AS SOON AS the treason indictment had been dropped,
government officials stated that there was no longer any objection
to Pound's release from St. Elizabeths Hospital. This substantiated
what both his friends and enemies had said all along--that he
was not insane, and that he should either be tried or released.

Even a vindictive critic might have agreed that he could be
freed by 1950. Alger Hiss had served but three years and eight
months for lying about his activities as an espionage agent for
Soviet Russia, and five years would have been sufficient punish-
ment for Pound's patriotic broadcasts, that is, for airing political
views in wartime. A predecessor of Pound in the continuing fight
for the Bill of Rights, Chief Justice Roger Taney, had resigned
from the Supreme Court in disgust after President Abraham
Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War.

Pound's case recalls another cause célèbre of the Civil War,
the strange story of Doctor Mudd. Like Pound, Doctor Mudd had
been confined in a grim fortress, shut away from his countrymen,
because of his involvement in a political matter. He was sent to
Fort Jefferson, Florida, a medieval type of fortress, which could
only be reached by boat from the mainland. In obedience to his
Hippocratic oath, he had tended the wounds of John Wilkes
Booth, although there is a strong likelihood that he was imprisoned
because he had learned too much about the strange circumstances
of Lincoln's death.

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