During the 1852 presidential campaign, Lincoln again found himself in the now familiar position of demeaning the military service of a Democratic candidate, this time Franklin Pierce, and military service, in general, as a qualification for elected office while promoting a U.S.-Mexico War general, this time Winfield Scott, for the presidency. In a speech to the Springfield (Illinois) Scott Club, Lincoln responded to charges Stephen A. Douglas made against Scott. Lincoln noted that Douglas, in his speech, “runs a tilt at Gen. Scott as a military politician, commencing with the interrogatory ‘Why has the whig party forgotten with an oblivion so complete all that it once said about military politicians?’ I retort the question, and ask, why has the democratic party forgotten with an oblivion so complete all that it once said about military politicians?” Here, much like in his 1848 response on the House floor to a similar Democratic barb, Lincoln did not deny Douglas’s charge; he merely reversed it to sanction his own ensuing burlesque. In the speech that followed, Lincoln accused Democrats of employing the very tactic of demeaning military service that he had used so comically in 1848 and, indeed, continued to use in this very speech. Lincoln went on to paint as “ludicrous” a biographical scene intended to depict Pierce’s heroism and arrived at the sarcastic conclusion that Pierce supporters had “a pertinacious purpose to ‘pile up’ the ridiculous. This explains the new plan or system of tactics adopted by the democracy. It is to ridicule and burlesque the whole military character out of credit; and this [thus?] to kill Gen. Scott with vexation.” He cited as an example of this strategy “how our own ‘militia trainings’ have been ‘laughed to death’ by fantastic parades and caricatures upon them.” In painting a verbal picture of such a militia parade and then transferring that ridicule to Pierce, Lincoln kept the tone light while engaging more forcefully in the tactic of travestying military service, which he had, of course, just pilloried Democrats for doing. He milked such scenes for comic and political effect while laying the responsibility for disrespectful rhetoric at the feet of his political opponents. Burlesques of militia drills had long been a favorite trope of southwestern humor, from Oliver Prince’s 1807 “Militia Drill” to Augustus Longstreet’s 1835 Georgia Scenes to William Tappan Thompson’s third Major Jones letter.30 Lincoln’s auditors’ familiarity with such travesties allowed him to identify Pierce as a comic character in Lincoln’s own update of the traditional militia sketch. Through such satiric deflection, Lincoln questioned the political usefulness of military heroism without the attendant devaluing of the experience of the Whig generals whose candidacies he sought to support.
Satiric Flattery in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates
In his famous 1858 senatorial campaign debates with Douglas, Lincoln consistently used satiric modesty to differentiate himself from his more renowned opponent, playing off Douglas’s fame and his own relative political insignificance to ingratiate himself with his hearers. These audiences—both in person and through print—were certainly large. In addition to the huge crowds that attended the debates, coverage by shorthand reporters, wire services, and magazines, such as Harper’s, ensured a national audience. When Lincoln collected his and Douglas’s speeches in book form as Political Debates, it sold thirty thousand copies within a few months.31
Lincoln’s use of false modesty in the 1858 debates was merely a continuation of a tactic that he had been deploying against Douglas for years. As early as 1852, in his Springfield Scott Club speech, Lincoln noted his and Douglas’s shared political history and juxtaposed U.S. Senator Douglas’s status as a rising star in the Democratic Party to the shortcomings of his own political career as a one-time congressman. He said, “I was reminded of old times—of the times when Judge Douglas was not so much greater man than all the rest of us, as he now is.” In attaching to Douglas the sarcastic honorific of “Judge,” Lincoln called attention to how Douglas had attained that title as a result of his self-serving drive to expand the Illinois Supreme Court. In this way, Lincoln—certainly, not for the last time—simultaneously praised and mocked Douglas, in this case by giving him a title that his audience would see as unjustified or tainted. Upon resuming his speech at the club’s next meeting, Lincoln again started by building up Douglas, this time in apologizing to the audience for taking as his text a Douglas speech, having learned that a previous speaker discoursed on the same subject. In his mock apology, Lincoln claimed, “I dislike the appearance of unfairness of two attacking one. After all, however, as the Judge is a giant, and Edwards [Ninian W. Edwards, the previous Whig speaker] and I are but common mortals, it may not be very unfair.” In this instance, Lincoln purported to take literally Douglas’s nickname, “the little giant,” a moniker that Douglas had already held for almost twenty years, in order to justify attacking him. Later in this speech, Lincoln recurred to this literalization of Douglas’s nickname in leveling a charge that Douglas had been miscalculating or misrepresenting government expenditures in his attacks on Whigs. After questioning Douglas’s numbers, Lincoln deadpanned, “Judge Douglas is only mistaken about twenty five millions of dollars—a mere trifle for a giant!”32 Having earlier set up Douglas as an actual giant, Lincoln used understatement in jokes about scale in order to question Douglas’s integrity. Lincoln began both sections of this speech by rhetorically raising Douglas to an elevated position and then spent the rest of his speech undercutting the basis for that elevation.
In an October 16, 1854, Peoria, Illinois, speech against the Nebraska Act, Lincoln continued this approach. He announced that he would respond at seven o’clock to a speech that Douglas had given, thus offering the audience a chance to eat dinner and return. In explaining that Douglas would then have an hour to reply to his speech, Lincoln joked that his motives for agreeing to allow “one of his high reputation and known ability” to rebut his remarks were “not wholly unselfish; for I suspected if it were understood, that the Judge was entirely done, you democrats would leave, and not hear me; but by giving him the close, I felt confident you would stay for the fun of hearing him skin me.”33 In this instance Lincoln deprecated his own abilities in order to display his good humor to his hearers, presenting himself as human, approachable, and appropriately deferential. Additionally, by offering himself as a target—a sacrifice to be skinned—Lincoln lowered the audience’s expectations of his speech. He situated himself as an entertaining antithesis instead of as a debate-worthy equal. But in doing so he also drew attention to himself (in this case, literally by convincing the audience to stay) in a novel and engaging way.
From this position of ostensible inferiority, Lincoln used his embellished flattery of Douglas to tear him down. As Lincoln had previously done with the concept and symbols of heroism in his attack on Cass, he consistently described Douglas as a “great man” and then redefined “greatness” negatively. In this way Lincoln used Douglas’s fame against him, specifically by lauding Douglas’s prominence and then implying that one could not sustain such a position without compromising his principles. In an 1856 speech in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for example, Lincoln quipped, “Douglas is a great man—at keeping from answering questions he don’t want to answer.”34
By 1858 Lincoln developed his redefinition of greatness into a full-blown campaign strategy. For instance, in accepting the Republican nomination to run against Douglas for a U.S. Senate seat, Lincoln in his House Divided speech on June 16, 1858, rallied the audience against Douglas and his Kansas-Nebraska Act at the Republican state convention: “They remind us that he is a very great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones. Let this be granted. But ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion.’ Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion for this work, is at least a caged and toothless one.”35 Lincoln made it others (“they”) who called Douglas a great man and then transformed that greatness into a position of impotence (“caged and toothless” lion) inferior to the position of the “small” men and “living dog” Republicans.
In addressing a more politically heterogeneous group at their July 16, 1858, de
bate in Springfield, Lincoln himself (instead of a distanced and othering “they”) contrasted Douglas’s greatness to Lincoln’s own obscurity so as to juxtapose the political sycophantism of Democratic politics and the ethics of the Republican campaign and its candidate. Lincoln claimed, “Senator Douglas is of world wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party, or who have been of his party for years past, have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, postoffices, landoffices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands. [Great laughter.]” Aside from the verbal caricature of Douglas’s visage, this formulation does not expressly attack Douglas but rather the hangers-on that, Lincoln implies, necessarily come along with such fame, experience, and expectations of further achievements. Lincoln then provided an antithetical portrait of his own political circumstances: “On the contrary nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank, face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out. [Tremendous cheering and laughter.]” Lincoln self-effacingly invoked the difference between his “poor, lean, lank, face” and Douglas’s “round” face—to Lincoln’s own advantage, of course. Lacking pedigree and pageantry, Lincoln and the Republicans could claim that they had “to fight this battle upon principle, and upon principle alone.”36 Through satire that targeted Douglas, Douglas’s followers, and himself, Lincoln succeeded in portraying himself and his party as righteous underdogs battling the well-oiled machinery of purely political and, thus, necessarily amoral power.
Lincoln used a similar rhetorical ploy in the Ottawa, Illinois, debate on August 21, 1858, where he lamented the fact that Douglas had questioned Lincoln’s truthfulness in implying a conspiracy between Douglas’s popular sovereignty legislation and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling. Lincoln first pretended to be flattered with some complimentary language Douglas had used to describe him even after he had leveled his conspiracy charge in an earlier debate. Referring to “my friend, Judge Douglas,” Lincoln noted that Douglas “complimented me as being a ‘kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman.’ . . . Then, as the Judge had complimented me with these pleasant titles, (I must confess to my weakness,) I was a little ‘taken,’ [laughter] for it came from a great man. I was not very much accustomed to flattery, and it came the sweeter to me. I was rather like the Hoosier, with the gingerbread, when he said he reckoned he loved it better than any other man, and got less of it. [Roars of laughter.]” Here Lincoln once again juxtaposed, through a folksy simile, Douglas as a “great man” to himself as a star-struck fan starved for the famous man’s “flattery.” He used this juxtaposition to set up a claim of Douglas’s disingenuousness: “As the judge had so flattered me, I could not make up my mind that he meant to deal unfairly with me.” But, of course, Lincoln told the crowd, he was mistaken. From here he built toward an angrier tone: “It is fortunate for me that I can keep as good-humored as I do, when the Judge acknowledges that he has been trying to make a question of veracity with me. I know the Judge is a great man, while I am only a small man, but I feel that I have got him. [Tremendous cheering.] I demur to that plea.”37 The audience, of course, recognized the humor of Lincoln’s visual irony in presenting himself as a “small man” and Douglas as a “great man,” since the discrepancy between their heights—Lincoln was a foot taller—would be readily and ludicrously apparent when they appeared onstage together. But Lincoln also contrasted Douglas’s greatness to his own seeming insignificance to claim the justness of his cause. In spite of Douglas’s fame, Lincoln had “got him” and now “demur[red]” not to Douglas but to his own charge and its justification. In this speech and others, Lincoln’s constant references to Douglas’s “greatness” offered modest deference to Douglas’s reputation while questioning the basis of that reputation and of the worth of “greatness” as incarnated in Douglas.
This satiric treatment of Douglas’s “superiority” was not limited to oral debate. Lincoln also parodied the political theater of Douglas’s arrivals at the debates, which was full of over-the-top pomp and circumstance. For example, Douglas traveled to the Ottawa grounds in a horse-drawn carriage, with an attendant band, supporters waving banners, and cannons booming. Lincoln, who deplored such pageantry, mocked it heavily. Of Douglas’s cannons, he had said previously, “There is a passage, I think, in the Book of the Koran, which reads: ‘To him that bloweth not his own horn—to such a man it is forever decreed that . . . his horn shall not be blowe-ed!’” At another time he fiddled with a harmonica and claimed that was his band. And, most publicly, he rode to the Freeport, Illinois, debate, August 27, 1858, in a covered wagon in a burlesque of the pageantry of Douglas’s arrival in a coach. An offended Douglas, seeing this display, insisted on walking to the debate.38
In both his verbal and visual satires of Douglas, then, Lincoln took advantage of the multivalence of status symbols by reversing their affective associations. Lincoln successfully turned the emblems of prestige, greatness, and accomplishment against Douglas’s deployment of them as his qualifications for office. Lincoln built Douglas up as “great” and then undermined reverence for greatness while demeaning himself as a “dog” or a “small man” with a “poor, lank, lean face” but imbued those descriptions with a populism that appealed to his audiences and mapped to prevailing myths of the self-made man. In his senatorial campaign against Douglas, Lincoln’s humble self-fashioning sanctioned his good-humored jokes and stories, allowing him to present himself as a man of the people in contradistinction to the more professional and prestigious Douglas. The press, anyway, seemed to appreciate this approach. The St. Louis Missouri Democrat praised Lincoln on September 30, 1858, for treating “his opponent with a deference which the latter is incapable of reciprocating.” As Douglas himself complained in an interview, “Every one of his stories seems like a whack upon my back. . . . Nothing else—not any of his arguments or any of his replies to my questions—disturbs me. But when he begins to tell a story, I feel that I am to be overmatched.”39 By pretending himself to be “overmatched,” Lincoln could “overmatch” Douglas.
In an 1878 Scribner’s Monthly piece, Noah Brooks remembered Lincoln’s approach: “He admitted away his whole case, apparently, and yet, as his political opponents complained, he usually carried conviction with him.” Brooks also recalled “once meeting a choleric old Democrat striding away from an open-air meeting where Lincoln was speaking, striking the earth with his cane as he stumped along and exclaiming, ‘He’s a dangerous man, sir! a d——d dangerous man! Makes you believe what he says, in spite of yourself!’” This angry confession is a testament to the affective power of Lincoln’s rhetoric: in carefully crafting his homespun image as an honest but fallible rustic, Lincoln through his self-presentation assured his audiences that his power was truly representative, of the people instead of above them. Bray observes what he calls “the paradox of satire” in “the democratic logos of antebellum western America,” which is “that it both levels and distinguishes individuals. In the name of the people demagogues must be ‘taken down,’ yet ‘the people’ demand that only the best, the most accomplished logicians, speak in their name.”40 The trick for Lincoln was to convince the people that he was not attempting to replace a demagogue like Douglas but to more fully “speak in their name.” He accomplished this in his self-satiric utterances by negating the positive content of symbols of heroism and greatness while attaching positive political connotations to oppositional symbols of simplicity, modesty, and rusticity.
Winning by Losing: Strategic Modesty as Presidential Tactic
Once elected to the presidency, Lincoln, though famously still enjoying a good joke, used less-satiric rhetoric in public discourse and did not engage heavily in attack politics in his official speeches. Part of this, of course, has very much to do with the dignity of the office as wel
l as with Lincoln’s attempt to unite the country during the Civil War. The solemnity of most occasions for his speeches often precluded the use of humor and vitriol. In proclaiming a national fast day, for example, Lincoln did not crack jokes or insult the South (though his political enemies certainly implied that he did). Lincoln as president was hardly able to engage in “little big man” political rhetoric; coming from the holder of the highest elected office in the country, such tactics would come off as disingenuous at best, weak or desperate at worst. Tactics, after all, are the “art of the weak” precisely because “power is bound by its very visibility.”41
Even though Lincoln stood at the apex of political power as President of the United States, he still managed to engage in tactics somewhat analogous to the “little big man” strategy by abjuring authority in order to win by losing. Two examples of behind-the-scenes political maneuvering are Lincoln’s handling of the Fort Sumter crisis in 1861 and of Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase’s presidential ambitions. One of the first pieces of business on Lincoln’s desk as president was a March 5, 1861, note informing him that troops stationed at Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor were running low on supplies and would have to give up the fort or starve within six weeks. Lincoln did not surrender the fort to, and, thus, recognize the power of, the Confederacy, as this would create a public-opinion disaster demoralizing to Northern morale. Nor did he forcefully resupply the fort with food, arms, and reinforcements, a move that would offend not-yet-seceded Border States and some Northerners who demanded that the government avoid involving itself in acts of forceful coercion of seceded states. Rather, Lincoln chose the middle ground. He informed South Carolina governor Francis Wilkinson Pickens that he would attempt to peacefully resupply the fort with provisions only.
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