2

PFUNNY PFACE

The President was hurrying across the South Lawn of the White House. Abraham Lincoln’s strides were long and loping, but his face was pensive. It was a fine day in late June 1861, and he looked forward to inaugurating a new Marine bandstand. The young soldiers had tacked together a makeshift marquee to stage their performances and a crowd stood in festive anticipation on the close-cut grass. Lincoln liked martial tunes and the gaiety that surrounded such occasions. His task that afternoon was an enjoyable one: to run the Stars and Stripes up the new flagpole, giving a much needed morale boost to the worried nation.¹

Lincoln proceeded through a crowd of uniformed soldiers on the lawn. The Marine detachment was there, of course, but so were band members from the Twelfth New York Regiment, and an honor guard from the Third U.S. Infantry Division. These were not the first military men the President had met that day, however. He had just left a tense discussion with his senior commanders, a debate over the steps needed to end the rebellion quickly. General Irwin McDowell was recommending a swift movement against rebel forces at Manassas Junction, some twenty miles from Washington. General Winfield Scott disagreed with the plan, maintaining that the troops were undisciplined, unready, and unfit for battle. Instead he advocated a choking blockade on the Mississippi, a lengthier process, but one Scott felt would more effectively subdue the Confederacy. Lincoln and some cabinet members shook their heads at these slow campaign proposals. The Northern public wanted to avenge the April 12 insult at Fort Sumter, wanted to teach the impertinent rebels a swift lesson. The Southern boys were just as green as the Yanks, Lincoln reasoned, and the country was growing impatient. As in so many instances, the commander in chief looked first to political considerations to shape battle strategy. The nation’s mood called for action.²

The President was still pondering this as he walked into the sunshine with Secretary of State William Seward and Generals Scott and Joseph Mansfield. He was also preoccupied by the message he would deliver to Congress in a few days. Like the public, the legislators wanted an explanation for the slow military response. Moreover, Lincoln would have to defend the unparalleled—indeed possibly illegal—measures he had authorized in the first months of his presidency. In the heat of the moment Lincoln had taken on exceptional powers, justifying them through his authority as commander in chief and the constitutional responsibility to see that the laws were faithfully executed. Without statutory authorization he had approved actions that ranged from suspending the writ of habeas corpus in several places and arresting persons who were “represented to him” as prospective traitors, to increasing the Army well beyond its authorized size. Lincoln was an attorney who respected the law and he thought these unusual moves were warranted by the crisis. Nonetheless, they were irregular. The bright bunting and trilling melodies on the South Lawn would be rendered meaningless if Lincoln’s extraordinary acts undermined the values they symbolized.³

Lincoln Raises the Flag at the White House, pencil, by Alfred R. Waud, June 29, 1861

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

An observer that day noticed Lincoln’s “abstract and serious eyes” and sensed that the President had “withdrawn to an inner sanctuary of thought.” The onlooker remarked something else as well: some part of Lincoln was sizing up the situation, cannily regarding the flagpole and the arrangements, and trying to figure out how he was going to get that “heap of stuff through the hole at the top of the partition.” The marquee looked something like a carelessly constructed circus tent, with the mast running through a small opening at the top, allowing barely enough room for the standard to squeeze through. The flag itself was a ceremonial one, taken from the war steamer USS Thomas Freeborn, which two days before had been engaged in a naval skirmish at Mathias Point, Virginia. The rebels had won the day, harvesting the first naval death of the war by repulsing the Union ships and killing the Potomac flotilla’s commander. Not only were these associations sobering, but the flag was immense. Measuring nearly seven by nine feet, it was far too large and heavy for the unstable new flagstaff.⁴

The President certainly wanted the ceremony to go off well. Reverend Smith Pyne from St. John’s Church across Lafayette Square had been invited to give the invocation, and the regimental brass was already sounding the national anthem’s opening stanza. In previous months, at similar events, Lincoln had given stirring tributes to the banner and all it represented. He had told audiences that he considered it his sacred duty to maintain “every star and stripe of the glorious flag,” and that he had pondered the original thirteen stars, what they meant, and how the field had expanded to thirty-four. Each new star on the flag, he noted, “has given additional prosperity and happiness to this country.” His sentiments were echoed on postal envelopes, which patriotically declared “Not a Star Must Fall.” At an emotional post office opening, the chief executive had spoken about the honor of raising the flag, how it had “hung rather languidly about the staff” until “a glorious breeze soon came and caused it to float as it should.” Lincoln concluded with the hope “that the same breeze is swelling the glorious ensign throught [sic] the whole nation.”⁵

“Not a Star Must Fall,” Civil War envelope, c. 1861–62

WARREN E. SAWYER PAPERS, THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY

So the band played, and the Reverend Pyne prayed, and Lincoln stepped forward to hoist the Stars and Stripes above the rickety gazebo. Then, the very problem he had feared materialized in the most mortifying fashion. As he pulled on the cording, the huge flag caught between the pavilion and the pole and “stuck so fast that the President had to tug away with all his strength.” Lincoln’s powerful arms did manage to raise the ungainly material, but when Old Glory appeared above the crowd, “lo! the upper stripe and 4 of the stars were torn off & dangling [from] the rest of the flag.” One witness thought five stars had flown off; another believed the entire flag had been shredded. It was painfully reminiscent of satirist Artemus Ward’s recent commentary in the new humor magazine Vanity Fair: “Feller sitterzens . . . the black devil of disunion is trooly here, starein us all squarely in the face! . . . Shall the star-spangled Banner be cut up into dishcloths?”⁶

Lincoln also tried to make light of the mishap. A few days later, at a similar ceremony before the Treasury Building, he remarked that he understood his job was to hoist the banner “which, if there be no fault in the machinery, I will do.” Once raised, he added, the people would have to do their part to keep the national standard afloat. But even the President’s closest friends, who had gathered on the White House lawn for a jolly evening concert, were unsettled by the implications of the ripped flag, representing as it did the rent condition of the Union, and Lincoln’s inability to mend the tattered nation. “A bad omen, as all thought,” noted Benjamin French, his loyal commissioner for public buildings. “A bad augury,” echoed the Chicago Tribune, adding that the damaged flag did not show the half of it, as eleven states had actually been torn from Union. Superstition and inference weighed heavily on the spectators. The discomfort was only relieved when a plucky Marine advised the President that he should not worry too much about the dangling stars. “Never mind,” said the serviceman, “we can sew ’em on again.”⁷

One of the striking things about the flag-raising tale is that it is so little known. This is surprising, since the documentation is excellent and the story itself both humorous and haunting. Its symbolism is so pronounced that it might well have become a venerable part of the patriotic canon. Yet it is not one of the stock anecdotes about Lincoln. Perhaps this has been conscious—the image of a president wrenching apart the nation’s flag just as his country embarks on fratricidal war is too unsettling to be the stuff of popular lore. It may have been suppressed at the time by administration-friendly publications such as the Daily National Intelligencer, which declined to mention the incident in its coverage, noting instead that the “evening was pleasant and every thing passed off happily.” The story has been edited out of later publications as well: Commissioner French’s eyewitness account was not included in printed collections of his papers, and modern biographers have ignored the incident. Nevertheless, it is a tale worth telling, not only for its ominous overtones, but because it is exactly the kind of portentous yarn that Lincoln himself liked to spin.⁸

Recollections of Lincoln, particularly those that appeared after his assassination, are notably unreliable and frequently at odds with accounts written as events unfolded. Dimness of memory, grief, and self-conscious attempts to sanctify the “martyr-president” all undermine their historical value. Mary Todd Lincoln noted this soon after her husband’s death: “There are some very good persons, who are inclined to magnify conversations & incidents, connected with their slight acquaintance, with this great & good man.” But one characteristic clearly impressed nearly everyone who had even the briefest contact with Lincoln, and there is such a critical mass of similar accounts that they must be taken seriously. That was his great fondness for storytelling, and the way that he used his skill as a raconteur to enhance both his personal and political power.⁹

People remembered Lincoln trading yarns with cronies in Indiana and Illinois, amusing fellow politicos in the Capitol’s back rooms, joking with soldiers in the field, or breaking up cabinet meetings to read from his favorite humorists. These are among the most endearing images of the sixteenth president, the delightful human element that has created a rapport across the centuries. At certain points in his presidency, Lincoln became almost a caricature of himself in this regard, yet his penchant for wit and parable, for the apt reply or saucy joke, was so natural that whatever ulterior purposes his tales served, they seem to have been grounded in a genuine love of laughter.

Men particularly liked Abe’s stories, and liked the fact that they tickled the teller as much as the listener. “He is [of] a gay & lively disposition, laughs & smiles a great deal & shows to most advantage at such times,” wrote John Henry Brown, an artist who traveled to Springfield in 1860 and regretted that he could not depict this effervescence in the campaign portrait he was painting. In anticipation of a good laugh, Lincoln apparently became oblivious to expected social composure. He liked to rub his trouser leg with delight or run his fingers through his bristly black hair until it stood out in all directions; and when the punch line came, he would double up until “his body shook all over with gleeful emotion” and “drawing his knees, with his arms around them, up to his very face,” he would let out a jagged eruption of high-pitched laughter.¹⁰

As remarkable as these gyrations were, what impressed Lincoln’s audiences most was the transformation of his face when he turned to jesting. The normally coarse features, the air of aloofness or distraction, the sadness that suffused his countenance, would soften when he looked up “with his peculiar smile and eye-twinkle” to recall a story. Noah Brooks, a newspaperman who spent a good deal of time with the President, wrote that “[f]ew men ever passed from grave to gay with the facility that characterized him,” and a military confidant described how his “small eyes, though partly closed, emitted infectious rays of fun.” Even his less admiring contemporaries, like the journalist and legislator Donn Piatt, who described Lincoln’s face as “dull, heavy, and repellent,” acknowledged that it “brightened like a lit lantern when animated.” (The winning smile may in fact have been a gap-toothed, jack-o’-lantern grin, for we know that Lincoln had at least twice submitted to the dentist’s pliers.) He had a peculiar habit, as well, of screwing up his face and wrinkling his nose, then screaming with laughter until, as a loyal Republican visitor noted, the President resembled a wild animal—an “affinity with the tapir and other pachyderms.” Still, the transformation was beguiling. As funny as the jokes were, it was Lincoln’s way of sharing them, his “unfeigned enjoyment,” that made them memorable. “There was a zest and bouquet about his stories when narrated by himself that could not be translated or transcribed,” remembered one friend. “The story may be retold literally, every word, period and comma, but the real humor perished with Lincoln.”¹¹

Some believed Abe Lincoln inherited the storytelling gift from his father, indeed thought Thomas Lincoln outshone his son in this respect. Wherever it was acquired, it soon became a defining part of the long-limbed Midwesterner’s character. Like so many other aspects of Lincoln, we know of it largely through secondhand information, for, interestingly, it does not permeate his own writings. There is little amusing in the papers that have been left to us—most are wooden documents, often clumsily written, unless highly polished for political purposes. As a younger man, he experimented with satire, publishing some barbed opinion pieces in local papers, or occasionally producing a ribald poem or pointed commentary for a public statement. Sometimes these got him into trouble. In 1842, for example, he went overboard in his lampoon of a rival politician named Shields, landing with an awkward challenge to a duel. Lincoln’s wit was evident at that event as well, however, for when he was allowed the choice of weapons he demanded “cavalry broadswords of the largest size” brandished from a narrow plank, rendering the encounter as ridiculous as possible. Many of these early mockeries seem adolescent—a kind of rustic gasconade—and Lincoln had largely dropped them by the time he became a serious contender for national office. By then the smart aleck in him had matured into a wryer, more sophisticated wit. There is very little levity in the papers of his presidency, though he occasionally lapsed into sarcasm when exasperated with his generals. Scornful remarks like the one to George McClellan—“if you don’t want to use the army I should like to borrow it for a while”—only diminished respect for him in military circles, however, and this kind of taunting letter also became rarer as the years went on.¹²

Instead, Lincoln’s legacy of fun has come to us through the oral tradition. Abe’s listeners fondly remembered the yarns told from atop stumps or around a smoky fire, and repeated them to others. Many of the jokes seem to have lost their context or punch after so many decades, but some are still delightfully fresh. Most of them came from Lincoln’s experience among country folk, and even after years in the spotlight, he still relied on blustering preachers, unscrupulous millers, or hogs mired in mud to make his point. He wove many strands together in his tales—fables, allegories, and stories grounded in metaphor—but always with an ear for homely phrases and an eye to the familiar scenes of life. “He had a marvelous relish for everything of that sort,” recalled an Illinois acquaintance. “He always maintained stoutly that the best stories originated . . . in the rural districts.” Lincoln was not above the social prejudices of his region, and mercilessly mimicked Irishmen, Dutchmen, and African Americans in many a gag line. He knew the cadence of frontier speech—the lingo of flatboat men and Yankee peddlers and Negro minstrels—and used their expressive language to portray the logical illogic of the unschooled. Lincoln also relished the absurd, in speech and in simile. “No one could ever use the term fac simile in his presence, without his adding ‘sick family,’” stated a colleague from Lincoln’s circuit-riding days. Sometimes he coined unique words or novel phrases to give life to a particular character or idea. Meddlesome people he called “interruptuous”; those who were easily duped were “dupenance.” Albert B. Chandler, a young man who kept a journal while working at the War Department telegraph office, noted how peculiar names and alliterations caught the President’s eye, and how he would repeat them over and over until they were fixed in his mind. One night Lincoln laughed with the boys over an invention that used a trapdoor to rob a chicken of its newly laid egg, inducing her to produce another. Its title—“The Double Patent Back-Action Hen Persuader”—set him rocking on the legs of his chair.¹³

Lincoln also liked to deflate the self-important or highly placed. Likening them to ignorant (if shrewd) hicks was a handy way to accomplish this. He compared his cabinet members to skunks or pumpkins, and rival Democrats to a squirrel hunter shooting in desperation at a louse dangling before his gun sight. When pressured by adversarial religious sects, Lincoln regaled his cabinet with tales of a Presbyterian minister who denounced Universalists for believing that all men could be saved. “We brethren,” fumed the Presbyterian, “we look for better things.” In 1863, after the long preparation for bombarding Charleston ended in a fizzle, Lincoln reproached Admiral Samuel Du Pont by telling him he felt like a hungry man who had been made to stand through a very long grace, only to be served a miserable plate of soup. And the chief executive dismissed Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase’s ambitions to take over the presidency as just like a “horsefly on the neck of a ploughhorse—which kept him lively about his work.”¹⁴

Lincoln appears to have been a natural raconteur, but his performances were not entirely spontaneous. Several friends remarked on the conscious effort he made to hone his comic skills, both to tickle the audience and to sharpen his points. One remembered that Lincoln quickly sized up his listeners, brought out new and appropriate material, and never “vexed the dull ears of a drowsy man by thrice-told tales.” An army officer claimed the President explained his method for holding attention by saying that there were two ways to tell a story. “If you have an auditor who has the time and is inclined to listen,” explained Lincoln, “lengthen it out, pour it out slowly as if from a jug. If you have a poor listener, hasten it, shorten it, shoot it out of a pop-gun.” There is nothing particularly insightful about this observation: every good comedian knows that gauging an audience is the secret to packing a punch. Lincoln’s delightfully expressive language, however, makes it a memorable anecdote. Apparently, the President also chose the timing of his routines and balked at performing on demand. When a New Yorker visiting the presidential summer retreat begged for “one of your good stories,” he was chastened by Lincoln’s curt refusal, and the remark that his stories were not a carnival act, but a useful way of directing discussion.¹⁵

During Lincoln’s lifetime, a number of books appeared with titles like Old Abe’s Joker (1863) or Old Abe’s Jokes (1864). They purportedly contained original Lincoln material, but most of their contents were actually tired, recycled jests. A journalist named Alexander McClure, who claimed to have an intimate relationship with the President, later produced an anthology of Lincoln’s stories, but few can authoritatively be traced to him. One historian who made a detailed study of bons mots attributed to Lincoln found that many had been circulating literally for centuries, but that “Old Abe” had a knack for shaping their context and making them his own. Lincoln himself told Noah Brooks that only about one-sixth of the stories credited to him had actually been his invention. “I don’t make the stories mine by telling them,” he said, laughing. “I am only a retail dealer.”¹⁶

It seems clear, however, that Lincoln actively looked for new stories. His compatriots in Illinois remembered that he keenly took in every comical episode or bizarre name, and loved to collect gossip at local fairs or minstrel shows. The jokes that can be authentically attributed to him show that he picked up material wherever he found it: in the literature of the day, or from political cartoons and offhand remarks. Some said that he kept a file of the best ones in his desk. A general who traveled with Lincoln was amused to see the lanky executive sprawl across the deck of a boat to cut an absurd article out of a newspaper and then read it with great glee to every member of the party. A New York politician told how the President held up a White House receiving line for an apparently intimate conversation with one attendee. When the tête-à-tête ended, a curious crowd pressed the man for details and learned that he had shared an anecdote a few days before “and the President, having forgotten the point, had arrested the movement of three thousand guests in order to get it on the spot.”¹⁷

What seems to have been truly original were Lincoln’s clever quips, the one-liners that gave him a reputation for shrewdness and quick repartee. These witticisms were widely replayed and admired at the time, and still please us today. Take, for example, the remark that he could not execute those who ran from battle because it “would frighten the poor devils too terribly to shoot them,” or his comment that trying to get the Army of the Potomac to move was “jes like shovlin’ fleas!” When a captain was court-martialed for voyeurism, Lincoln could not resist playing on the name of Count Piper, the Swedish ambassador to Washington, with a double pun: the guilty officer, he told John Hay, “should be elevated to the peerage . . . with the title of Count Peeper.” Then there is his wonderful retort to Senator Benjamin F. Wade, who stormed the White House in the tense days of 1862, barking that the President was leading the country to Hell, and that in fact they were within a mile of it at that very moment. “Yes,” Lincoln replied, thoughtfully gazing out the window, “it is just one mile to the Capitol.” It was this kind of delicious tidbit that launched Lincoln into the enduring pantheon of American wits, alongside Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and Will Rogers.¹⁸

Some of Lincoln’s sayings and aphorisms were simple country corn, but a great number were also smutty. The witnesses are too many to doubt that Lincoln relished lewd scenes and double entendres. Illinois friends remarked that he had “a Great passion For dirty Stories,” that his mind “ran to filthy stories—that a story had not fun in it unless it was dirty,” and that “the great majority of Lincolns stories were very nasty indeed.” A fellow lawyer claimed that when he once asked why Lincoln did not collect his anecdotes and compile a book, Lincoln drew himself up and replied, “Such a book would Stink like a thousand privies.” When the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne visited the White House in July 1862, he recorded conversations that “smack of the frontier freedom, and would not always bear repetition in a drawing-room.” (Hawthorne cut them from his article for the Atlantic Monthly.) Walt Whitman apologized to friends in 1863 for Lincoln’s crudeness by saying that “underneath his outside smutched mannerism, and stories from third-class country barrooms,” there was some practical wisdom. Hugh McCulloch, Lincoln’s last treasury secretary, was another who allowed that “the stories were not such as would be listened to with pleasure by very refined ears, but they were exceedingly funny.”¹⁹

Some of the ribald stories have been left to us. Most seem sadly juvenile, filled as they are with outhouse pranks, vomiting drunks, sexual high jinks, and bare behinds. Few are ennobled by illuminating insights or memorable lines, and, at least in the retelling, hardly elevate Lincoln to the level of a backwoods Chaucer. At best they contain some simple, clever puns. “How is a woman like a barrel?” ran one Lincoln ditty from the age of coopers and crinolines. “You have to raise the hoops before you put the head in.” Another story circulated by Lincoln told how the great Revolutionary hero Ethan Allen traveled to England, where many Britons made fun of the Americans. One day they hung a picture of George Washington in a “Back house” where Allen would see it. When he made no comment, they finally asked if he had recognized the likeness. Allen replied that he thought it very appropriate for Englishmen to see it there because “their [sic] is Nothing that Will Make an Englishman Shit So quick as the Sight of Genl Washington.” Another moment of indelicacy was recorded at the War Department, where one night the President sat reading a stack of telegrams. When he came to the bottom of the pile he announced: “Well, I guess I have got down to the raisins.” Puzzled, the telegraph operators asked what he meant. He explained that a little girl he knew, having eaten too large a share of treats filled with raisins, became violently sick. After “an exhausting siege of throwing up, she gave an exclamation of satisfaction that the end of her trouble was near, for she had ‘got down to the raisins.’”²⁰

Leonard Swett, who concerned himself with the sixteenth president’s reputation, was among those who winced at such lore, but he proposed that there was no vulgarity in Lincoln’s character, only the desire to make his point. “It was the wit he was after—the pure jewel, and he would pick it up out of the mud or dirt just as readily as he would from a parlor table.” Historians of the apologist school have also sometimes downplayed the off-color jokes, feeling they might interfere with the heroic portrayal of their subject. (Biographer David Herbert Donald was among those who regretted that some of the rougher tales had been lost through prudery.) But scatological jokes only appeal to a certain kind of jester, and scrubbing Lincoln to the point of one-dimensionality cannot take the salt from his skin. Lincoln’s stories were never of the tittering, parlor variety but were made for a thigh slap and a guffaw. Indeed, much of the pungency in his rural style came from its earthiness.²¹

Whether silly, spicy, or sage, Lincoln’s jokes served several purposes for him. The most straightforward, of course, was to indulge his fondness for a chuckle. It was not just that he wanted an audience—though it is clear that he craved that too. What seemed to animate him was the tonic of hilarity. He felt a “deep satisfaction expressed in the ha ha,” one admiring friend attested. Both before and during his time in public office he went to music halls and minstrel shows, treated visitors to juicy bits from his favorite comic stories, and surrounded himself with others who liked to laugh. His secretary John Hay recorded a wonderful scene of the President wandering the halls at midnight dressed only in nightclothes (“his short shirt hanging about his long legs & setting out behind like the tail feathers of an enormous ostrich”) in order to recite an inane poem. Lincoln indulged the antics of his children, attended their magic lantern shows (they sent him complimentary tickets), and was vastly amused by a cabin they built on the White House roof, dubbed the “Ship of State.” He was merry at receptions, and visitors recalled hearing a good deal of laughter coming from his cabinet rooms. He even bantered while being shampooed. He had a strong sense of the ridiculous, and on occasion relaxed by inviting Tom Thumb or “Hermann the Prestidigitateur” to perform after dinner, liking the ludicrous spectacles, and taking part in the performances. In these situations, wrote an administration official, the beleaguered president looked “natural & easy. He is Old Abe & nothing else.”²²

Many have thought that Lincoln’s pursuit of laughter was a much needed antidote to his introspective, melancholy disposition. The swift change in his countenance, from shadow to sunshine, argues for this, as do the observations of long-standing friends, who saw how his moods would shift rapidly within a single day. His closest confidant, Joshua Speed, maintained that telling tales was “necessary to his very existence,” replacing any desire to escape with drink or dice. Longtime law partner William H. Herndon agreed. An eccentric man, Herndon was nonetheless in a position to observe Lincoln at close range. He quoted his partner as saying that if “it were not for these stories—jokes—jests I should die: they give vent—all the vents of my moods & gloom.” Herndon’s curious assessment was that Lincoln was naturally slow-moving and slow-thinking; he needed stimulation not only to chase depression but to increase the flow of blood to the brain and awaken his full productive power. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana echoed these thoughts, though in less peculiar terms, stating that the “safety and sanity” of the President’s intelligence were maintained through the outlet of humor.²³

Those studying Lincoln’s moods have indeed found dangerous dips and erratic behavior, particularly in his younger days. But the dynamics of his psyche have remained elusive. Lincoln, as always, tells us next to nothing—his writings offer little illuminating introspection and few clues about the trials and tensions of his life. Some intriguing studies have concluded that Lincoln’s changeable disposition was the consequence of childhood losses. Others refer to an abnormal homeostasis. Several of Lincoln’s associates related that he took “blue mass” pills, a common remedy of the era for many disorders, and one group of modern doctors has proposed that he suffered mercury poisoning as a result. The medication was concocted from almost pure mercury, in dangerous doses, and could have caused Lincoln’s explosive laughter and unrestrained outbursts of temper, as well as the insomnia, memory loss, and neurological instability that seem to have plagued him. There is no clinical evidence, however, and only shaky historic grounds for any authoritative analysis of Lincoln’s “mercurial” nature. Whatever the cause, sadness and mirth seem inextricably linked in the man. His jokes often pointed up the absurdity of fretting over trivial concerns, or the frivolity of human vanity, and how such disproportion may lead to a wasted life. Perhaps it was this classic overlap of comedy and tragedy, pride and futility, that gave his humor such force.²⁴

Whatever psychological benefits joking had for Lincoln, his storytelling was also a powerful social tool. On the most basic level it made him popular. Community acceptance was important on the rough frontier—a dangerous place where goodwill was crucial for survival, not to mention success. Abe Lincoln was a strange young man there: he looked odd, and he seemed to disdain the pleasures of the local boys. He disliked hunting, drinking, or smoking; shied away from chasing girls; and, as he got older, increasingly made himself a curiosity by climbing trees to read a geometry book or a worn copy of Shakespeare. It was fortunate for Lincoln that he was as physically impressive as he was: those loose-jointed limbs were deceptively strong, and once the hardscrabble crowd figured out that he could outrun, -jump, and -wrestle them, they treated him with respect. But comedy was what made Abe’s company desirable. He was fun and irreverent, and the fellows would gather in little knots to hear him perform. No matter how ludicrous he became, no matter if he wobbled on the line of good taste, his dignity never suffered. He may have been a clown, but he was admired, not reviled. When Lincoln’s career interests grew, his good-natured banter became important for cementing professional friendships. Every politician both craves and needs popularity, and comedy was the way Lincoln first attracted a crowd.²⁵

Humor also gave Lincoln power. It was not just the power to command applause, but the ability to control a situation. As a laboring man he could undermine a strict foreman by luring the field hands from their work for some jesting; as an attorney he influenced decisions in the courtroom—sometimes thwarting justice—by suggesting a droll analogy to the case at hand. His aptitude for homey phrasing that plainspoken jurors could understand earned him a fine reputation for summing up a case, as did his ability to think on his feet. Nor was he above using stagecraft to gain his point. A fellow circuit lawyer described the way Lincoln swayed one jury when there was a seemingly airtight case against his client.

He picked up . . . a paper, from the table. Scrutinizing it closely, and without having uttered a word, he broke out into a loud, long, peculiar laugh, accompanied by his most wonderfully funny facial expression. There was never anything like the laugh or the expression. A comedian might well pay thousands of dollars to learn them. It was magnetic. The whole audience grinned. He laid the paper down slowly, took off his cravat, again picked up the paper, looked at it again, and repeated the laugh. It was contagious. . . . He then deliberately took off his vest, showing his one yarn suspender, took up the paper, again looked at it, and again indulged in his own loud, peculiar laugh. . . . Judge Woodson, the jury and the whole audience could hold themselves no longer, and broke out into a long, loud, continued roar; all this before Lincoln had ever uttered a word.

Needless to say, the prosecution’s case was completely destroyed, though apparently Lincoln took care that the damages paid were fair.²⁶

Lincoln also manipulated his personal conversations by the timing and tenor of his jokes. He could end an interview, sidestep an argument, deflect tension, or buy time for reflection—all by announcing that something “reminded him of a little story.” The astute people around the President understood that he had the last word, that he was leaving them laughing, but they were helpless against his prowess. William Howard Russell, a skeptical British observer of the American scene, attended a dinner soon after Lincoln’s first inauguration at which Attorney General Edward Bates began a diatribe against a minor political appointee. Lincoln quashed the impending quarrel by raising a chuckle with “some bold west-country anecdote,” and while the company was laughing he beat a quiet retreat “in the cloud of merriment produced by his joke.” Pennsylvania Republican Titian J. Coffey was another who admired Lincoln’s ability to stage-manage a situation. “The skill and success with which Mr. Lincoln would dispose of an embarrassing question or avoid premature committal to a policy advocated by others is well known,” he commented. “He knew how to send applicants away in good humor even when they failed to extract the desired response.” Longtime friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon called the jokes “labor-saving contrivances,” whose purpose was to expose a fallacy or disarm an opponent.²⁷

He also knew how to make his point without belaboring it. As Lincoln’s stature grew, he told his stories less to tickle the funny bone than to drive home an argument. His repertoire came to resemble a set of illustrative fables that could clarify issues or persuade detractors. Aphorisms and apologues became a kind of shorthand for him, helping, as Lincoln reportedly told one visitor, to “avoid a long and useless discussion . . . or a laborious explanation.” As a raconteur, for example, he could subtly voice his sympathy for those who quaked under battle fire by telling the story of a private who advised his captain that he had as “brave a heart as Julius Caesar ever had; but some how or other, whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it.” (The commander in chief’s leniency toward “leg cases” became famous during the conflict.) When Lincoln compared the problem of slavery to a venomous snake in bed with a child—a terrible danger, but one that must be handled with skill and caution—it was an analogy that every prairie family could understand.²⁸

However calculated the effort, Lincoln’s effect was clearly very real. He had the knack most coveted by political comedians: first to make his audience laugh—and then to make them think. Even those who sparred with the Lincoln administration understood his gift for winning a debate with a telling phrase. George McClellan, 1861: The President’s stories “were as usual very pertinent & some pretty good. . . . he is never at a loss for a story apropos of any known subject or incident.” Horace Greeley, 1864: “President Lincoln . . . has had no predecessor, who surpassed him in that rare quality, the ability to make a statement which appeals at once, and irresistibly.” Congressman Henry Dawes, a radical Republican: “He was a storyteller, not for the story’s sake, but for the use he could put them to, to clinch an argument, to show up an absurdity as in a looking glass, or to make plain an impossibility.” Dawes once sought the President’s advice about circumventing a knotty political problem. Lincoln replied with a parable. “You were a farmer’s boy and held [a] plow, I guess,” he said. “What did you do when you ran against a stump, drive through and smash everything, or plow around it?” That was all he said, noted the congressman—and that was enough.²⁹

This kind of Lincoln lore seems to indicate that the President profited by a mild approach and soft political invective. However, though he quoted Shakespeare’s warning about the “power to hurt”—how a withering remark could ultimately wither the critic—he did not always heed the caution. Lincoln could, and did, use his verbal agility to crush opponents, as well as to buttress his arguments. At times his attack was savage. He sometimes used sophisticated logic to undermine an argument, but he could also descend into personal assaults, even when the victim was not present to defend himself. This was particularly true in Lincoln’s younger days, when he took on some of the most prominent men in his region, undercutting them on the stump and in the local press, and leaving their reputations in question. For example, Lincoln confronted a celebrated local preacher, Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright, not with measured argument but with caustic newspaper attacks, which unjustly accused him of hypocritical acts. Cartwright fought back, but Lincoln, who had hidden behind a pseudonym, escaped relatively unscathed. In another notable case, Lincoln challenged a rival politician named Jesse B. Thomas, employing all his powers of smirking enfilade fire, until his opponent publicly dissolved in tears. The episode, which came to be known as the “Skinning of Thomas,” was something of a cautionary moment; even Lincoln understood that he had overstepped the mark, and took some care afterward to avoid handing up total humiliation.³⁰

Despite his attempts at self-restraint, however, lawyer Lincoln was, in the words of Judge David Davis, “hurtful in denunciation, and merciless in castigation.” He continued to jab at political adversaries, especially pompous or preening men, referring to them as “dogs,” “caged and toothless” lions, or “little great men.” According to one loyal retainer, Lincoln even boasted of his “hits” when he thought he had got the best of a situation. Stephen A. Douglas cringed when encountering the sneering Lincoln during their famous debates: Abe Lincoln’s reasoning could be got around, Douglas maintained, but “every one of his stories seems like a whack upon my back. . . . [W]hen he begins to tell a story, I feel that I am to be overmatched.” The desire to undercut his opponents, by fair means or foul, was part of Lincoln’s inordinate ambition, his unflagging desire to win. It came as handily to him as a half nelson had in the years when wrestling defined his local dominance. Some of this urge to lead by belittling continued into his presidency, when he took delight in deflating the egos of his cabinet and generals, sometimes ungenerously. “Mr. Lincoln,” wrote his ever admiring secretary John Nicolay, “seems always to have been as adroit in answering a fool according to his folly as in silencing the follies of men who consider themselves wise.”³¹

Thus, for Lincoln, humor was an important weapon, sometimes with a razor-sharp point. At times, it was also a refuge. Lincoln was an intensely self-absorbed person, private and protective. He was not good at small talk and had trouble forming deep bonds. His law partner thought he drew a defensive circle around himself, meant to ward off the curious and shelter him from unnecessary conversation. The comedic act was part of this. It gave Abe a way to connect with people without truly revealing himself. He would “laugh and smile and yet you could see . . . that Lincoln’s soul was not present,” Herndon wrote. Lincoln’s political ally Leonard Swett thought so too. “He always told enough only of his plans and purposes to induce the belief that he communicated all, yet he reserved enough to have communicated nothing.” Martinette Hardin, the sister of Lincoln’s fellow Whig legislator John Hardin, recalled that Lincoln was often mute in genuine discussions, or that he did not respond at all until he could interject a little joke. Moreover, Lincoln’s stories were also prefaced with a kind of disclaimer—that he had heard them from someone else, or read them somewhere—which distanced him from the barbs or bawdiness of the laugh line. Lincoln defended his silence, once saying that although he was a taciturn man, it was more unusual “to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.” Nonetheless, his joshing precluded dialogue, making much of his interaction one-sided. Engaging tales and set-piece routines let Lincoln control a conversation, without truly interacting.³²

Storytelling also provided him with a script. The popular impression today is that Lincoln was a master of both beautiful prose and inspired conversation. He worked dutifully at the English language and became a fine writer, but this, like his compelling dramatic talents, was not spontaneous—it was a skill he practiced and honed, one requiring prodigious application and constant revision. All the available evidence during his lifetime shows him to be an awkward conversationalist, with a poor grasp of grammar and elegant expression. He was largely at a loss when he had to speak extemporaneously. Even Lincoln’s admirers saw him as a “country clodhopper . . . always stiff and unhappy in his off-hand remarks,” or praised his political insights while acknowledging his sad lack of grammar. “I wish he would leave off making little speeches,” faithful retainer Benjamin French remarked. “He has not the gift of language, though he may have of western gab.” Two fellow party men noted that he was “not a successful impromptu speaker,” that he was “often perplexed to give proper expression to his ideas; first, because he was not master of the English language; and secondly because there were, in the vast store of words, so few that contained the exact coloring, power, and shape of his ideas.” John Hay, whose veneration for his chief knew few bounds, squirmed after reading the “hideously bad rhetoric” and indecorous language of a pivotal presidential letter and even accused his boss of uncommon dexterity at “snaking a sophism out of its hole.”³³

What is remarkable is not that Lincoln lacked communications skills, but that he came so far from such a shaky base. Well aware of his shortcomings, he avoided off-the-cuff remarks and apparently wrote down and committed to memory any appropriate phrases that might serve him. Noah Brooks remembered him struggling to avoid improper or overly quaint phrases. Finding Lincoln laboring at his desk over a manuscript, Brooks was surprised to hear the President say that he had to be “mighty careful” when addressing the nation. He had once used the expression “turned tail and ran,” Lincoln said, which outraged some Bostonians, and he had resolved to give no more unrehearsed speeches. He reiterated this at a fair held in February 1864 to benefit the United States Sanitary Commission. After noting that “a little fraud” had been perpetrated by not telling him he was expected to speak, Lincoln sidestepped the matter by noting that it “was very difficult to say sensible things” and that he had better keep quiet or both he and the country might be in trouble. Even in his penultimate speech, a response to a serenade celebrating Union victory, he made the embarrassing admission that he had nothing to say on the great occasion. The set-piece stories and quips he perfected offered him a sturdy safety net to avoid this discomfort in both formal and informal discussion.³⁴

At times the fund of jokes also provided a shield against those who would make the President himself the object of fun. Humor helped him ward off criticism before it bruised too deeply, as well as maintain much needed perspective. He was a natural target for lampooning—if ever a human seemed formed for ridicule, it was Abraham Lincoln. His unusual height would have been enough to cause comment, but added to this was “the loose, careless, awkward rigging” of his frame; the stooped, shuffling walk; and a shock of coarse, unruly black hair that one amused citizen likened to “an abandoned stubble field.” The prominent nose was clownishly tipped in glowing red. His face had an unfortunate simian cast: more than one observer thought that a president who “grinned like a baboon” was a disgrace to the nation. He paid little attention to his dress and this only increased the opportunities to scoff. Lincoln routinely greeted guests of all rank in scruffy carpet slippers and rumpled suits. One soldier who met the commander in chief thought his clothing was the dirtiest he had ever seen. Another visitor compared him to a shabby undertaker, and when Nathaniel Hawthorne came to call, he was startled to encounter the nation’s highest official in “a rusty black frock-coat and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully that the suit had adapted itself to the curves and angularities of his figure, and had grown to be an outer skin of the man.” What saved the President from being completely ludicrous were his utter lack of pretension, a winning twinkle in his eye, and an ability to impress guests with his sincerity. Hawthorne saw this, and it overrode his surprise at a hairdo that had apparently seen neither brush nor comb that morning; so did a young James A. Garfield, who recognized Lincoln’s peculiar power to impress men with his candor and direct gaze. George Templeton Strong spoke for many when he confided to his diary: “He is a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla, in respect of outside polish . . . but a most sensible, straightforward, honest old codger.”³⁵

“Shaky,” wood engraving, Vanity Fair, June 9, 1860

Lincoln learned to “whistle off” those who snickered at his appearance or to preempt them with self-mockery. Laughing took the sting from his detractors, overcoming their taunts with an aura of good-humored self-acceptance. An Illinoisan who met Lincoln in 1858 noted that he was just as gangly as reported, but his sharp eyes made it clear that “if a man should insult him he would laugh at him and shame him out of it sooner than to fight him.” When Stephen Douglas tried to gain advantage in the 1858 senatorial election by pointing up his distinguished national reputation, Lincoln admitted that there was not much in his “poor, lean, lank, face” that was presidential. He then adroitly linked Douglas’s “round, jolly, fruitful” countenance to greed, patronage, and corruption. Lincoln also poked fun at his own ungainly figure on horseback, chortled over satirical pieces that pictured him vowing “to split 3 million rails afore night,” and borrowed laugh lines from scornful cartoonists such as the one who pictured him as “Shaky” in Vanity Fair. One wonderful anecdote claimed that when a rival accused Lincoln of being two-faced, he responded: “If I had another face do you think I would wear this one?” Alas!—like so much Lincoln lore—this story is probably apocryphal. More credible is the wisecrack the President made after he contracted a mild form of smallpox in 1863: “There is one consolation about the matter. . . . [I]t cannot in the least disfigure me!”³⁶

“Honest old Abe on the Stump, Springfield, 1858”; “Honest old Abe on the Stump, at the ratification Meeting of Presidential Nominations, Springfield 1860,” lithograph

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Lincoln effectively shrugged off remarks about his eccentric physique, but he disliked being made to look ridiculous, and he had a pronounced sensitivity to serious criticism. Acquaintances found him “touchy” when his self-esteem was tried: he was “keenly sensitive to his failures and it would not do to mention them in his presence.” When he could not dismiss a slight, he sometimes struck back fiercely. His first foray into satire was a smarty-pants piece of verse that cast doubt on the virility of some local cronies who had chosen not to invite him to a wedding. Lincoln’s early public writings are filled with unconstrained language denouncing the “fabrication and falsehood” of his rivals or deriding them as “not more foolish and contradictory than they are ludicrous and amusing.” The president-elect was embarrassed in 1861 when detractors branded him a coward for surreptitiously entering Washington in order to circumvent threats on his life. That mortification may have caused him to take unwise risks thereafter. Nor was he laughing when Maryland senator Reverdy Johnson questioned his policies toward Unionists in Louisiana, or when he was squeezed by a Christian committee on emancipation, or when his old friend Carl Schurz bluntly criticized the way the war was being handled. Lincoln lashed out at these men, saying that he had been “very ungenerously attacked” and that he mistrusted “the wisdom if not the sincerity of friends, who would hold my hands while my enemies stab me”; he also accused the press of maligning him. “You think I could do better; therefore you blame me already. I think I could not do better; therefore I blame you for blaming me,” he petulantly retorted. In Schurz’s case Lincoln tried to backtrack, making light of the outburst by slapping his knee with a loud laugh and saying, “Didn’t I give it hard to you in my letter? Didn’t I?” But Schurz had already picked up the “undertone of impatience, of irritation” and recognized how defensive the President had become. Herman Haupt, an army engineer whom Lincoln esteemed highly, witnessed a similar explosion when a member of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War frankly told the President how dissatisfied the military was with his leadership. “Stop right there!” the commander in chief shouted, drawing a hand across his chest. “Not another word! I am full, brim full up to here.” It is striking that so many similar outbursts were recorded, since Lincoln also liked to preach a philosophy that advised self-control and the avoidance of “personal contention,” and at times took pains to avoid confrontation. Such explosions help us understand how vulnerable Lincoln could be, how fragile he was under the armor of bonhomie. It appears that the man who had “skinned Thomas” had a thin skin himself.³⁷

Wordplay is part of the comedian’s genius, but another important element is timing. After Lincoln’s death many noted with admiration how perfectly pitched his taglines could be. Unfortunately, just because a witticism is apt does not always make it appropriate. During his lifetime the President faced significant criticism for his near addiction to joking, and for the way it interrupted real dialogue or showed insensitivity to the severity of the nation’s crisis. He reverted to flippancy too easily when the business at hand was somber, and he jested with people who were not well acquainted with him, and consequently liable to misunderstand his levity. As early as 1839, his Illinois constituency showed concern for his “assumed clownishness,” advising Lincoln to give up the “game of buffoonery,” which not only lacked dignity but failed to persuade an audience of his points. In 1861 a British journalist was dismayed to find Lincoln, his legs sprawled over the railing of a veranda, “letting off” one of his jokes to federal officers in the field, apparently oblivious to a menacing Confederate flag waving in the near distance. Military men also frowned at their commander’s inexplicable mirth. William Thompson Lusk, a captain with the New York Highlanders (and a man willing to support Lincoln), was greatly offended in the wake of 1862’s disastrous Virginia campaigns. “The men are handed over to be butchered—to die on inglorious fields,” he protested. “Lying reports are written. . . . Old Abe makes a joke.” The Army was willing to fight, he mourned, but “the brains, the brains—we have no brains to use the arms and limbs and eager hearts with cunning.” A fellow officer echoed the sentiment. “What is to become of us with such a weak man at the head of our government, be he ever so honest?” he queried. “One who . . . turns off things of the most vital interest with a joke?” A Southerner who beseeched Lincoln to take measures to protect Unionists caught in the Confederacy listened patiently while the President trotted out a string of stories. Then he responded candidly:

Mr. Lincoln, this to me, sir is the most serious and all absorbing subject that has ever engaged my attention as a public man. I deprecate and look with horror upon a fratricidal war. I look to the injury that it is to do, not only to my own section—that I know is . . . desolated and drenched in blood—but I look to the injury it is to do to humanity itself, and I appeal to you, apart from these jests, to lend us your aid and countenance in averting a calamity like that.

As Confederate momentum remained unchecked, the Polish-born writer Adam Gurowski acidly summed up the situation: “And so Davis is making history and Lincoln is telling stories.”³⁸

Among those most annoyed by Lincoln’s perpetual joshing were senior members of his government. McClellan, of course, thought anecdotes told by the “Gorilla” were “ever unworthy of one holding his high position.” Salmon Chase was also offended by the constant banter when “danger was too imminent & the occasion too serious for jokes”—as it was during a midnight discussion of desperate reinforcement operations at Nashville in September 1863. Secretary of War Stanton and Senator Henry Wilson simply abhorred the stories, and Stanton, particularly, was not above showing his anger to the President, his staff, or the military brass. Stanton had hoped when he took office that there would be “no jokes or trivialities” and that the contest would be taken in “dead earnest.” He was to be disappointed. Benjamin French, despite his fondness for the man, had to admit that Lincoln’s judgment and timing were often astonishingly poor. After Confederate general Jubal Early made a daring raid on Washington in July 1864, pointing up the impotence of Union intelligence and defensive strategy, French went round to his chief’s office to express alarm. He was regaled with a long Lincolnian story that compared a yokel who thought he saw a wolf’s tail with the Union Army, now so far in the rear of the Confederates “that it is doubtful if they will even get sight [of] their tails.” French got “mad & came away disgusted.” The President showed so little concern for beating the rebels, noted French, that he was jeopardizing the welfare of the country.³⁹

II

To a large degree Abraham Lincoln was able to overcome his curious physical appearance and clumsy perpetual joking through his sympathetic nature. But this personal touch was only felt by the small number of people with whom he actually had contact. The vast majority of the nation knew their chief magistrate through partisan broadsides, or newspaper accounts, some of which were little more than printed hearsay. And by the 1860s elected officials were publicly commented on more than ever before. Americans were not shy about expressing their opinion of a president’s fitness for office, whether justified by firsthand knowledge or not.

Abraham Lincoln, photograph by Alexander Gardner, February 5, 1863

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Lincoln’s tenure coincided with the rise of photography, and the boost it gave to the cult of political personality. He was the most photographed president to date, and it appears he liked to have his portrait taken. Unfortunately, the camera did not love him. The sharp imagery of the glass plate prints showed every detail of his gaunt face, unruly mane, and tortured necktie. The warts were literally there, and the benevolent expression lost, in all but a handful of pictures. In addition, his flapping appendages and western gaucherie were simply meant for caricature. It was also the golden age of lithography, and the illustrated papers had a field day, in the North as well as the South. Because they could narrate a great deal with a few sketchy lines, using sarcasm or allegory to distill complex emotions or policies, cartoons held a disproportionate influence. They became as emblematic as the Capitol dome, creating stereotypes more potent than a slogan. Moreover, with the telegraph and mails well established, the reach of these images was vast and immediate. The entire nation was able to share an impression or a chuckle at Washington foibles in real time, forming a collective consciousness that could be either unifying or highly divisive. The New York Herald recognized that technology and the popular press had combined to make Lincoln an “eccentric addition” to the gallery of prominent men, for “it is only in the present age of steam, telegraphs and prying newspaper reporters, that a subject so eminent . . . could have been placed under the eternal microscope of critical examination.” It was no longer possible to cover up an unfortunate moment like the misbegotten flag raising—it zipped across the wires in an instant.⁴⁰

Political satire had, of course, existed for centuries. After all, Machiavelli delighted in exposing the wiles of power-hungry princes, whose professions of goodwill were in absurd contrast to their private ambitions. But political humor had become particularly forceful in the United States, where the most scathing remarks went unpunished, and where growing literacy created a wide audience. By the mid-nineteenth century, poking fun at the nation’s leadership had grown to be a fine art. The paradox between presidential celebrity and its bossy bed partner, the rule of law, was simply too good to pass up. In addition, the colorful trappings of each polling season smacked of farce, nearly begging for a sardonic spree. The campaign of 1840, in which Lincoln participated, was an excellent example. It was almost devoid of substance, the goal of each party being simply to win the spoils of office for itself—and the log-cabin origins of William Henry “Tippecanoe” Harrison, invented by early image makers, were in preposterous juxtaposition to his genteel upbringing. By the time of Lincoln’s election, the spoofs were more fearless and more widespread. The inevitable clumsiness of self-rule and the perpetual cycle of political mischief were kept on prominent display, warning the public not to take its rulers too seriously. In London’s Punch, the comic-strip version of Lincoln, outfitted in striped pants and a star-spangled vest, became confused at times with Uncle Sam (who grew a beard when Abe did), but the image was not meant to elevate the President. Instead, it mocked his inability to hold the Union together.⁴¹

“The Latest from America; Or, the New York ‘Eye-Duster,’ to be taken Every Day,” wood engraving by John Tenniel, Punch, July 26, 1862

In a sense Lincoln was the first true media president, though Buchanan had come in for some impressive drubbing during the last days of his administration. Lincoln’s sensitivity about off-the-cuff remarks, and their possible misinterpretation, is one indication that he recognized the burgeoning power of the fourth estate. Another is the way he and Republican leaders took concrete measures to appease newspapermen. Joseph Medill, the influential editor of the Chicago Tribune, for example, advised Lincoln after his 1860 nomination that the party would want to mollify “his Satanic Majesty” James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the critical New York Herald. Bennett’s “affirmative help is not of great consequence,” Medill cautioned, “but he is powerful for mischief.” Medill thought Bennett, who longed for social status, could be bought by a White House invitation or two. It proved not to be so. Like several other prominent journalists, Bennett remained true to the Union, but not necessarily to administration policies. In 1863 Lincoln was still trying, in his words, to “humor” the Herald by giving its reporters advance copies of documents or special access. As time went on, his “management” of the press would edge perilously close to state censorship.⁴²

Lincoln understood that, for the president, public commentary was one of democracy’s more fiery trials. Citizens cherished their right to heckle their leader—to deride not only his policies but his personal traits. The playful slap at authority was a kind of leveling exercise. It stripped down the powerful by implying that their leadership was a hilarious sham that could be knocked away by jeers as easily as by violence. “Democracy,” H. L. Mencken would write, “is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.” It was this, the vaudeville of republican government, that made parody such a forceful expression of popular will.⁴³

The freedom to complain publicly had long been one of the hallowed distinctions between authoritarian regimes and elected government, but this did not necessarily make it more comfortable. Lincoln was greatly distressed, for example, by a cartoon Harper’s Weekly ran after the Union debacle of December 1862, which showed “Columbia” asking the President, “Where are my 15,000 Sons—murdered at Fredericksburg?” and Lincoln replying, “This reminds me of a little joke—” He did not guffaw at the New York Herald’s February 19, 1864, editorial, which began, “President Lincoln is a joke incarnate. His election was a very sorry joke. The idea that such a man as he should be the President of such a country is a very ridiculous joke.” He found the New York World’s semifictitious account of his request for saucy songs during a trip to the Antietam battlefield so mortifying that he could not bear to look at it. The story was not entirely true, though accounts by officers present attest that the President rode through the battlefield in an ambulance, listening to aides sing childhood ditties and “grinning out of the windows like a baboon,” and that he later shared smutty stories at the mess table. Lincoln wrote a reply for the songster’s signature, maintaining that the revelry had taken place off the field and not at his request, but the piece was widely replayed by the opposition press, and the damage had been done.⁴⁴

“Columbia: ‘Where are my 15,000 Sons—murdered at Fredericksburg?’ Lincoln: ‘This reminds me of a little Joke—’,” wood engraving, Harper’s Weekly, January 3, 1863

Lincoln did not relish being the brunt of jokes, but as the highest elected official in the land, he could not just counteract the satire with a clever retort or belittle the humorists who criticized him. Others could do this, however, and he was fortunate to have surrogates who could lightheartedly scoff at the scoffers. Nothing was sacred to the era’s comic writers, including the sentimental trappings of patriotism and battlefield glory. Artists made a travesty of democratic virtues by mingling them with the gore of war, and they contrasted the nation’s noblest aspirations with the haplessness of its leaders. The pundits might castigate Lincoln for escaping through laughter, but the public appreciated that the horrors surrounding them could be relieved by a little hilarity, and irreverent newspapers, books, and jokes circulated quickly.⁴⁵

The President himself liked to read popular rags such as Pfunny Pfellow, as well as columns in local papers that ran mock editorials on military matters. “An order has been issued by the Secretary of the Navy prohibiting sailors from using, hence forth, the expression ‘shiver my timbers,’ which is no longer applicable now that wooden war ships are doomed to extinction,” ran one lampoon. Given the popularity of ironclads, the piece continued, Secretary Welles was proposing the phrase “Flummux my rivets.” Lincoln was particularly drawn to Vanity Fair, whose self-proclaimed goal was the castigation of secessionists, shady contractors, and “flagitious politicians.” “Union and the Constitution is our motto,” they boasted. “A Rod in [a] Pickle for all who Deserve it, and a word in aid of all who need and are worthy of it.” Until it closed in July 1863, Vanity Fair’s editors made free with a wide variety of leaders, taking aim at everyone from Winfield Scott to Henry Ward Beecher. They treated Confederates like irritating relations who should be ignored, while robustly criticizing excessive abolitionists, political hacks posing as generals, and anyone else who hindered the foot soldier. Lincoln underwent some ribbing as well. He was pictured as a silly man who traded on poor witticisms and impotent public statements while doing little to end the conflict. Ran one ditty:

We have found a way

At the present day

To fix the affairs of the nation.

The magic pill

For every ill

Is—issue a Proclamation!

For the most part, however, Vanity Fair cut the President a good deal of slack, and forcefully nipped at administration foes, relieving some pressure from the government. Lincoln mentioned to at least one acquaintance that the magazine’s pointed reviews were “very helpful to him.”⁴⁶

Whatever their political benefit, the President liked the satirists because they gave him an excuse to chuckle away his fatigue or irritation. Lincoln was especially tickled by the writings of longtime Vanity Fair editor Charles Farrar Browne, who became indistinguishable from his fictional creation “Artemus Ward.” Browne was a professional journalist who took his role as critic seriously; he saw his writings as a correction against the excesses of the era. The “shaft of ridicule,” he noted, “has done more than the cloth-yard arrows of solid argument in defending the truth.” Yet his pseudonymous persona Artemus Ward was pure burlesque. An itinerant carnival barker, Ward traveled around the country with an exhibition consisting of “three moral bares,” a kangaroo, and a wax model of George Washington. Ward’s travels allowed him to observe, with canny accuracy, the social curiosities of the era, from unorthodox religious cults to the burgeoning women’s movement. Browne’s ear for dialect was extraordinary, whether he parodied the “flatulence” of a pompous local sheriff or the malapropisms of a clodhopper quoting Shakespeare. The writings are peppered with Ward’s particular sagacity, such as his comment on the virtues of thrift: “By attendin strickly to bizniss I’ve amarsed a handsum Pittance.” This use of wacky misspellings, bombastic speechifying, and gross exaggeration gave the writings a distinct sense of absurdity. “People laugh at me more because of my eccentric sentences than on account of the subject-matter in them,” Browne once noted. Still, Artemus Ward’s sympathy was always for the small-town citizen, and he pointed up, as did Lincoln, the shrewd pragmatism of frontier folk. In his story “The Draft in Baldinsville,” Ward roasted draft dodgers as well as prattling politicians who intoned the need to fight while remaining safely at home. “War meetin’s is very nice in their way, but they don’t keep Stonewall Jackson from comin’ over to Maryland and helpin’ himself to the fattest beef critters. What we want is more cider and less talk,” opined Ward. The writings were something more than a send-up of bucolic simpletons. They made a plea for common sense and moderation that proved an antidote to the fanaticism of the war.⁴⁷

It is not surprising that Charles Farrar Browne had such an appeal for Lincoln, for they shared a number of traits. Both were awkward and ambling, noted for their ill-fitting trousers and unruly hair. Both were sometimes given to morbid introspection, cracking jokes to chase depression. Both cared passionately about language; they popularized stories and expressions that have survived for many generations, influencing the growth of a characteristic American humor. Politically they were further apart, with Browne reflecting the more conservative and pro-slavery leanings of Midwestern Democrats. At best he gave lukewarm support to the sixteenth president’s program. When Vanity Fair published Ward’s story of a fictional meeting with Lincoln and several cabinet members in April 1862, it poked fun at both the style and ineffectiveness of the war leaders, and the magazine consistently pushed for a return to older interpretations of the Constitution. Still, Browne and Lincoln shared an animosity toward draft evaders and the radicals in Congress, and the President found Ward’s send-up of provincialism to be instructive as well as amusing.⁴⁸

Lincoln liked to pull a copy of Artemus Ward’s His Book out of his pocket to read passages aloud. He thought the mildly blasphemous “High Handed Outrage at Utica” particularly funny, though that episode seems to have lost its pungency over time. He regaled his cabinet with an interpretive reading of the piece on September 22, 1862, just before announcing his decision to publish the Emancipation Proclamation, a juxtaposition of gravity and mirth that greatly annoyed Edwin Stanton. Lincoln’s penchant for these comedic routines became known outside Washington, and in 1863 the New York Herald published an editorial called “Artemus Ward and the President,” which claimed the performances were meant to convulse the cabinet with laughter so that they would agree to whatever Lincoln proposed. “We scarcely know which most to admire, the simplicity, the sublimity or the success of the idea.” Most descriptions of the President’s readings, however, give the impression that he simply enjoyed sharing a good story, whether it was his or borrowed from someone else.⁴⁹

The presidential office also held the writings of Robert Henry Newell, a New York journalist who used his pen to highlight the more ludicrous side of the military situation. It is interesting that Lincoln appeared to enjoy Newell’s work, for they were not closely allied politically, and Newell had little admiration for those wielding power. He opened his first commentary with the words “Though you find me in Washington now, I was born of respectable parents, and gave every indication . . . of coming to something better than this.” On virtually the same day, Newell inaugurated his character Orpheus C. Kerr—whose name was a play on “office seeker”—in a drawing sent to Lincoln’s secretary of state. Showing a harried official sorting through piles of petitions for office, it pointedly reproached administration spoilsmen. Newell was a highly educated man who shunned the use of dialect and sprinkled his columns with literary allusions, but he had a keen eye for paradox and the affectations of those wielding power. He disliked equally abolitionists, antiwar Democrats, the arrogance of the South, and the wasteful incompetence of civilian and military leaders. He once described Lincoln as bowing “like a graceful door-hinge,” and expressed bemusement at the President’s near obsessive penchant for long anecdotes. He was not personally hostile, however, and seems to have gained some respect for the chief executive over time. Nonetheless, Newell was one of the most effective and biting satirists of the administration. George Templeton Strong thought the Orpheus C. Kerr papers the “most brilliant product of the war,” likened them to champagne, and pronounced their author a “genius of the Rabelaisian type.”⁵⁰

Lincoln’s interest in the adventures of Orpheus C. Kerr is all the more intriguing because Newell’s main thrust was antimilitaristic, and he dared poke fun at the nearly untouchable embarrassment of the Army of the Potomac. He took a steely-eyed view of the war, shunning popular romanticism, and the empty bravado of the battlefield. The majority of Newell’s stories involved Kerr’s service with the hapless “Mackeral Brigade” of the “Army of Accomac,” a unit known for its “remarkable retrograde advances.” Most of the brigade’s actions centered on efforts to cross a puddle-sized body of water called Duck Lake in order to capture a two-house burg named “Paris.” It was an amphibious operation, with the Navy patrolling the lake in an ironclad, rigged up from a converted stove, whose front grate came unhinged in violent action. Experiments with pontoon bridges and novel weapons constantly backfired. Across Duck Lake, the rebels constructed massive batteries and rival ironclads in plain sight of the Union men, and occasionally the two sides went fishing together. For those familiar with the disappointing progress in the Eastern Theater during 1862 and 1863, the stories are a wonderful take on the imbecilities of the campaign, and only a hilarious hairline from the truth. Perhaps this is also what caught Lincoln’s eye. He was wildly frustrated by the operations of the Army of the Potomac, with its seemingly irrelevant movements and inexplicable failures. Perhaps a mordant presidential cackle over the Mackeral Brigade forestalled an explosion of another kind. Pinning the failure on military ineptitude may also have soothingly removed any discomfort about Lincoln’s own responsibility for the debacles in Virginia and Charleston harbor, which Kerr only thinly disguised.⁵¹

Orpheus C. Kerr offered a laugh at the Army’s expense and Artemus Ward set up the arrogance of petty officials and small-time hucksters. But arguably no one filled Lincoln with more glee than David Ross Locke’s fabulous character Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby.

Vesuvius Nasby erupted onto the scene in April 1862, in one of Locke’s regular columns for an Ohio newspaper. A preposterous bucolic preacher, who lived at “Confederit X. Roads,” he liked to remain lubricated with the whiskey he called “koncentratid kontentment” and was opposed to “methodis, Presyterin, Luthrin, Brethrin, and other hetrodox churches.” Like Charles Farrar Browne, Locke used cacography and tortured common sense in his caricature, in this case a spoof of the Copperheads—as those who opposed the war were popularly known. Nasby parroted their racial prejudice and blustered over the evils of conscription, which the antiwar party used as a rallying point against Lincoln. The commentary was scathing, whether it roasted outspoken critic Clement Vallandigham (“The trooth is, Vallandigum . . . hez tongue, without discreshun. . . .”), Democratic journals (“The Noo York Illustratid Flapdoodle”), or the lame excuses of draft dodgers (“I am bald-headid, and hev bein obliged to wear a wig these 22 years”). Nasby’s sermons were delivered in a pseudo-trenchant style that purported to show a principled abhorrence of fratricidal war, but Locke’s stinging wit exposed these attitudes as nothing more than ignorance and bigotry.⁵²

Like other humorists, Locke had a day job as an editor. He wrote serious political commentary against the mismanagement of the Union effort, as well as the “masked secessionists who go about grinning at every reverse.” But nothing matched the reach or genius of Petroleum V. Nasby’s uncouth voice. Locke was aware that his satire influenced the public more profoundly than his straightforward reporting. Objectivity was not his goal, nor was pure humor. Having personally experienced the disruption of his neighborhood by antiwar politics, as well as religious divisions that were altogether too similar to Nasby’s “Church uv the Noo Dispensashun,” he determined to speak out strongly. “I have simply exaggerated error in politics, love, and religion,” he told a friend, “until the people saw those errors and rose up against them.”⁵³

Lincoln greatly admired Locke’s inventive turns of phrase, and reportedly once told him that “for the genius to write these things I would gladly give up my office.” It was said that the President read the Nasby Papers more than he did the Bible, and his worn copy, now in the Library of Congress, attests to his faithful perusal. Lincoln pulled Nasby from his pocket as often as he did Artemus Ward’s His Book, sometimes interrupting serious strategy sessions to regale his cabinet with the latest exploits from Confederit X. Roads. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was surprised to find Lincoln in March 1865 so engaged with Locke’s writings that he set aside other business to “initiate” Sumner into their hilarity. The senator thought it a “delight to see him surrender so completely to the fascination,” but was concerned that Lincoln kept a group of legislators waiting more than twenty minutes while he recited Nasby’s pseudo-wisdom.⁵⁴

Lincoln’s partiality for Nasby reflected something more than frivolity. The nation’s leader recognized that Locke had handed him a salve against the bruises of rough and ready democracy—indeed, a cunning restraint against an unschooled public’s right to jeer at authority. Locke played havoc with the pretensions of armchair critics and shrewdly undermined the credibility of the naysayers. Hypocritical preachers, pompous journalists, and self-righteous politicians were felled with the nib of his pen. Petroleum V.’s naïve assessments, his blunt, Swiftian japery, and his unerring eye for paradox became an unofficial machine for administration efforts to suppress the opposition. Although Edwin Stanton evidently dubbed Locke’s humor “the God damned trash of a silly mountebank,” in the end it may have been more effective at stifling criticism than the sterner measures devised by Lincoln’s administration. Locke’s writings were a “constant and welcome ally,” Sumner admitted. “Unquestionably they were among the influences and agencies by which disloyalty in all its forms was exposed, and public opinion assured on the right side.”⁵⁵

III

As outlandish as Locke’s writings were, they were not more pungent than some of the genuine protests that found their way onto Lincoln’s desk. His letter bag carried many a semiliterate assault on administration policies, some of them just as pithy as the sermons preached by Petroleum V. Nasby. One correspondent, who signed himself only as “SNB,” allowed that “it would be a most gratifying thing to The majority of this nation if the Bowells of the Earth or Hell it Self . . . would open their Bowells & Engulph the whole damned Abolition administration for their damned Hypocracy the[y] are only decieving themselves and not God.” In case the point had not been strongly enough expressed, SNB signed off saying, “So good by you damn old abolition negroe thiefing Scoundril.” Not to be outdone, a Chicago man admonished the President: “Mr. Abe Lincoln . . . if you don’t Resign we are going to put a spider in your dumpling and play the Devil with you.” Exercising the American right to speak his mind, this correspondent then veered into colorful obscenity. From the pulpit and in the press, Lincoln was demeaned as “a flat-boat tyrant” or denounced for having a mind that attracted vulgarity as “mange to dogs or meazles to swine.” One particularly cheeky editor, Marcus M. Pomeroy, of the La Crosse [Wisc.] Democrat, wrote a contemptuous epithet for Lincoln in August 1864:

Beneath this turf the widow-maker lies

Little in everything, except in size.⁵⁶

Pomeroy liked to gloat over his snide phraseology, but his disgruntlement was grounded in serious concerns. He was, in fact, equally disgusted with extremists on all sides, whom he thought had brought on the war for political purposes. At the same time, he was genuinely shocked by the casualties and the license of the conflict. After seeing a pile of crude coffins on the wharf at St. Louis, Pomeroy dryly noted that it rather took the poetry out of military gold braid. As it happened, his views differed little from those of David Ross Locke, who wrote that his own satiric voyage had been launched when war shattered the economy in his Ohio hometown and siphoned its young men off to battle. Where the Pomeroys and Lockes diverged was over the legitimacy of the war itself, not the methods Lincoln was employing to win it. In his serious editorials, Locke did not hesitate to complain of the administration’s ineptitude, but as a racial egalitarian and social reformist, he saw a moral purpose in the contest that overshadowed the messiness of its waging.⁵⁷

Nasby’s relentless racism—“a holsum prejoodis agin evrything black”—is perhaps the most defining aspect of Locke’s stories. In exaggerating fears of “amagamashun” and economic competition, and peppering his writings with the offensive term “nigger,” Locke was taking specific aim at the Copperheads’ resistance to emancipation and the use of black soldiers in the Union Army. An English visitor to Philadelphia was surprised to find open antipathy to the Emancipation Proclamation in the North, and to learn that many who opposed secession did not necessarily object to slavery, even seeing it as commercially advantageous. “I thought that outside Carolina I sh[oul]d never hear such sentiments,” he confided to a relative. It was also a source of disgruntlement within the Army, especially among officers. Not every “Peace Democrat” was pro-slavery, but most were staunchly conservative; reluctant to meddle with the Constitution’s property guarantees or to embrace a multiracial society. After Lincoln announced his Emancipation Proclamation, their resistance increased.⁵⁸

The antiwar Democrats were also opposed to conscription, particularly if the point of fighting was to free the slaves, and they resented the provost marshals and other measures that President Lincoln and War Secretary Stanton put in place to enforce the draft. Conscription was a new phenomenon, and a source of discomfort for wide swaths of American society. It was resisted in the South (where it was pioneered) as well as the North. Copperheads saw the provisions as unfair to the poor, who could not afford to pay for substitutes, as well as a usurpation of the state prerogative to raise militia forces. New York governor Horatio Seymour worried that this “lottery for life” was being enacted without proper safeguards for impartiality, and in opposition to the needs of his state, which could not even man the forts within its borders. In addition, he questioned the draft’s constitutionality and asked that its legality be judged before he enforced it. (Lincoln did not disagree on the legal principle, but pleaded that time and necessity forbade such a review.) For the Copperheads, conscription foreshadowed increasing government interference with individual freedom. It was also a potent sign that Lincoln’s foundering war strategy was discouraging volunteerism. William Havemeyer, the former mayor of New York City who made a serious effort to shore up flagging civilian morale, joined others in pointedly telling the President that the “dissatisfaction with the management of the War, which makes volunteering impossible,” was likely to make conscription ineffectual as well. “Half a Million More Men for the Shambles—The Want of Brains Must Be Made Up by Numbers,” read the headline of an opposition paper in Pennsylvania after a call-up in 1864. Irritation with the draft opened other sores, many of them economic. Conscription led to labor shortages and was widely suspected of fostering corruption in the Army, the government, and the business community. It added to dismay over the slow pace of commercial activity, which had been hampered by tariffs, as well as the closure of Southern markets and Mississippi River traffic. The production of paper money—the “greenbacks” that floated the cost of the war—also deflated pocketbooks. As the price of gold soared, the Peace Democrats became stronger and more vocal.⁵⁹

Many of these issues were political, and indeed party rivalry was the backdrop to much of the controversy over Copperhead activities. The mid-nineteenth century was an intensely partisan era, with well-defined factions and strong organizations at all levels. The Democrats had commanded national power for decades, but the splintering of their support—and consequent defeat in the 1860 election—left them scrambling to reassert their influence. They also held a deep ideological resentment of the Republican Party, which they viewed as the source of the nation’s divisions. They used all the traditional tools of the opposition to undermine their rivals: slogans, symbols, provocative editorials, and bellicose carping on contentious points, whether petty or profound. The Republicans fought back, of course. As early as July 1861 they had coined the word “Copperhead,” meant to liken their opponents to vicious snakes. The Democrats tried to make the epithet a virtue—copperhead was also the nickname of the penny that sported a picture of Lady Liberty on one side—but the reptilian image stuck. Almost as ubiquitous was the Republican habit of defining any difference of opinion as “treason.” “The fact is the . . . opposers of the administration are doing us more damage now, than the traitors of the South,” a concerned citizen told Congressman Henry Dawes in 1863. For some, the terms “Peace Democrat” and “domestic traitor” became interchangeable. “Internal treason extends over this country like a diabolical net,” brayed the ever emphatic Adam Gurowski. “A defender of slavery, a Copperhead, and a traitor, differ so little from each other, that a microscope magnifying ten thousand times would not disclose the difference.”⁶⁰

In their concern for partisan loyalty and the unity of the war effort, Republican zealots made little distinction between honest dissent and evil intent. They saw Southern sympathizers in every Washington bureau, and intrigue at every peace rally. “Secret” organizations with names like the Sons of Liberty or the Knights of the Golden Circle were said not only to be encouraging the South but to have large memberships and subversive plans. Nervous citizens bombarded the administration—at some points on a daily basis—with rumors about blood oaths and murderous pacts. Alarmists reported that Copperhead associations were raising rival militia companies or were planning to liberate the Confederate prisoners held by the Union. In June 1864 William Rosecrans, commander of the Department of Missouri, urgently telegraphed Washington, claiming that a massive conspiracy to overthrow the government was afoot, under the direction of the Order of American Knights. Lincoln took it seriously enough that he sent John Hay to investigate the matter, but ultimately concluded that Rosecrans’s panic had more to do with military rivalries and a desire for enhanced resources than any real danger to the nation. The President’s take on the societies was that they were just another political faction—albeit characterized by “malice” and “puerility.”⁶¹

Lincoln probably called it right. Many of the fears of subversive associations were greatly exaggerated—in some cases brilliantly—by Republican propagandists. A few ambitious plots to disrupt Northern harmony were uncovered, and some communities were genuinely terrorized by their threats. In most instances, however, the societies appear to have been little more than a showcase for bravado and bullying. Union general Samuel Heintzelman mockingly dismissed one parading group as nothing but a specimen of “unterrified, unwashed Democracy.” No highly organized network of these groups was established, nor was any coordinated plan for aiding the rebels ever uncovered. In a number of cases, the Democratic Party even backed away from the organizations or played a restraining role.⁶²

It is tempting to see the societies’ actions as slightly ridiculous, something akin to Orpheus Kerr’s farcical tales of provincial “war-meetins.” Still the impact of the antiwar protesters cannot be completely ignored. Most dissent came from Democrats, and in some instances it resulted in organized resistance against conscription or the enrollment of black troops. The New York draft riot of July 1863 was the most visible of these disruptions. This was not an idle scare, but a full-blown uprising, the largest civil disturbance in American history, with scores of victims and ugly racial and social overtones. It left war leaders on edge, concerned that the antidraft movement would spread like an epidemic. Small-town intrigue was also used to whip up disgruntlement and further partisan ends. When the great-great-grandfather of this writer, John Jackson Kenley, was on furlough from the Twenty-Fourth Indiana Regiment in 1863, his wedding was interrupted by a hissing mob that asserted there were “butternuts”—another term for some Copperheads—in the bridal cake. A brawl ensued, the purpose of which was to prevent his return to the Army (it was unsuccessful). Viewing the escalation of such incidents, one Republican stalwart thought Indiana was on the verge of an internal war that would cause the streets of Indianapolis to run with blood. In neighboring Illinois, a constitutional convention dominated by the Democracy (as Democrats liked to term themselves) tried to strip the Republican governor of any meaningful power, again unsuccessfully, though not without ramifications. Observant Southern leaders monitored these protests, hoping they might undermine the Union effort and give the Confederacy an opening to sue for peace on its own terms. Robert E. Lee’s excursions into Union territory in 1862 and 1863 were partly based on the hope that he could exploit Northern divisions, though in the end his bold moves only rallied the Yankees to their own defense.⁶³

Some Copperheads were viciously partisan and a few truly dedicated to interrupting the military campaigns. Others—like La Crosse [Wisc.] Democrat editor Pomeroy and Clement L. Vallandigham, an Ohio congressman whose spirited oratory directly challenged the Republican platform—had personal ambitions and outsized egos. However, a great number of Peace Democrats sincerely believed that the nation had split unnecessarily, that fratricidal war was not only abhorrent but actually sinful, and that the appalling loss of life resulted from the recklessness and incompetence of the Lincoln administration. Many protesters retained their loyalty even while voicing their concerns. For example, an outspoken critic of the war named William B. Pratt noted in his diary how he constantly irritated the “war Republicans.” But he also referred to Union soldiers as “our Army,” and, as a town supervisor in Prattsburgh, New York, worked to make sure the area met its conscription quota. Charles Mason, a distinguished jurist and former chief of the Patent Office, watched with dismay as the years brought increasing disruption of civil liberties, along with grotesque casualty lists. His diary is a day-by-day lesson in disaffection, as he was transformed from a willing helper of the administration to a disgruntled observer of the chaos and waste it produced. Within the military, the disparity between commitment to the war effort and allegiance to Lincoln’s policies was particularly clear. “The support of the war is a very distinct thing from the support of the President,” wrote an officer with the Army of the Potomac. “The more I think of it the more angry I am with the government for placing in such a dilemma good citizens like myself.”⁶⁴

Preachers from many denominations also criticized the government for its ethical stance and absolutism. “Instead of feeding your people with ‘the bread of life,’ you feed them with blood and gunpowder,” intoned one pastor. Some of these admonitions came from the more conservative sects, which cited scripture to justify slavery and opposed the employment of African American soldiers. Often their words were only slightly different from Reverend Nasby’s forays into the “aposssel biznis.” But many of the most urgent sermons came in response to excessive Republican war rhetoric, such as the assertion by one Methodist parson that his party would put down the rebellion even “if in doing so, we have to exterminate from God’s green earth every living human being south of Mason and Dixon’s line.” Stunned, peace-promoting ministers maintained that they, not Lincoln, held the moral high ground.⁶⁵

Copperhead righteousness reached its apogee in protests against Lincoln’s stance on constitutional rights. Within weeks of taking office, he began using his executive power to curb the authority of courts, suppress “disloyal” newspapers, establish martial law, and suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Opponents professed outrage that the President was undercutting essential freedoms that had long been associated with America’s guardianship of liberty. “He is tearing down our institutions daily, and seems to comprehend the magnitude of his work . . . no more than the rat does which is at work upon the timbers of the strong and beautiful ship,” railed one critic. Although Lincoln respected the Constitution, and at one time had been leery of altering its provisions, as president he began to view it less as a sacred philosophical framework and more as a flexible tool to help him govern. Explaining this to Congress was, in fact, one of his concerns on the day he unwittingly mangled the Stars and Stripes. But his arguments did not sway everyone, and even those in his own party raised their voices. “Our Presdt is now dictator, Imperator—what you will,” protested Charles Sumner, “but how vain to have the power of a God if not to use it God-like.”⁶⁶

Habeas corpus, the only fundamental right specifically protected by the original Constitution, was considered the basic guarantee against arbitrary imprisonment or unlawful exercise of power. Its suspension was an especially sensitive issue. David Ross Locke caught its importance to the American psyche when he sardonically noted that a “tyrannikle President hez taken our old habis corpusses from us, and persistently refuses to furnish us new wuns,” or advised, with tongue only half in cheek: “I kin find no constitooshnal warrant for half what is bein dun. I am in favor uv a war for the Union ez it used to was, and the Constitooshn ez I’d like to hev it.” No matter how much Lincoln enjoyed the fictitious exploits of Petroleum V., he did not see the activities of Peace Democrats as a laughing matter. His main concern seems to have been with those who hampered the prosecution of the war, and many whose rights were abridged were draft dodgers or leaders who encouraged them. It was not a perfect balance, however, and plenty of politics was mixed with the legitimate attempt to promote recruitment and bolster army morale. Lincoln justified his actions by citing provisions that gave him extraordinary powers in times of rebellion or by the authority granted him as commander in chief. He also made skillful use of public statements to explain his unusual exercise of authority. Copperhead anticonscription campaigns, for example, were undermined by eloquently upholding the rights of “simple soldier boys” against those who maliciously enticed them to run from duty. The President rejected the notion that his wartime measures would create a precedent for future tyranny by maintaining that his crackdowns were akin to giving medicine to a sick man, which could be stopped when the ailment was cured. And he taunted opponents of the U.S. Colored Troops by saying: “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you.”⁶⁷

As nimble as the words were, Lincoln’s curtailment of civil liberties was, and still is, controversial. Some of the early arrests went unnoticed, or were executed with a sleight of hand from the administration that indicated its desire to downplay the measures. However, when a national suspension of habeas corpus went into effect in September 1862 (unfortunately timed just a few days before the controversial Emancipation Proclamation was issued), there was widespread dismay, as well as suspicion that Lincoln was forcing his contentious policies on a public that no longer had the right to protest. The Connecticut Assembly sent a formal resolution decrying “the unjustifiable interference with the liberty of our citizens.” Pennsylvania’s chief justice handed down a powerful opinion in February 1863, arguing that fundamental rights could not be overturned because of a rebellion: “The very purpose of the law is to set a rule that may remain fixed and immovable among the disturbances of society, and that shall be the standard of judging them.” Objection was particularly strong to the imposition of military authority in places where civil structures were still intact, a practice that grew during the conflict. For some, suspension of the writ and like actions simply pointed up the ineffectiveness of the administration. “There was no necessity for them,” wrote an exasperated soldier, “and their appearance indicates cowardice in the government in addition to its other weaknesses.” Another officer, who loyally served for three years, asked a comrade, “Do you not think it would have been better for Abraham to have worked less for expediency and have done what was constitutional and right, would not honesty have been a better policy than those crooked ways by which he sought to cheat his own conscience and that of the North?” Attorney General Edward Bates carefully upheld the need to maintain public safety, but he also cautioned the President about overuse of arbitrary arrests, usurping the power of the courts, and curtailing freedom of speech, especially the right to remain silent rather than vocally support the President. “We may regret his lukewarmness,” Bates wrote of one case, “but no man has a right to dictate the measure of another man’s zeal & activity.”⁶⁸

To sensible Republicans, the great concern of such crackdowns was that they might give the Democrats a pretext for their disgruntlement—which indeed they did. Instead of silencing the dissent, curbs on free speech offered the Copperheads a great rallying cry, which helped overcome the party’s weakness in its early antiwar protests. The more the President constrained his opponents, the more ammunition he handed them. When the only paper in Baltimore that opposed Lincoln’s 1864 reelection was forcibly closed, for example, the chief executive received wide-ranging cries of foul play, with even highly partisan Republicans cautioning him that “the stopage of the paper in Baltimore and the refusal to see the Editor will hurt us more than we can gain by stoping it.” The worst of it was that the policies also gave the South a justification for rebelling against usurpation of authority by the “Tyrant Lincoln.” “What a sad state their political affairs must be in if they cant bear comment!” exclaimed one Louisianan. “O Free America! You who uphold free people, free speech, free everything what a foul blot of despotism rests on a once spotless name!” A careful observer in the Confederate War Department came to the same conclusion. “But how can it be possible for the people of the North to submit to martial law?” he queried. “The government which directs and enforces so obnoxious a tyranny cannot be sure of its stability.”⁶⁹

IV

According to Noah Brooks, who covered the White House for the Sacramento Bee, Lincoln relished a Nasby lampoon of Copperhead protests against black enlistment in the Union Army. The President liked to recite it “with great effect,” to point up the contradictions in Democratic statements on that issue. Ironically, inconsistency was one of the chief flaws with Lincoln’s own way of managing the opposition. The questionable legality of measures taken by his government was made more uncomfortable by the unevenness of their application, as well as by the way political motives so often trumped principle. Without any uniform code, and with a great deal of latitude left to the generals who oversaw military districts, punitive measures were frequently based more on personal impulse than on established procedure.⁷⁰

Administration handling of press criticism bordered on the capricious—perhaps surprisingly so, given the media’s ability to defend itself publicly. In Maryland, a Christian newspaper that castigated both abolitionists and secessionists was shut down because its masthead listed Richmond among its distribution points. Officials were annoyed by some of the paper’s factual accounts of plundering by Union troops, but no one could ever explain what law had been broken by its editor. In New Orleans, the famed Picayune had remained guarded in its coverage but was finally closed because of a “series of little pin thrusts” at the commanding politico-general, Nathaniel Banks. “It was more from frequent irritation,” a foreign observer remarked, “than from any fear of mischief that the paper was stopped.” In 1864 two opposition papers, the New York World and Journal of Commerce, were shuttered after they unsuspectingly ran a false announcement of another call for troops, which had been put on the wires by the Associated Press. Despite reassurances from the New York provost marshal that the real culprits had been detained, and the fact that the announcement held some truth (the administration was in fact on the verge of announcing another draft), Lincoln approved the closures. When protests arrived from around the country, he had to backtrack once more, suffering months of editorial criticism. Treatment of newspapers in Missouri, Kentucky, and other border states was particularly chaotic. Some tabloids that slammed the actions of the government remained open, while serious publications were closed for reporting facts. Papers loyal to Lincoln’s centrist policies were sometimes shut down by Republican secret societies—for those too existed—who ironically labeled them “Copperhead” propaganda.⁷¹

Of course, no one protested this more vociferously than the press itself. Journalism of the day was far from uniformly responsible, but it forcefully championed free speech and the right to unrestricted information. As early as July 1861, William Howard Russell noted that Lincoln’s acts were casting a shadow over the grand reputation of the Constitution. “The freedom of the press, as I take it, does not include the right to publish news hostile to the cause of the country in which it is published,” he complained. Some newspapermen simply found ways around the censorship, but others courageously fought it. The Baltimore journalist whose McClellan-leaning newspaper was closed in 1864 sent multiple messages to Washington contending that citizens had been deprived “of the means of deciding intelligently upon the questions at issue,” making “the so called election a mockery.” Lincoln did not respond. In Pennsylvania several editors battled restrictions to the point of endangering themselves physically. One, Franklin Weirick, owner of the minuscule Selinsgrove Times, wrote impudent editorials that were remarkably similar to the parodies so beloved by Lincoln. When he exposed the fact that soldiers had been stationed at strategic locations during the midterm election of 1862 to make sure Republicans carried some doubtful districts, he was threatened with lynching. Hoisted onto a barrel by the local party faithful, he spent the day with a noose around his neck, until he muttered “three cheers for the Union.” Impervious to the consequences, Weirick subsequently ran a headline announcing he was “Unshaken by the Frowns of Unprincipled Demagogues, Unintimidated by the Clamours of the Rabble and the Threats of Insolent Mobs.”⁷²

The inconsistent handling of the press revealed Lincoln’s overall ambivalence about handling the “unofficial war” waged by noncombatants and irregular “guerrilla” forces, particularly in the fragile border states. His options in these places were not good. Leniency as a policy encouraged license; ruthlessness caused more resistance. Lincoln’s 1863 letters to leaders in Missouri show he understood the danger of spiraling violence, yet his administration frequently allowed—or cast a blind eye to—harsh measures to maintain control. In Maryland, a Kent County judge named Richard Carmichael was bodily torn from a courtroom for protesting the suspension of habeas corpus. He was beaten with rifles until blood flowed and incarcerated for eight months, without disloyalty being either charged or proved. In several states, stationing troops at polling places—theoretically to prevent disruption—was sanctioned, as were ballot requirements that fell outside state laws. Often there was no proper supervision, resulting in widespread reports of voter intimidation. “Fraud added to force” was how one jurist described the measures. Citizens loudly protested, as did officials such as Maryland governor Augustus Bradford, who was gingerly supporting his state’s adherence to the Union, while resisting the federal government’s erratic military occupation. He rather pointedly called out Lincoln’s ignorance of the applicable statutes and noted that the troop presence only served to alienate Unionists. The President, however, chose to view border state dissenters as guilty until proven innocent. He rather huffily dismissed one group of petitioners, saying the Democrats could manage their affairs their way and he would manage his side his own way. Although he pledged to look into several violations, no robust action by the government was forthcoming.⁷³

Missouri—where peaceful protests alternated with vicious guerrilla raids, some of them sponsored directly by the Confederates—was an even more delicate case. There the administration wavered between underestimating the danger and sudden, brutal suppression of opposition activities, including unauthorized arrests and confiscation of property. A parade of generals was dispatched to control events; however, many of them also exercised questionable authority. John C. Frémont’s extra-legal attempt to seize and liberate slaves in the district in 1861 was followed by John Schofield’s arbitrary displacement of entire communities and William Rosecrans’s inexplicable order requiring that the oath of allegiance be administered before anyone could attend church. (“Not only is this order wrong in principle, I can say unhesitatingly there is for it not the slightest political necessity,” complained one pastor.) Lincoln tried to advise Schofield to act judiciously and to avoid alienating the public, and General in Chief Henry Halleck drew up a code of military conduct for dealing with insurgent activity. But no one in the Lincoln government, including the President, strictly enforced it.⁷⁴

The situation in the Show Me State was worsened by disarray in neighboring Kansas, which was deteriorating into what one observer called “a carnival of crime.” In 1863 the Kansas legislature had declared rebel sympathizers to be “outside the law.” Although there was little real evidence of Copperhead activity, marauding bands such as the “Jayhawkers” were allowed to settle old scores under the protection of this edict because of their relationship to the Republican Party. When the head of the Army’s Department of the Frontier, General James G. Blunt, moved to crack down on lawlessness and enforce public order, he was recalled. Lincoln tried to insert himself in the Kansas mess, sorting personal animosities from professional misconduct, but ultimately had no more success establishing clear guidelines for civil procedure or military administration than he had in Missouri. The best alternative to martial law he could suggest, late in the war, was to hold town meetings, which he rather optimistically thought would be guided by “memory and honor and Christian Charity.”⁷⁵

Lincoln’s friends were concerned about this kind of inconsistency and so advised him. “The necessity for some uniform order on the question of arrests, [and] the suppression and exclusion of disloyal papers from military departments, appears so necessary, that I hope such an order as all loyal men can approve and defend may after full and free consultation be adopted,” pleaded James M. Ashley, a Republican from Ohio. “The people ask and pray the Administration to give them plain and positive directions for their own government and for the government of their military officers.” Ashley was particularly concerned about the way a directive from General Ambrose Burnside, head of the Department of Ohio, had been imposed, and its confusing consequences. Issued on April 13, 1863, General Orders No. 38 stated that the “habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed in this department,” and that those not complying would be immediately arrested or banished to Confederate territory. The order had been issued without the permission of Lincoln or Stanton—which was already enough to raise eyebrows—and the administration was caught in an embarrassing position as Burnside proceeded to implement it. At first the President expressed “firm support” for Burnside’s action, even when his general nabbed the highly visible Copperhead spokesman Clement Vallandigham for challenging his order. “Valiant Val,” as he was known to his supporters, had been an annoyance to the administration since the outset of the conflict, but Burnside’s treatment of him soon threatened to create a backlash and launch Vallandigham into martyrdom. Although Ohio was a loyal state where the civil courts were still operating, Burnside tried Vallandigham by military commission, which sentenced him to imprisonment for the duration of the war. Lincoln rather deftly overruled the incarceration, calling Vallandigham’s pro-Southern bluff by forcing him into exile beyond Union lines. The notion of a prominent Copperhead slithering his way through Confederate society almost seemed like one of the President’s little jokes. The ensuing adventure, with Valiant Val wandering the halls of Richmond (which proved to be less receptive than he had imagined), then escaping to Canada and finding his way back to his homeland to run for governor of Ohio, became a kind of popular sideshow, not unlike the spectacles of Artemus Ward’s traveling carnival. Lincoln monitored it as well, with a keen eye for any political ramifications. Noting that Vallandigham was getting more publicity than ever, the President did not protest when his Copperhead foe slipped back into the country. Vallandigham’s violent rhetoric, Lincoln shrewdly noted, might benefit the Union by causing significant portions of the Democratic Party to back away.⁷⁶

The Vallandigham escapade was coupled with an awkward administration flip-flop over the closure of the Chicago Times. The Times’ Democratic editor, Wilber F. Storey, unapologetically ran opinion pieces quoting disgruntled Union troops, and asserting that conscripts would be “sacrificed uselessly if the imbecile management that has distinguished the conduct of the war hitherto continues.” Such inflammatory statements caused Burnside to close the paper on June 1, 1863. Two days later, prominent Chicago business and political leaders, concerned about collateral damage at the next election, demanded that the order be rescinded. A near vaudevillian to-and-fro ensued. Caught within the political vise that so often squeezed the pulp out of principle, Lincoln first ordered War Secretary Stanton to revoke the suppression order. On receiving another petition, this time from Republican worthies who desired that the Chicago Times be kept closed, Lincoln again backtracked. He advised Stanton to reverse the order once more, putting the censorship back in force—but to do it slowly. So, in that telegraphic age, a mule-mail order was sent, which arrived too late to go into effect until the Army had destroyed every copy of the paper and Storey was in open defiance. Watching the spectacle, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles—who had little sympathy for anyone claiming protection from a government that person was trying to undermine—lamented that “without absolute necessity” military officers were “disregard[ing] those great principles on which our government and institutions rest.” In the end, the Times was closed for only a few days, and continued its editorial protest throughout the war.⁷⁷

“The Great American WHAT IS IT? Chased by Copperheads,” lithograph by E. W. T. Nicholas, 1863

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Supporters might term such inconsistency an admirable “flexibility,” but this kind of irresolution, and seeming lack of executive control, opened Lincoln up to derision that went far beyond mockery of his goofy appearance. The ever caustic Chauncey C. Burr, editor of the antiwar magazine The Old Guard, for example, reworked Macbeth, the President’s favorite play, with warlocks Seward, Stanton, and Chase tossing the remnants of liberty into their toxic caldron. The scene features Seward advising the grinning president:

Make a charm of powerful trouble,

Make the hell-broth boil and bubble;

The Habeas Corpus put it in,

It is the charm by which we’ll win. . . .

Put in FreeSpeech; boil freeman’s tongue,

In the negro’s odor flung;

Nor let free-press the cauldron ’scape. . . .

“Keep on the Track!,” wood engraving, Vanity Fair, November 22, 1862

When Lincoln tells the trio they have done well, and asks when they shall meet again, Stanton replies, “When the hurly-burly’s done, / And our battles are not won.” In its own way, this satire was as clever as anything devised by the pro-Republican pundits, and its bite had a similar galvanizing effect on the opposition. In another jibe at dubious federal efforts to “manage” dissent, Vanity Fair ran a cartoon of Lincoln trying to keep a locomotive labeled “Union” on track by burning up timber labeled “democracy.” Even the President’s staunch supporters became discouraged, not just by the war’s grim progression, but by the state of free government. “The great experiment of democracy may be destined to fail . . . in disastrous explosion and general chaos,” wrote a despondent Republican, who questioned whether Lincoln was “strong enough to manage so large and populous an asylum.” Indeed, he queried, was anyone? “Satan seems superintendent de facto just now.”⁷⁸

Even the humorists who kept Lincoln’s spirits afloat joined the heckling chorus. When clothed in solemn editorial garb, David Ross Locke was consistently critical, questioning the chief executive’s military judgment and his sensitivity to public opinion, and especially his stance on civil liberties. Nor did Locke hesitate to unloose Nasby in protest. In “An Interview with the President,” written during the height of the suspensions, Nasby challenged the “goriller” to “Restore to us our habis corpuses, as good ez new. Arrest no more men, wimmin, and children for opinyun’s saik.” Although the piece also ridiculed “Valandigum” and his followers, Locke’s censure was real, and he ended it in the tone of a Shakespearean sage: “Linkin, scorn not my words. I hev sed. Adoo.” Orpheus C. Kerr also mocked restrictions that were loosely termed “military necessity” by having a fictitious congressman, “Mr. Chunky” of New Hampshire, question whether it was true that every man in McDowell’s army had been imprisoned on suspicion of being secessionist. “If so,” admonished Chunky, “he would warn the Administration that it was cherishing a viper which would sting it.” The Copperheads, he cautioned, were not the only poisonous politics the President was handling.⁷⁹

A year after the blowup over General Orders No. 38, Lincoln was asked to justify those who had protested the Chicago Times suppression. In his response the President admitted that he was “embarrassed with the question about what was due the military service on the one hand, and the Liberty of the Press on the other.” The tension between the need for national security and the defense of cherished rights was precisely the thorny problem he faced. It represented the inherent contradiction in a republic, where liberty is fundamental, but its protection must sometimes be upheld at the cost of absolute freedom, and where leadership is expected to be both forthright and constrained. Lincoln was not the first president to sacrifice perfect freedom for national safety, or to further his political aims by loosely interpreting the Constitution. Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, and Polk—not to mention the feisty Jackson—had all taken measures that stretched constitutional principles when they believed the nation was in peril. The Supreme Court did not meaningfully challenge Lincoln’s actions, though his attorney general feared it might, and Congress legitimized many of the administration’s restrictive measures, albeit sometimes grudgingly. This was not enough to justify an erosion of liberty, however, and Lincoln also knew he must square his policies with national ideals and public expectations.⁸⁰

Lincoln wrestled with the conundrum throughout 1863 and 1864. He never fully resolved it. He allowed that irregularities had been practiced and that he had “not the power or the right” to interfere if citizens chose not to uphold his government. He also conceded that nothing justified suspension of civil authority except military necessity, and that that was being imperfectly interpreted. Part of the issue, he noted, had also to do with the concept of liberty itself, which was open to many interpretations. He recognized that Americans were in need of a cogent definition, but in practice every faction was defining “freedom” for itself. Lincoln’s operating principle was that he could not fully protect the Constitution if it meant losing the nation. As was his habit, he used logic and an everyday analogy to make his point. A limb, he wrote, must sometimes be amputated to save a life; “but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.” As chief executive, Lincoln urged the nation to take a longer view, submitting that his “small” mistakes paled beside the great work before them.⁸¹

Lincoln also argued that because events threatened to spiral out of control, he had to anticipate trouble, or try to forestall it, rather than wait for it to develop. A solitary anticonscription rally might quickly transform itself into a full-scale uprising, or encourage guerrilla action. He thus became greatly angered when state judges began to release protesters held without charge, waving aside cabinet members who advised him that states had long had the power to issue their own writs. In Lincoln’s eyes it was all a “formed plan of the democratic copperheads, deliberately acted out to defeat the Govt., and aid the enemy.” When a group of Democrats led by New York congressman Erastus Corning questioned the integrity of his legal constraints, Lincoln responded that allowing complete liberty of speech would only allow internal enemies to “keep on foot . . . spies, informers, supplyers, and aiders and abettors of their cause.” He stressed the need for vigilance and caution, and once more lambasted those who remained mute in the national crisis, or who spoke ambiguously, qualifying their support “with ‘buts,’ and ‘ifs,’ and ‘ands.’” The President had been fooled once, during the secession winter, when he underestimated the audacity of the Southern Fire-Eaters, and overestimated the loyalty of men such as John Magruder and Robert E. Lee. Even if mistakes might be made, he had no intention of being called out again in such apparent naïveté.⁸²

This was the administration’s strongest public statement against Copperhead machinations. It was widely reprinted and greeted enthusiastically among supporters, who admired the President’s skillful argument and catchy phrasing. Yet it did not persuade everyone. Corning and his cohorts questioned Lincoln’s implication that personal integrity would prevent any abuse of power, noting that the President ignored the danger of precedent for a less scrupulous leader. They accused him of jumping to the conclusion “at a single bound” that “there is no liberty under the Constitution which does not depend on the gracious indulgence of the Executive only.” The skeptics also questioned Lincoln’s assertion—as had Attorney General Edward Bates—that those who remained silent, or qualified their support for the war, were disloyal. “We think that men may be rightfully silent if they so choose,” ran the retort; “as to the ‘buts’ and ‘ifs’ and ‘ands,’ these are Saxon words and belong to the vocabulary of freemen.”⁸³

It is easy to conclude that the sixteenth president erred on the side of repression, overreacting in situations that were never really threatening, and failing to set a uniform standard for dealing with opposition. If, as he conceded, he had not the right to constrain the public, he had nonetheless taken the liberty to do it. The constitutional questions particularly stand out because of the contrast between Lincoln’s lofty rhetoric about cherished freedoms, and the rough way he allowed those freedoms to be handled. This must have bothered Lincoln as well, for he mused “whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its own existence, in great emergencies.” Gideon Welles, who also pondering these questions in June 1864, insightfully described the dilemma. Lincoln, he noted, was being

blamed for not being more energetic and because he is despotic in the same breath. He is censured for being too mild and gentle towards the Rebels and for being tyrannical and intolerant. There is no doubt he has a difficult part to perform in order to satisfy all and to do right.

This war is extraordinary in all its aspects and phases and no man was prepared to meet them. . . . I have often thought that greater severity might well be exercised, and yet it would tend to barbarism.⁸⁴

Here then was the rub. Striking the right balance has always been one of the critical tests of a democracy, which must find the strength to uphold its values under even the severest pressure. The First Amendment was particularly frustrating in this regard for leaders trying to maintain security in wartime, because within the privilege of free expression lies the unintended consequence of a sometimes reckless cacophony of voices. Shrill or disruptive debate can also dent the nation’s determination, and this was another of Lincoln’s concerns. Although military officers frequently criticized the administration’s policies, common soldiers by and large detested the Copperheads. They resented those who disrupted recruitment or showed disrespect for the dangers of the field. If anything, they wanted to see the Peace Democrats treated more harshly than they were. “If Vallandigham should come here and talk the way he does in Congress the Soldiers would kill him,” asserted a sergeant fighting in Virginia. A similar piece of advice came to the President from the western front: “instead of suspending the writ of habeas corpus he should suspend the necks of those who prate so violently against its suspension.” Lincoln’s strongest civilian proponents concurred. It was impossible for him to ignore these groups, which formed the very backbone of his support.⁸⁵

History would show that the Copperheads posed less of a menace than Lincoln feared. They were able to neither defeat him through constitutional processes nor overturn the policies—conscription, emancipation, and militarism—they so hated. Although they discouraged army recruitment, and their bellicose statements embarrassed the government, few truly seditious actions can be proven. Whether the opposition’s ineffectiveness was due to Lincoln’s restrictions or the threat was never that grave to begin with is difficult to gauge from the available sources. Those studying the Copperheads closely have concluded, however, that most of their activities were within the boundaries of a loyal minority, and that they acted as an important guardian of civil liberties during the war. Although he made some sporadic efforts to have meaningful dialogue with his opponents, Lincoln never found a way to interact effectively with them, and it is hard to know exactly what he so feared. He undoubtedly wanted to avoid any further fissures in Northern unity, for he saw that the Union might founder as much from internal disruption as from the defiance of the South. But even this does not explain Lincoln’s nervous reaction. Perhaps his sensitivity to criticism was pricked, the same vulnerability that caused him to don the armor of japery. Perhaps it was his ambitious ego that balked at the censure. If so, it is all the more interesting because he was a partisan’s partisan, and many of his nemeses were acting from his own political script, furthering their party, and stumping for votes.⁸⁶

The tragedy was that the one thing that could have broken the opposition and galvanized the country was swift military victory. Repression of dissent, mandatory conscription, and even Lincoln’s inspiring rhetoric could not rally the North as battlefield success would have. The Confederate government understood this: it sustained a remarkable degree of cohesion, until the rebel army’s increasing defeats left its public bewildered and dispirited. But military command was not Lincoln’s genius, and decisive victory was exactly what he could not give the country, no matter how badly he wanted it. The President was constantly reminded of this from 1861 on: his mailbag brought the message from well-wishers as well as detractors. A three-year veteran warned that the nation was on the verge of a civil crisis which was directly linked to “the great necessity of properly guiding our military operations.” “I am sorry to say,” he continued, “we have much . . . to complain of from lack of competency.” One Democrat who tried to work with Lincoln, Maryland’s Reverdy Johnson, observed that the President’s oppressive policies could not counter the “lack of a successful result of the contest while he is commander in chief of the army and navy. . . . This must be arrested, or the country will be ruined.” Even personal friends shook their heads. The Democrats were gaining points, a Patent Office examiner named Horatio Nelson Taft wrote in his diary, but that did not “indicate disloyalty to the Union, it is more like an expression of want of confidence in . . . those in power for their inefficiency and blunders. A few Victories will put the matter all right.” From Bull Run on, Lincoln confronted the nation’s sinking morale, seemingly helpless to reverse it by the one measure that would have silenced the criticism.⁸⁷

Perhaps it was because he could make so few inroads against the Copperheads that he laughed heartily at them through the inspired works of the humorists. It was a kind of gratifying retribution to belittle them, to cast them down in hilarious scorn, when sterner measures failed. It allowed the President a sense of moral superiority, by validating his belief that the war was being prosecuted for ends larger than an Orpheus C. Kerr could ever appreciate. And it gave Lincoln something more. He could so easily have been a citizen of the Confederit X. Roads; he had, indeed, been born to that world. A letter sent to Lincoln in 1864 by a kinsman, asking in muddled Nasby-esque syntax “whot is to cunm,” painfully points out the semiliterate life he might have led. Yet he had escaped, and by his own exertions. Despite his rustic mannerisms, Abraham Lincoln no longer reflected the provincialism, or bigotry, of the susceptible masses. Awkward and crude he might be, but he was no yokel. There was satisfaction in that—and justifiably so.⁸⁸

V

A few weeks after Lincoln’s death, the New York World published a mournful article entitled “The Empty White House.” The piece is remarkable for a number of reasons. The World was one of the most critical news media during the Lincoln administration. Its editor, Manton Marble, had not balked at fabricating stories or writing editorials that were harmful to the Union cause or to the President. One fellow journalist termed Marble the “most malignant, the most brutal, the most false and scurrilous of all the assailants of the President and of the Republican party.” (It was Marble who had embellished the hurtful story of ribald songs being sung over the graves at Antietam.) However, the letter filed from Washington on May 14, 1865, that Marble printed, spoke of Lincoln in sorrowful language, casting the country’s loss in tragic terms. It was a complete reversal for the journal, and indicative of the radical reshuffling of opinion that followed the assassination. The World’s candid assessment of Lincoln’s performance would no longer sell, and even Marble’s heart was not cold enough to dissect the previous four years or speculate on the late president’s chances for success at reconstruction. No longer catering to a partisan audience, and caught up in the national trauma of war and public murder, Marble, like so many others, played to the sentimentality of the moment, and did an about-face.⁸⁹

One of the war’s leading reporters, George Alfred Townsend, had filed the letter with the New York World after wandering with John Hay through the somber Executive Mansion. Mary Lincoln had not yet left the premises, but the family’s belongings were being sorted and packed. “They are taking away Mr. Lincoln’s private effects,” Townsend wrote, as he watched young Tad Lincoln run through the rooms, dressed in mourning, “and the emptiness of the place, on this sunny Sunday, revives that feeling of desolation from which the land has scarce recovered.” Entering Lincoln’s office, he noted battle maps still pinned to the wall, campaign markings scribbled on them. Untidy mounds of paper covered every surface; old law books jammed the shelves. Townsend noticed something else and, going to a table, picked up some dog-eared copies of Artemus Ward and Orpheus C. Kerr. They were apparently untouched since Lincoln left the room for an evening of merriment at Ford’s Theater. Hay remarked how the satirists had cheered up the President between moments of labor. “Their tenure here,” wrote Townsend, “bears out the popular verdict of his partiality for a good joke.”

They walked to the window and looked out over scenes Lincoln had viewed when contemplating the division of the nation: the silvery gash of the Potomac, slicing North from South; Arlington, Robert E. Lee’s home, so close, yet a world away in the Virginia hills; the Capitol, newly crowned with a sculpture of “Armed Freedom.” Then Hay and Townsend gazed down at the South Lawn’s grassy expanse, where the little Marine bandstand that Lincoln inaugurated still stood. The flag flying there had all its stars and stripes intact now, but it drooped, as in mourning. The clumsy moment in 1861 was long forgotten; left behind were myriad other stories, humorous and heartbreaking, and a chill foreboding that the nation must brace for new challenges. As in 1861, the flag’s meaning floated in limbo. It no long radiated a simple pride of place nor waved with the excited huzzahs of victory. Now it was the pity of war that was caught in the downcast folds—the pity of 750,000 dirges echoing from once merry bandstands—and of a leader slain while laughing at a farce.⁹⁰