Samuel Mudd - Career After Release

Career After Release

Due in part to the influence of his defense attorney, Thomas Ewing Jr., who was influential in the President's administration, on February 8, 1869, Mudd was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson. He was released from prison on March 8, 1869 and returned home to Maryland on March 20, 1869. On March 1, 1869, three weeks after he pardoned Mudd, Johnson also pardoned Spangler and Arnold.

When Mudd returned home, well-wishing friends and strangers, as well as inquiring newspaper reporters, besieged him. Mudd was very reluctant to talk to the press because he felt they had misquoted him in the past. He gave one interview after his release to the New York Herald, but immediately regretted it, complaining that the article had several factual errors and that it misrepresented his work during the yellow fever epidemic. On the whole though, Mudd continued to enjoy the friendship of his friends and neighbors. He resumed his medical practice and slowly brought the family farm back to productivity.

In 1873, Spangler traveled to the Mudd farm, where Mudd and his wife welcomed him as the friend whom Mudd credited with saving his life while suffering with yellow fever at Fort Jefferson. Spangler lived with the Mudd family for about eighteen months, earning his keep by doing carpentry, gardening, and other farm chores, until his death on February 7, 1875.

Mudd always had an interest in politics. While in prison, he stayed abreast of political happenings through the newspapers he was sent. After his release, he became active again in community affairs. In 1874, he was elected chief officer of the local farmers association, the Bryantown Grange. In 1876, he was elected Vice President of the local Democratic Tilden-Hendricks presidential election committee. Tilden lost that year to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in a hotly disputed election. The next year Mudd ran as a Democratic candidate for the Maryland House of Delegates, but was defeated by the popular Republican William Mitchell.

Mudd’s ninth child, Mary Eleanor “Nettie” Mudd, was born in 1878. That same year, he and his wife temporarily took in a seven-year-old orphan named John Burke, one of 300 abandoned children sent to Maryland families from the New York City Foundling Asylum run by the Catholic Sisters of Charity. The Burke boy was permanently settled with farmer Ben Jenkins.

In 1880, the Port Tobacco Times reported that Mudd’s barn containing almost eight thousand pounds of tobacco, two horses, a wagon, and farm implements was destroyed by fire.

Mudd was just 49 years old when he died of pneumonia on January 10, 1883. He is buried in the cemetery at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Bryantown, the same church where he once met with John Wilkes Booth.