Tertium quid: a third something in a muddied puzzle.

Abstract

TERTIUM QUID: A THIRD SOMETHING IN A MUDDIED PUZZLE JOHN L. DUSSEAU* TL· moment ofhighfate is not seen by the tìieater audience. Only one man sees that moment. He is the Outsider, tL· one who waited and lurked and made hL· preparations. He comes through the outer door into the little hallway,fastens the strong though slender bar into the two-inch niche in the brick wall, and braces it against the door panel. He moves softly to tL· box door and through tL· little hole studies the box occupants and his Human Target seated in an uphotoered rocking armchair. Softly he opens the door and steps toward his prey, in his right hand a one-shot brass derringerpistol, a little eight-ounce vest-pocket weapon wingedfor death, in his left hand a steel dagger. He is cool andprecise and times his every move. He raises the derringer, lengthens his right arm, runs his eye along tL· barrel in a line with the head of his victim less thanfivefeet away—and pulL· the trigger. [l,p. 709] I. The Facts One hundred and fourteen years after the event, Dr. Samuel Mudd has been officially absolved from any role in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. [2] Many newspapers carried accounts of President Carter's letter of exoneration, and almost all added: "Dr. Mudd's connection with the assassination inspired the phrase, 'His name is mud' " [3]. Like so many circumstances of the famous case, even this modest literary footnote is ambiguous. The phrase probably owes its currency not to Dr. Mudd but to The Sentimental Bloke—a well-known ballad by a little-known poet, Clarence James Dennis—whose second stanza begins "Me name is Mud." One has the feeling of inevitability in the fateful encounter of John Wilkes Booth by Samuel Alexander Mudd on a forbidding day in April Of all the books and essays about Dr. Samuel Mudd the most scrupulous and carefully documented is Samuel Carter's The Riddle ofDr. Mudd. Citations to it in this paper do not do full justice to its use as a fine reference source for the facts here presented. ?Address: 609 Fox Fields Road, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 19010.© 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved 003 1-5982/82/2502-0259$0 1 .00 238 I John L. Dusseau ¦ Tertium Quid 1865—Booth, his leg broken and agonizingly painful, and Mudd, morose, cool, competent, ministering to him in a careful pretense of not knowing who he was. Although Booth was lunatic, the two men were not unalike in fierce devotion to the Confederacy, in outraged hatred for President Lincoln, and in a solitude of stubborn purpose. About both men there are abundant contemporary records; but these are often contradictory, garbled, and biased. In the case of Mudd all his personal papers (journals, letters, medical and farm records) were confiscated by the federal authorities upon his arrest and have been lost or were destroyed . The Mudd family had for 200 years dominated the Zachia Swamp area and its surrounding arable acres in southern Maryland. On a ridge beyond the swamp borders stood the recently built Oak Hill—a commodious but graceless home—where Samuel Mudd was born in 1833, one of 10 children in a household typical of Southern family tradition and devout Catholicism. The house bespoke an atmosphere of stern rectitude, righteousness, and determined aggressiveness. The Mudds were a prolific family and its men were tobacco growers and slave owners , for tobacco was an even more demanding crop than cotton and could exist only by slave labor. Growing tobacco was also a chancy business , and its rigors made the plantation owners of southern Maryland what they were: hard, arrogant, proud, and given to the curious ancestor worship of the region. Samuel Mudd grew up in a prosperous, clannish, staid, and Spartan environment in which life moved in accustomed grooves and ways. For the son of a successful plantation owner medicine and law were the only acceptable alternatives to tobacco growing; and often enough the lawyer or physician was also gentleman planter. Earlier in the century in response to restriction of religious observance , some of the Mudds had crossed...