Thomas F. Mulledy

Daguerreotype of Mulledy, c. 1840s

Mulledy was appointed president of Georgetown College on September 14, 1829, following John William Beschter's brief leadership of the school.[26] Several months before, Peter Kenney had been appointed apostolic visitor to the Jesuit mission in Maryland, and oversaw Mulledy, who was viewed cautiously by the Jesuit superiors in Europe for his ardent republicanism; at the same time, Mulledy was made a consultor to Kenney.[27] When he assumed the presidency, the state of Georgetown was poor; the number of students had dropped to only 45. By 1834, this had rebounded to 140.[28]

During his presidency, the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum was more fully implemented, primarily under the direction of the prefect of studies, George Fenwick.[28] In May 1830, the first observation in the United States of the Month of Mary was undertaken by Georgetown's chapter of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin, which had been founded in 1808 as the first chapter of the sodality in the United States.[29] With a growth in the number of books owned by the university under Mulledy's presidency, he undertook to organize the 12,000 volumes in a single library room in Old North on February 16, 1831.[30]

Mulledy had a reputation for being relatively lax in enforcing discipline.[31] In 1833, a rebellion was staged by a group of several students who plotted to ambush and assault the prefect of studies, in response to the prefect's reporting of a student who imbibed to the point of intoxication at taverns when the class took a trip to the Capitol. The plot was thwarted, and Mulledy expelled several of the students.[32] In March 1833, Pope Gregory XVI chartered Georgetown College as an ecclesiastical university, the first such institution in the United States. This authorized it to grant canonical degrees in philosophy and theology.[33] The college narrowly escaped destruction on December 10, 1836, when a carpenter's shed near the Walks caught fire. The students and faculty worked to contain the flames and prevented their spread to the nearby dormitory.[34]

During Mulledy's tenure, Georgetown was frequently visited by congressmen and senators. On the whole, he was viewed as having effectively managed the college.[35] Kenney reported back to Rome that Mulledy had been a successful administrator despite his "extremely impetuous enthusiasm and excessive patriotism."[27] His first presidency of Georgetown ended in 1837, and he was succeeded by William McSherry.[36]

Mulledy Hall (now Isaac Hawkins Hall) was completed in 1833.

Gervase Hall was completed in 1831.

With the steady increase in the number of students during his presidency, and an influx of money as remuneration from a widow who entered the Georgetown Visitation Monastery and entrusted her son as a ward of Georgetown, Mulledy was able to construct a new infirmary building in 1831.[37] This building was named Gervase Hall, after Brother Thomas Gervase, a missionary who sailed to Maryland aboard the voyage of The Ark and The Dove in 1634.[38]

Notwithstanding the misgivings of the Jesuit province's treasurer, Francis Dzierozynski, about Mulledy's penchant for building despite the province's precarious finances, Mulledy undertook an even larger project the following year. He was initially unable to fund a new building that would house a refectory, chapel, study hall, and dormitories; eventually, a Jesuit who owned property because he had not yet taken final vows offered Mulledy a substantial loan. With this money, groundbreaking on the new building occurred in July 1832 and was completed by July of the following year.[39] This building became known as Mulledy Hall.[40] Erection of these two buildings was enabled by a loan of $7,000 from the widow of Stephen Decatur.[41]

During Mulledy's presidency, "the Walks", a network of scenic paths through the backwoods of the campus, were created. They were the result of Joseph West, a Jesuit brother's, purchase of the land for the college.[42] Following Congress' donation of land to Columbian College in 1832, Georgetown requested similar benefits. The legislature eventually awarded Georgetown lots worth $25,000, (~$635,032 in 2021) the titles to which were transferred to the college on February 20, 1837.[43]

Mulledy again took up the presidency of Georgetown on September 6, 1845, following his brother Samuel Mulledy.[44] Soon thereafter, President James K. Polk requested that the Catholic Church send chaplains to minister to Catholic soldiers in the Mexican–American War; as a result, Mulledy's vice president and procurator left for the Rio Grande to minister to General Zachary Taylor's army.[45]

In 1848, due to popular uprisings in the Italian states, many Jesuits fled Italy and took refuge for a time at Georgetown College, including the future famed astronomer Angelo Secchi and scientist Giambattista Pianciani.[46] That same year, Mulledy resigned as president of the college,[16] and was succeeded by James Ryder.[47]

Mulledy's signature on the articles of agreement for the 1838 slave sale

Mulledy's building program left Georgetown College—and, by extension, the Maryland Jesuits—with considerable debt. Compounding the financial insecurity was that the Maryland Jesuits' plantations had been mismanaged and were not generating sufficient income to support the college.[52] To rectify the province's finances, Mulledy, as provincial, sold nearly all the slaves owned by the Jesuit Maryland Province to two planters in Louisiana. This plan had been authorized by the Jesuit Superior General in Rome, Jan Roothaan,[18] in late 1838 on the condition that the slave families not be separated and that they be sold to owners who would allow them to continue in their Catholic faith.[53] Mulledy executed the sale of 272 slaves to Jesse Batey and Henry Johnson on June 19, 1838.[54] Despite Roothaan's order, it soon became evident that families were, indeed, separated.[18]

This sale provoked outcry among many of the province's Jesuits, who were opposed to slaveholding by the Jesuits and supported manumission of the slaves. These Jesuits sent graphic accounts of the sale to Roothaan,[18] who was inclined toward removing Mulledy as provincial superior. William McSherry convinced Roothaan to delay his decision and, along with Samuel Eccleston (the Archbishop of Baltimore), tried to persuade Mulledy to step down. Roothaan even contemplated expelling Mulledy from the Society of Jesus, but was persuaded otherwise by Eccleston. By August 1839, Roothaan ordered McSherry to inform Mulledy that he had been removed,[55] for the twofold reasons of disobeying orders and of promoting scandal.[18]

By the time Roothaan came to this decision, McSherry had already convinced Mulledy to step down in late June and to go to Rome to explain himself to the church authorities. Mulledy resigned the day he received Roothaan's letter. McSherry was made the acting provincial, and was later elected provincial despite being severely ill and near death. Following Mulledy's meeting with Roothaan in Rome, he was assigned to teach English to young boys in Nice in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia,[56][57] effectively as censure for his conduct in the slave sale affair.[58] During his exile, Mulledy wrote to Roothaan of his feelings of loneliness and sense of being forgotten.[18]

Mulledy became an alcoholic, and later tried to break this habit with a year of abstinence.[50] With the intensity of the controversy waning, in the winter of 1841 and 1842, the province petitioned Roothaan to allow Mulledy to return to the United States.[18] Roothaan was particularly persuaded by Bishop Eccleston's request for Mulledy's return. Granting the request, Roothaan sent Mulledy to the Diocese of Boston, so as to keep him away from Maryland, where the scandal had taken place.[59]

Mulledy was president of St. John's Literary Institution (depicted in 1890).

Mulledy was elected the procurator of the Maryland province in 1847 at the province's general congregation, following heated clashes between himself and his fellow Jesuits, including James Ryder. A Belgian Jesuit, Peter Verhaegen, wrote to Roothaan that Mulledy had been "imperious and despotic," and severely condemned his hostile temperament and breach of fraternity.[67] The new provincial superior, Ignatius Brocard, transferred Mulledy to Philadelphia, where he continued as procurator,[60] before being sent to Frederick, Maryland in 1850 as president of St. John's Literary Institution, succeeding Charles H. Stonestreet. The president of the school also served as the pastor of St. John the Evangelist Church.[5]

Mulledy advocated for an English-only curriculum, rather than teaching classes in Latin, so as to not drive away students into Protestant schools that taught in English.[61] During his tenure, Mulledy enforced very strict discipline, prompting a mass walk-out of the older students in the school. In response, he expelled a majority of them,[69] reducing the once-regional student body to one solely from the city of Frederick. This sent the school into a decline from which it never recovered.[70] Upon the end of his term, Mulledy was succeeded by Burchard Villiger.[5] He then was assigned to Alexandria, Virginia for a short while on a pastoral mission.[71]

In the fall of 1854, Mulledy was again sent to the College of the Holy Cross, where he was made the prefect of studies and spiritual prefect. He remained in this position until 1857.[23] When asked to teach Latin and Ancient Greek, he declined on the grounds that his competence in the subjects had diminished with age. Instead, Mulledy much preferred to deliver sermons, of which he compiled a file.[72] With the rise of the Know Nothing movement across the United States, and the 1854 victory of the party in winning control of the Massachusetts General Court, a Joint Special Committee on the Inspection of Nunneries and Convents was formed to investigate Catholic institutions. A rumor began circulating in July of that year that Holy Cross was being used as a weapons depot for an eventual Catholic revolution. Consequently, the committee arrived in March to investigate the college, and was escorted around the premises by Mulledy. Upon finding no truth to the rumor, they left.[73]

Mulledy once again returned to Washington in 1857, where he served as pastor of Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown until 1858.[74] He then went again to Philadelphia for two years, the latter of which he spent as superior at Saint Joseph's College.[18] Mulledy died of "dropsy" on July 20, 1860, at Georgetown College.[16][lower-alpha 4] He was buried in the Jesuit Community Cemetery on Georgetown's campus.[75]