His name is mud: the origin of the phrase

When we say that somebody’s name is “mud” we mean that he or she is completely out of favour for one reason or another. On the face of it, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable word to use, given that mud is that nasty, sticky or slippery stuff that we don’t like treading in if we can avoid it.

However, the term has a much more interesting derivation, concerning a tale of a miscarriage of justice and a name that just happened to fit the use to which it was put.

The story begins with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in a box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC on 14^th April 1865. His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, fired the fatal shot then jumped down on to the stage of the theatre. This proved to be too great a height for safety, because Booth broke his leg when he landed and it was only with some difficulty that he was able to leave the theatre, mount his horse and escape.

Once safely outside Washington, Booth found a doctor to treat his injury. This was Dr Samuel Mudd, who did what he was asked, after which Booth rode away.

Dr Mudd only realized who his patient had been when news of the assassination reached everyone the following day. He promptly informed the authorities that he had seen and treated the assassin, but the response he got was far from what he expected. Instead of being thanked for providing valuable information, he was arrested and charged for apparently being a friend of Booth and part of a conspiracy to kill the President.

Giving aid to the man who killed Abraham Lincoln was reckoned by the general public, and the court that tried Dr Mudd, as being a heinous crime that deserved a heavy punishment, and a sentence of life imprisonment was what he got, despite his claim that he had no idea who Booth was at the time he had treated his injury.

It was not until 1869 that Dr Mudd was pardoned and released from jail, but there were still plenty of people who did not believe his protestations of innocence. His name therefore continued to be “mud” for the rest of his life, and “mud” has stuck to many other people in later years whose reputation has been seriously tarnished.

© John Welford

Mrs Quantrill waves a flag, 1862

On 6^th September 1862 a symbolic act was carried out in a town in Maryland that, much hyped, led to a famous poem.

The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, led by General Robert E Lee, had had a notable victory at the second Battle of Bull Run. Lee had a notion that, if he took his army on a sweep through Maryland and on into Pennsylvania, he would bring many local people on to his side. He believed that the people of Maryland, which was a Union state, were secret admirers of the Confederacy who would support his army with generous donations from the harvest they were now gathering, and their men of fighting age would rally to his cause.

The incident in Frederick, Maryland, was proof that Lee had miscalculated. It was not much, in that Mrs Quantrill and her daughter simply stood outside their house and waved a union flag at the troops as they marched past, but it was a demonstration that the support Lee had counted on did not exist. Instead of farmers showering the army with gifts of freshly harvested corn, they left the fields unharvested and drove their cattle to safety so that Lee’s men could not seize them. There was no hospitality from the locals for the Army of Northern Virginia, which actually lost some 15,000 men (out of an original 55,000) due to desertion as they marched through Maryland.

However, a good poet cannot let a story get away if there is patriotic sentiment to be wrung out of it. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92) transferred the actions of Mrs Quantrill into those of 95-year-old Barbara Frietchie who, according the Whittier, brandished the flag with the words: “Shoot if you must this old grey head, but spare your country’s flag”. Whittier’s poem “Barbara Frietchie” was written in 1864 and became an instant hit.

Although Whittier did somewhat twist the facts to suit his cause – there was a real Barbara Frietchie but her house was on a different street to that which the troops marched down – it was the symbolism of the gesture that mattered and which caught the public’s imagination.

As it happened, Lee’s bedraggled and weakened army never made it out of Maryland and into Pennsylvania. They were halted by a much larger Union force at Sharpsburg and forced to retire to Virginia.

© John Welford