indignity, Mudd’s pro bono attorney missed a Supreme Court filing deadline.

“We were dead in the water, judicially,” Thomas Mudd said. “Now I just plug away, like my father did for many, many, many decades, and do it in the court of history.”

Mudd’s Lansing account will cover the kidnap plot, the assassination, the flight of Booth and Mudd’s trial and imprisonment. The story will include a colorful Lansing character who will figure more prominently in future April events in the Historical Society of Greater Lansing series: Lt. Luther Baker, the head of the militia detachment that caught up with Booth and killed him. Baker and his horse, Buckskin, were fixtures of Lansing´s Decoration Day parade for years. Baker is buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery.

Mudd´s talk will also touch upon a Jackson resident and Army colonel with the striking name of Christian Rath. Known as “The Hangman,” Rath was in charge of the July 7, 1865, execution of four people convicted in the plot to assassinate Lincoln. Despite his fearsome name, Rath did not relish the duty and regretted it the rest of his life. The four were convicted by a military commission — even though they were civilians — and included the first woman executed by the federal government, Mary Surratt.

Mudd will begin his talk by giving his take on Abraham Lincoln himself, and that’s where it gets a little weird. After the assassination, Lincoln was lionized and Mudd was smeared. That never sat well with the Mudds, who have a way of mixing their zeal to rehabilitate their ancestor with a disturbing dash of Lincoln envy.

“My father used to say that being assassinated was the best thing that happened to Lincoln,” Thomas Mudd said.

Thomas’s father, Richard Mudd, put it this way in an April 14, 1972, op-ed piece for the Chicago Tribune: “The violent death of a leader enhances his stature in history by making him a martyr or hero. Such honor, however, is not the lot of a noble human being who falls victim to a miscarriage of justice.”

Thomas Mudd points out that Lincoln was a deeply unpopular president — even in the North — especially after suspending the writ of habeas corpus. In Mudd´s view, Lincoln rose to martyrdom mainly by being shot — on a Good Friday no less.

As if that weren´t enough, Thomas Mudd will, in his talk Thursday, also advance the controversial claim that Lincoln had Marfan syndrome — a wasting disease that would likely have killed him before his term was over.

A skeptical listener might connect all these dots and paraphrase Mudd´s case this way: “Yes, Lincoln was murdered, but he would have died soon anyway, and even benefited from the assassination — which my slaveowning ancestor had nothing to do with.”

Now that´s a lively way to get the Civil War going again after 150 years.

The Mystery of Dr. Mudd & John Wilkes Booth

7 p.m. Thursday, April 9 East Lansing Public Library 950 Abbot Road, East Lansing lansinghistory.org.