Lincoln Assassination Conspirator.  His role in the conspiracy was to help kidnap President Abraham Lincoln, but he dropped out of the murder conspiracy two weeks before President Lincoln was assassinated. Born in Washington, DC, the Arnold family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where Samuel Arnold was raised, and he attended St. Timothy’s Hall, a military academy, where he met actor John Wilkes Booth.  Booth recruited him in 1864 to join a plot to kidnap the President to use him in exchange for several high-ranking Confederate officers being held prisoner by the Union.  The conspirators met at Gautier’s Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC to discuss the means of kidnapping the President, but when Lincoln changed his plans at the last minute, the plan fell through.  After this failure, Arnold took up a job as a clerk in Old Point Comfort, Virginia, and on March 27, 1865, wrote Booth a letter asking that Booth give up his plans, and that he, Arnold, would be leaving the conspiracy, at least temporarily.  After Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, the letter was found among Booth’s belongings in his rooming house, and Arnold was immediately arrested.  Tried by military court for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the conspiracy to murder most of Lincoln’s cabinet officers, Arnold was found guilty of conspiracy, but not the murder, and was sentenced to life in prison.  Three other conspirators, Doctor Samuel Mudd, Edman Spangler, and Michael O’Laughlen were also given life, and all four were sent to Fort Jefferson, Florida, in the Dry Tortugas, to serve out their sentences.  On March 1, 1869, President Andrew Johnson pardoned Arnold, and he was released.  He admitted to being a part of the conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln, but always denied being a part of the murder plot.  After his release, he lived in Baltimore, Maryland, and he died there of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1906. (bio by: Kit and Morgan Benson) Cause of death: pulmonary tuberculosis