The National Joker

by Thompson, Todd Nathan;

  “Cooperation,” from the April 12, 1862, Vanity Fair, works in much the same way (fig. 3.8). The title is a pun on the occupation of “cooper,” and the image depicts Lincoln as a cooper and the Union as a tub. With the help of an assistant in a dashing Zouave uniform (adapted from an elite battalion of French soldiers by various volunteer units from both the Union and the Confederacy), Lincoln engages in the tactile physical labor of saving the Union. His sleeves are again rolled up as he gets down to work.31

  All of these examples picture political and military work as manual labor, thus offering Lincoln’s working-class background as a fitting résumé for national challenges. These cartoons are remarkably similar in the ways in which they depict a hardworking Lincoln engaging in a manual-labor task that comes to represent his national political efforts. This derives, in part, from the ease of making physically representable actions of labor serve as visual shorthand for cartoonists. Lincoln’s biography and self-presentation made the use of such shorthand entirely plausible and logical. Lincoln’s image was a perfect fit with the emergent medium of political cartoons.

  The benefits of such images seem to have been self-sustaining. In an 1864 pamphlet, A Workingman’s Reasons for the Re-Election of Abraham Lincoln, the anonymous author appeals to the (by this time) well-established notion that “Abraham Lincoln is in the strictest sense of the phrase a man of the people.” In making this point, the author references popular images of Lincoln in circulation: “When you see him in the pictorials of the day with sleeves tucked up to his elbows, and axe in hand, or floating down some Western stream on a raft of lumber, it is no partizan fancy sketch designed to take the eye, and secure the votes of workingmen, but a simple reality of his early life. He has been placed in your circumstances. He has felt your necessities.”32 The author’s reference to “pictorials of the day,” presumably both serious portraits and satiric caricatures, hints at both their currency in popular culture and their influence on readers. In his eulogy of Lincoln, James Russell Lowell expresses similar sentiments in more elevated diction: “Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-edged process of his thought as it goes along, yet arriving at his conclusions with an honest kind of every-day logic, he is so eminently our representative man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people were listening to their own thinking aloud.”33 Both the pamphlet and Lowell’s eulogy connect Lincoln’s greatness to his representation of the common, working American people.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe, famous author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the immensely popular and controversial novel written in response to the Fugitive Slave Law and credited with ratcheting up sectional tensions that led to secession and the Civil War, similarly eulogizes President Lincoln more in terms of his laboring past than his presidential greatness. Or, rather, like Lincoln, she promulgates the myth of the self-made man by figuring these two seemingly different subject positions, laborer and president, as appropriately united in the person of Lincoln. In her 1868 book Men of Our Times, or Leading Patriots of the Day, she claims, “Abraham Lincoln was in the strictest sense a man of the working classes. All his advantages and abilities were those of a man of the working classes, all his disadvantages and disabilities those of the working classes, and his position at the head of one of the most powerful nations of the earth was a sign to all who live by labor, that their day is coming. Lincoln was born to the inheritance of hard work, as truly as the poorest laborer’s son that digs in our fields.”34 Stowe’s brother Henry Ward Beecher, a clergyman, lecturer, and Lincoln supporter who served as an agent rallying support for the Union cause in Europe and was hired by the National Union Committee to speak in the final days of the 1864 campaign, was also one of the main forces behind the antebellum mythos of the self-made man. As such, Harriet Beecher Stowe certainly understood the power of the rhetoric that she deployed in this passage. For her, even Lincoln’s faults were emblematic, class-based, and “American.” After his death, then, Lincoln became even more central to the myth of self-making, as he came to represent not just a particular kind of frontier grit but, in a reunited country now without chattel slavery, a newly national sense of the ideal citizen as self-made.

  The postbellum emphasis on the mythology of self-making can be seen on the July 8, 1865, cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (fig. 3.9).35 L. Hurz’s drawing “Log Cabin Built by President Lincoln in Kentucky” is five years removed from the log-cabin campaign and a little over two months after Lincoln’s death. Lincoln had lived in the White House for a little over four years, had achieved greatness, had put his poor Kentucky origins in the distant past, and had rewritten his life story from the “short and simple annals of the poor” to a narrative of diplomatic skill and ultimate self-sacrifice.36 But in keeping his memory alive, the press increasingly harked back to his humble beginnings, thus cementing the legend of Lincoln that he himself helped to create.

  It seems, then, that Lincoln’s real-life circumstances and political self-presentation influenced visual depictions of him and that, in turn, influenced the public by reminding them of his connection to the people and further instantiating his modest, self-satiric, homespun image. Lincoln’s self-mocking stories and consciously humble biography provided a wealth of material for cartoonists to work with, and in this sense, Lincoln indirectly guided their treatments of him. The effect of the proliferation of “workingman” caricatures of Lincoln was to enhance further his homey, rail-splitter image and to inspire others’ verbal and written depictions of him, which slightly altered Lincoln’s image (in the case of A Workingman’s Reasons, by pushing it further in the direction of mythology) and again inspired updated visual representations. In the new age of the illustrated newspaper, these cycles of visual images influencing textual depictions and vice versa became advantageously self-perpetuating.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Abraham Africanus the First”: The Limits of Preemptive Self-Satire

  The revilings which have been shouted from Richmond,—the cries of “Ape,” “Monster,” “Imbecile,”—revilings repeated by the low ministers of faction at the North,—are but the ribaldry in which the offscourings of an aristocracy based upon the denial of human rights display their hatred of those principles of democracy of which Mr. Lincoln is the worthy representative.

  —Charles Eliot Norton, 1865

  In his first American political cartoon, Thomas Nast captures the difference between Northern and Southern images of Lincoln during the secession crisis. The first panel of the drawing “President Lincoln’s Inaugural” in the March 23, 1861, New York Illustrated News depicts the Northern take on Lincoln’s inauguration: the president, gendered female in a dress, probably to evoke Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, holds a palm branch in his right hand and scales of justice in his left, with the word “Peace” in the background (fig. 4.1). The second panel imagines the Southern reaction through the caption, “This is the way the South receives it”; Lincoln, teeth gritted and wearing Roman war garb, brandishes a sword and holds his foot atop his enemy, with the word “War” in the background.1

  This image makes clear the limited sphere of influence for the ameliorating effects of the Lincoln image machine. The vicious pillory that Lincoln received in the Southern press, the English press, and the more vitriolic elements of the Northern Copperhead press is well documented. A media historian summarizes such treatment: “In the Copperhead papers, and some others, the President was referred to by such epithets as ‘a slang-whanging stump speaker,’ ‘half-witted usurper,’ ‘mole-eyed,’ ‘the present turtle at the head of the government,’ ‘the head ghoul at Washington,’ and other epithets even less complimentary. . . . He was accused of all kinds of misconduct—having drawn his salary in gold bars, drunkenness, granting pardons to get votes, needless slaughter of men for the sake of victories, even treason.”2

  If Lincoln used satiric modesty to fit into prevailing myths of the self-made man and, therefore, inoculate himself from criticisms dismissing him as a back
woods boor, such a tactic would be less effective for audiences that did not share in the lionization of the American Dream. The English held a different conception of class mobility; Southerners were culturally aligned with England and largely committed to an economic system that Lincoln and others saw as antithetical to self-making; and Northern sympathizers with the Southern cause were often tied to Southern society and economy and suspicious of American westerners.

  Indeed, the myth of the self-made man was largely an American (and Northern) phenomenon. Four of the five conduct manuals studied in The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches were published in the North or East. Horatio Alger Jr., whose rags-to-riches narratives helped fuel the myth in the second half of the nineteenth century, characterizes Lincoln’s rise as a particularly American phenomenon, in his biography Abraham Lincoln, the Young Backwoods Boy, or How a Young Rail-Splitter Became President (1883). He maintains, “In England the path of promotion is more difficult, and I doubt whether any one circumstanced as Abraham Lincoln was could ever have reached a commanding position.” Though actual opportunities for social mobility among different nations are fairly equal, according to historian Irvin Wyllie, attitudes towards mobility vary greatly.

  The ideal of rising in [U.S.] society was never subjected to the continual and devastating criticism of exponents of a traditional ideal of culture as it was in England, where . . . the self-made man was one of the prime targets of such big guns as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold. The contrast between nineteenth-century English and American attitudes toward self-improvement appeared often in the comments of English travelers in America. Mrs. Trollope [Frances Trollope, British author of the 1832 travel narrative Domestic Manners of the Americans], who visited American in the 1830’s, was stupefied by the pride that leading Americans took in the fact that they were self-taught and self-made, which, as she acidly remarked, meant to her only that they were taught badly and badly made.3

  Trollope’s sarcastic diagnosis echoes the joke about Lincoln’s self-making being a “d——n bad job.” This intimates that what to Trollope and other European visitors was distasteful was to Northern Americans joke-worthy but laudable. Either way, groups of people—in the United States and abroad—who did not buy into the rhetoric of the self-made man were less likely to appreciate Lincoln’s self-presentation (much less his politics); his self-aware, preemptive satire, therefore, did not mollify such groups.

  Lincoln’s supporters often saw his detractors as anathematic to self-making and, therefore, to American egalitarian principles. To give one example, author and critic Charles Eliot Norton opined in the North American Review at the close of the Civil War that

  one great source of the mis-esteem in which he is held by many persons in the community not opposed to him as partisans, and of the attacks upon him by the misnamed Democratic party of the present day, arises from the fact that there is a large class of Americans by birth or adoption, including the larger part of the spurious Democratic party, who are not Americans in principle. They have inherited prepossessions from the past; they belong to the old world of class-privilege, of inequality, of unjust political distinctions. They breathe with difficulty the free air of the new world. Their souls are not open to the inspiring and ennobling doctrines on which the future is to be builded fair.

  Norton lumped together Northern Copperhead and Southern vitriol by describing it as initiated in Richmond and then “repeated” in the North by “low ministers of faction.” He painted these detractors as decidedly un-American—either immigrants or “not Americans in principle” particularly in their continuing dedication to class stratification. Specifically, Norton claimed, those who opposed the war effort and Lincoln, whom he described as the paragon of American-ness, did so because as “the offscourings of an aristocracy based upon the denial of human rights,” they clung to “the old world of class-privilege, of inequality.” Such citizens would, of course, be unmoved by Lincoln’s anti-aristocratic charms.4

  An anatomy of common tropes in anti-Lincoln satires produced by Southerners, the pro-Southern, Copperhead press in the North, and English humor periodicals reveals limitations to the argument posited in chapter 3 about how Lincoln mitigated satiric treatments of him through his self-satiric performance of the self-made man. All this is not to say that the Northern press, as opposed to the British press and Southern press, portrayed Lincoln in a uniformly positive light. Rather, Northerners’ investment in the concept of the self-made man allowed Lincoln some wiggle room for image amelioration through self-satiric self-fashioning in a way that attitudes in the South and in England did not abide or even recognize.

  “Black Republican”: Lincoln in the Southern and Copperhead Press

  Before and even during the 1860 election, Southern vitriol focused less on Lincoln than on the Republican Party, in general. However, when the Civil War began, Southerners scapegoated Lincoln as the personification of Northern aggression; as a result, he bore the brunt of Southern calumny. Throughout all media, including newspapers, magazines, speeches, songs, and pamphlets, Southerners labeled Lincoln as “a simpleton, a buffoon, a drunkard, a libertine, a physical coward, and a pornographic story-teller” as well as a “‘tyrant,’ a ‘fiend,’ and a ‘monster.’” Depicting Lincoln as the personification of all that was “coarse, brutal, boorish, and crude among their foes,” Southern treatments of Lincoln attempted to other him by mocking his humble origins (notably, in Kentucky) and deriding his rise to prominence.5 For instance, former South Carolina Governor John Manning complained to his wife in 1860 that the Republicans had nominated “a wretched backwoodsman, who have [sic] cleverness indeed but no cultivation.”6 In seeking to puncture Lincoln’s self-made–man image, many Southern and Copperhead satirists and caricaturists went beyond mocking him as an awkward everyman. Rather, many satiric depictions of Lincoln relied heavily on long-standing satiric tropes of target-as-Satan or target-as-racialized-other.

  These satires of Lincoln commonly went to the extreme of labeling him as devilish or demoniac. “Masks and Faces,” a woodcut image published in November 8, 1862, in the short-lived Southern Illustrated News (September 1862 to March 1865), shows Lincoln removing a face mask to reveal his true self, Satan (fig. 4.2). At his feet lies a scroll with the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the caption reads, “King Abraham before and after issuing the EXCLAMATION PROCLAMATION.”7 The implication of this unsubtle image is that the proclamation is a diabolical act preplanned by a diabolical author, who is not merely a tyrant, “King Abraham”, but, worse, evil incarnate. Similarly, Baltimore artist Adalbert Johann Volck’s engraving “Lincoln Signing the Emancipation Proclamation” depicts a devilish Lincoln with one foot atop the Constitution, and the pen with which he signs the proclamation is dipped in Satan’s inkpot (fig. 4.3). The office decorations—a hooved desk, a statue in a hangman’s mask, and a picture of the bloody slave revolt of St. Domingo, the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution—associate diabolism with emancipation.8

  Another Lincoln-as-Satan cartoon, “Abduction of the Yankee Goddess of Liberty,” appeared in the November 14, 1863, Southern Punch (fig. 4.4). This illustrated comic newspaper, which began in August 1863 but died out in 1865, featured political cartoons, jokes, war news, and anecdotes and was consistently and virulently anti-Lincoln and anti-Union. In this cartoon Lincoln, described as the “Prince of Darkness,” kidnaps the goddess of liberty and carries her to “his infernal regions.” The goddess cries, “Monster of Perdition, let me go!” Lincoln replies, “Never! You have been preaching about the Constitution too long already. I was the first to rebel against constituted authority. ‘Hell is murky!’ You go thither!”9

  In each of these examples, a proclamation that Southerners saw as defying or undermining the U.S. Constitution is visually connected to Satan’s rebellion against God’s law. Such a claim was made from shaky legal grounds, since, in Lincoln’s view, anyway, the secession that led to the war that eventually necessitated emancipation was itsel
f unconstitutional.

  Describing Lincoln either as the devil or in league with the devil was also a common trope in satires attacking Lincoln in print. For example, the 1864 Copperhead satire The Lincoln Catechism, whose cover is figure 4.5, begins, “What is the Constitution?” “A compact with hell—now obsolete.” “By whom hath the Constitution been made obsolete?” “By Abraham Africanus the first.” This work cross-references another pamphlet also printed by New York publisher J. F. Feeks in 1864, Abraham Africanus I (fig. 4.6). That pamphlet begins with a dramatic poem in which Lincoln and Satan discuss the terms of their deal for Lincoln’s soul. Lincoln reminds Satan that he had promised a “Monarchy, or at least a First Consulship.” Other parts of the genre-shifting satire (it moves from dramatic monologue to prose narrative to framed burlesque biography) portray Lincoln as a hard drinker with “a general odor of liquor pervading him” (actually, he drank very rarely) and attempt to puncture Lincoln’s self-made–man image through the fictional Lincoln’s own testimony under the spell of a mesmerist. In this unconscious state, Lincoln disavows his humble heritage, claiming instead that he is of aristocratic descent, and admits that he only ever split one rail—“and that’s the rail truth.” Abraham Africanus I, thus, works not by reinhabiting or redeploying Lincoln’s symbolic use of the self-made man but by denying the veracity of Lincoln’s use of those symbols and the value of self-making, in general. In the narrative, the devil himself is embarrassed by Lincoln’s uncouthness: when Lincoln attempts to tell him “a western story,” which he describes as “a d——m good joke,” Satan scolds, “Don’t swear. . . . Forget your old habits for once, and behave yourself while in the presence of a gentleman as a gentleman.” When Lincoln, while mesmerized, claims that he will not leave office if voted out in the 1864 election, Salmon P. Cheezey (a thinly disguised Salmon P. Chase) complains, “This comes of elevating such trash.”10 Here the pamphlet’s self-contradictory class critique of Lincoln—that is, it both denies Lincoln’s humble roots and excoriates them—is linked to his supposed diabolism. But, though the thin fictional device of the mesmerism narrative sanctions the pamphlet’s slander of Lincoln, the setup and accusations are so outlandish that they would presumably not convince readers to change their preexisting attitudes towards Lincoln.