Anthony Wayne got ‘Mad Anthony’ from a jailed spy · or from Stony Point. — Famous Stories & the Record, Fort Wayne

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Brigadier General Anthony Wayne, portrait by Charles Willson Peale Public domain · source file

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The nickname itself, universally attached to Wayne in his lifetime's aftermath; his earlier nickname was “Dandy.”

Every origin story. The Jemmy-the-Rover tale, Wayne's spy, jailed in 1781, refused release, threatened with 29 lashes, muttering “Anthony is mad”, reaches print through Glenn Tucker's 20th-century biography, with details admittedly varying between tellings. Washington Irving's rival crediting of Stony Point daring (1779) is likewise a later literary attribution. No contemporaneous document for either was found.

Sources: American Battlefield Trust, battlefields.org; PA Center for the Book, pabook.libraries.psu.edu

The trail in print, once someone went looking for it, is later and thinner than the legend suggests. Historian Michael J. F. Sheehan's study of the nickname traces the earliest Jemmy tale he could find to 1829, in the Philadelphia magazine The Casket — nearly fifty years after the supposed 1781 incident and three decades after Wayne's death, with Jemmy's real name already “not recollected.” The word “mad,” meanwhile, was attached to Wayne in his own lifetime as criticism rather than endearment: a London pamphlet used it against him after the failed attack at Bull's Ferry (July 1780), a song in the Vermont Gazette did the same in March 1793, and a June 1794 editorial in the Gazette of the United States — rumoured to be James Wilkinson's work — accused him of favouring “tools, spies, and toad-eaters.” Horatio N. Moore's 1845 biography of Wayne, prepared with the general's son Isaac and drawing heavily on The Casket, is what carried the Jemmy story to a national audience; the Stony Point line “Issue the order, and I'll storm Hell!” belongs to the same later layer of the legend. The nickname is real; in print it began as an insult and became affection only afterward.

Added source: Sheehan, “‘Mad Anthony’: The Reality Behind the Nickname,” Journal of the American Revolution, via the History Center / ACGSI

Anthony Wayne got ‘Mad Anthony’ from a jailed spy · or from Stony Point.

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