The National Joker

by Thompson, Todd Nathan;

  Artists have relied upon devils and allusions to Satan to represent evil throughout history. On one level, then, in the images and writings discussed above, the satirists deployed Satan and Satanism to imply that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is an evil act. But satanic associations in images also attempt to create “objectifications of the shame that is wished or visited upon the figures portrayed.”11 Though these cartoons and print satires certainly could not make Lincoln feel shame for his actions, they did enact a symbolic moral judgment of those actions for their readers. But in reducing Lincoln to a symbol of evil, these satires and caricatures fail to engage with the materials of Lincoln’s life, work, and looks. Rather, they scapegoat Lincoln as an inscrutable, supernatural actor for a policy with which they do not agree.

  Another typical strategy of Confederate cartoonists and Copperhead satirists is to racialize Lincoln as a “Black Republican.” Before Lincoln’s inauguration, this charge was levied at all Republicans resisting the spread of slavery into new territories, instead of Lincoln, in particular. In the 1858 U.S. Senate campaign debates, Stephen A. Douglas had labeled Lincoln a “Black Republican” in an obvious race-baiting ploy. Lincoln was well aware of these criticisms and even addressed them directly in his Cooper Union speech in February 1860. In this speech, Lincoln, speaking directly to “the Southern people,” “if they would listen—as I suppose they will not,” preemptively put epithets in their mouths: “[W]hen you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the best as, no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to ‘Black Republicans.’ In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of ‘Black Republicanism’ as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite—license, so to speak—among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all.” With this address, Lincoln couched an attack on Southerners in the form of a complaint against their unfair attacks on Republicans. This allowed him to engage in ridicule while claiming to be above the fray, even as he mocked Southern speech by referring to popular sovereignty as “the ‘gur-reat pur-rinciple.’”12 He could do so with more freedom because before receiving the Republican nomination, he was not yet the party’s standard bearer and, therefore, not its symbolic embodiment.

  But once thrust into the national spotlight, Lincoln came to be seen as the personification of “Black Republicanism,” and Southerners and Copperheads responded with satires that attacked more through racist paranoia than wit or policy critique. Even physical descriptions of Lincoln in Southern newspapers and magazines tend to racialize him as black. For instance, in 1860 the Charleston (SC) Mercury described Lincoln as follows: “A horrid looking wretch he is, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man, a creature ‘fit evidently for petty treason, small strategems and all sorts of spoils.’ He is a lank-sided Yankee of the uncomliest visage, and of the dirtiest complexion. Faugh! after him what decent white man would be President?”13 In this passage, Lincoln’s homeliness is given a racial cast. As the examples above yoke together a class-based critique of Lincoln as a lout with charges of diabolism, so, too, did depictions of Lincoln that insinuated blackness (“sooty,” “dirtiest complexion”) combine with markers of lower-class status (“a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man”).

  Some treatments of Lincoln as a “Black Republican” were fairly innocuous. The Andrew Adderup joke book Lincolniana, or the Humors of Uncle Abe (1864), published by Feeks, begins with the story “An Involuntary Black Republican,” about a mischievous boyhood Lincoln who plays a trick wherein an ink bottle pours on his schoolmaster, “deluging the bald head in a shower of Stygian blackness” (fig. 4.7). “Lincoln” in the joke labels the incident as “the first black Republican ever made in Kentuck.” The joke pivots mostly on a depoliticizing pun that redefines the “making” of “black Republicans” as a literal darkening process through ink, though it does touch on Lincoln’s storytelling and hints at fears of amalgamation, especially in the punch line, where Lincoln says that “the conversion was too sudden” because the schoolmaster “afterwards married a widow and——twelve negroes.”14

  Most satires on Lincoln that relied on race-baiting were, of course, more rancorous. Southwestern humorists, for, example, mocked Lincoln’s appearance to excoriate his racial attitudes. Both George Washington Harris’s “Sut Lovingood” and Charles H. Smith’s “Bill Arp” characters were semi-literate backwoods rubes, who, in their newspaper epistles, addressed Lincoln as one of their own. In a series of pieces in the Nashville (TN) Union and American between February 28 and March 5, 1861, Harris unfolds a narrative in which Sut helps Lincoln evade assassins on his trip to Washington, D.C., for the presidential inaugural. Sut describes Lincoln, “Ove all the durned skeery lookin ole cusses fur a president ever I seed, he am decidedly the durndest. He looks like a yaller ladder with half the rungs knocked out.” Again, Lincoln is described as exceedingly ugly and as “yaller” vaguely racialized. When Sut, trying to save Lincoln from murderers, asks if Lincoln understands “southern law,” Lincoln responds, “Only es it tetches niggers.” Lincoln later tells Sut, “You wer right tu tell him [a stranger Sut had been talking with] that I warn’t smart, ur I woudent be here in sich imedjut danger, jis fur my party an a pack ove durned niggers.”15 By rendering Lincoln’s speech through Sut’s dialect, Harris already makes it appear that Lincoln “warn’t smart” and through the content of their exchange connects that stupidity to a political obsession with “durned niggers.” In this way Harris uses southwestern humor, to which Lincoln often had recourse in political situations, against him. In fact, Harris’s strategy of demeaning Lincoln by bringing him down to Sut’s social and intellectual level mirrors the “little big man” tactic that Lincoln used throughout his political career.

  Similar use of southwestern humor to damn Lincoln for his racial politics can be seen in Smith’s creation Bill Arp, whose “letters to Lincoln” were published in the Rome, Georgia, paper Southern Confederacy in April 1861, January 1862, and December 1862. Smith, like Harris, was a staunch Rebel, and his Arp letters were popular with Southern readers. One scholar of Southern humor says that Smith’s writing “was to the South what Artemus Ward’s was to the North.” Like Harris’s Sut, Smith’s Arp treats Lincoln as an equal and as a fellow humorist, but he has a bone to pick with Lincoln over the threat of emancipation. The month before the Emancipation Proclamation was to take effect, Arp wrote to Lincoln that the time

  hastens on to that eventual period which you have fixed when Africa is to be unshackled, when Niggerdom is to feel the power of your proclamation, when Uncle Tom is to change his base and evacuate his cabin, when all the emblems of darkness are to rush frantically forth into the arms of their deliverers, and with perfumed and scented gratitude embrace your Excellency and Madam Harriet Beecher Stowe! What a glorious day that is to be! What a sublime era in history! What a proud culmination and consummation and coruscation of your political hopes! After a few thousand have clasped you in their ebony arms it will be a fitting time, Mr. Lincoln, for you to lay yourself down and die. Human ambition can have no higher monument to climb. After such a work you might complete the immortal heroism of your character, by leaping from the topmost pinnacle to your glory upon the earth below.

  Arp here amuses his readers by coyly urging Lincoln to commit suicide in celebration of emancipation. As in several other satires on Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is figured as Lincoln’s abolitionist right-hand woman and, in the royal metaphor, his wife. This passage, which oozes sarcasm, equates emancipation with miscegenation (i.e., “rush frantically forth into the arms of their deliverers,” “clasped you in their ebony arms”) and fears of a black takeover of the United States (“Africa is to be unshackled”). Of course, Lincoln had addressed such connections hi
mself in a humorous fashion at a Chicago speech during his 1858 senatorial campaign: “I protest, now and forever, against that counterfeit logic which presumes that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife.”16 In making this tasteless, crowd-pleasing joke, Lincoln anticipated and preemptively defused the logic of emancipation as amalgamation that would be used against him in subsequent years.

  The 1862 print satire God Bless Abraham Lincoln: A Solemn Discourse by a Local Preacher also tried to damn Lincoln and his cohorts by playing to its audience’s racial fears. In response, like Arp’s letter, to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the pamphlet’s sustained irony offers “praise” of Lincoln for his “great work”: that of “changing the Black Moor, African, or Negro, vulgarly called, into white men.” According to the preacher, “laws to that effect have recently been ordained”; he ironically lauds “the practicability of turning the Blacks into Whites, and vice versa Whites into Blacks.” In the odd, science-fiction-worthy scenario that follows, the preacher explains that white men will be killed and white women forced to procreate with black men.

  All capable of bearing arms or matrimony are either to be slain by the edge of the sword or rendered unfit for service. This being the case, the White skin females marriageable or widowed will be innumerable. The Male Blacks or Ethiopians, having passed through the war unscathed, and well fed, must have allotted to each as many white females as Mrs. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE and the Strong-minded Women of the East, sitting in Faneuil Hall, as a Disposing Congress, of which Mrs. Stowe will be Speaker, may judge him competent to manage. Those of the white females who prove fastidious and who will not take to the Ethiopian Skins, are to be flung out, in BUTLER FASHION, for the use of the unbridled and unbroken-in Black Ourang-Outangs, to deal with them according to their natural instincts. At the same time, the Ethiopian females must be restrained, under penalty of death, from all intercourse with those of their own color. . . . They are to be assorted and classified; those found of proper age and health are to be reserved for white men.17

  Like Arp’s letter, this “sermon” sets up Lincoln and Stowe as the faces and agents of abolitionism. It, too, sarcastically lauds Lincoln and Stowe as the nation’s primary emancipators, along with General Benjamin “Beast” Butler. Butler earned this nickname in 1862 for his ironhanded measures as military governor of New Orleans, where he also instituted a controversial emancipation policy. “Butler fashion” likely refers to his 1862 Order No. 28, which proclaimed that any woman of New Orleans found insulting a Union soldier or officer “shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.”18 The pamphlet mirrors Arp’s epistle in its fears of emancipation as miscegenation, described here as a legally enforced dictum of Lincoln’s diabolical doings. The sermon moves on to imagine a litany of disastrous consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation: visions of a dystopia in which freed African Americans ravage the land, “Ships lie rotting at the wharves. . . . The Banks are closed and broken. . . . The Money Changers find their tables overthrown, and their occupation gone. . . . The Farmers find their Fields laid waste, Dwellings and Barns demolished.” Indeed, the pamphlet concludes in a jeremiad against Lincoln as the abolitionist extraordinaire: “Finally, let Hell open wide its Jaws, and jubilant of the works of Abolitionism, belch forth flames and lightening, and, in derision of the Most High, laugh out—in Thunders that will shake the earth and startle the ear of Heaven—GOD BLESS ABRAHAM LINCOLN!”19 This final summation joins the Lincoln-as-Satan trope with the “black Republican” trope to offer a fantastic conspiracy theory of an apocalyptic postemancipation nation.

  The Lincoln Catechism offers a similarly paranoid vision of a racially amalgamated future in America. In advertising in the front and back matter for other Feeks publications, the pamphlet is advertised as The Lincoln (Negro) Catechism, highlighting its racial focus, and the pamphlet’s cover features a caricature of a smiling African American. The contents of this fifty-page pamphlet are no less subtle.

  IV.

  What is a President?

  A general agent for negroes.

  V.

  What is Congress?

  A body organized for the purpose of taxing the people to buy negroes, and to make laws to protect the President from being punished for his crimes.

  VI.

  What is an army?

  A provost guard, to arrest white men, and set negroes free.

  . . .

  XV.

  What is the meaning of the word “patriot?”

  A man who loves his country less, and the negro more.

  The pamphlet’s title situates Lincoln as its subject and sets him up at the beginning through his title “Abraham Africanus the First,” and the job description, “general agent for negroes,” as behind the conspiracies elucidated thereafter. The catechism form allows the author to juxtapose banal questions (i.e., “What is a President?” “What is a Congress?” “What is an army?” “What is a loyal league?”) with shocking answers that act as punch lines and through their consistent invocation of “negroes” drive home the pamphlet’s paranoid point.

  “Lesson the Third” in The Lincoln Catechism shifts to a parody of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments of “loyal leaguers”—referring to clubs established during the war to promote the Union and support the war effort—include the following:

  Thou shalt have no other God but the negro.

  Thou shalt make an image of a negro, and place it on the Capitol as the type of the new American man.

  Thou shalt swear that the negro shall be the equal of the white man. . . .

  Thou mayest commit adultery—with the contraband.

  Thou shalt steal—everything that belongeth to a slaveholder.

  Here the invocation of biblical language, such as “Thou shalt” and “belongeth,” is meant to make Lincoln’s wartime actions appear blasphemous as well as unconstitutional, especially because most of the Ten Commandments are inverted to make biblical wrongs of Lincolnian rights (e.g., “Thou shalt make an image,” “Thou shalt swear,” “Thou mayest commit adultery,” “Thou shalt steal”).20

  “Lesson the Ninth” asks,

  “Does the Republican party intend to change the name of the United States?”

  “It does.”

  “What do they intend to call it?”

  “New Africa.”21

  This reversal plays on Americans’ postcolonial anxieties by imagining an ascendant imperial power as itself the object of racial imperialism. It also recalls God Bless Abraham Lincoln, which similarly relocates the center of the American empire to “St. Domingo and Liberia.”22 But the ludicrousness of the entelechy of “Lesson the Ninth”—that ending slavery will somehow turn America into an African colony—denied it serious polemical value with voters during election season. It was designed less to convince than to stir up fear and resentment.

  Southern visual caricatures of Lincoln were no more understated. For example, a sketch from Richmond animalizes Lincoln in order to associate him with a racial slur (fig. 4.8). Specifically, Lincoln is depicted as a monkey—a common stereotype levied at African Americans—who celebrates the Emancipation Proclamation with a tiny, dancing slave. The racist paranoia that motivated these satires targets Lincoln as the official incarnation of its fears, but the race-baiting that constitutes the billingsgate in no way touches the actual Lincoln.23 All of these attacks on Lincoln operate through preposterous vitriol instead of critiques rooted in Lincoln’s actual policy, history, character, or even physical appearance; as such, while they could certainly amuse or frighten Lincoln haters or even readers desirous of a harmless laugh, they likely would not succeed at reexamining the dominant Lincoln symbols or narrative in a new light.

  The reach and effect of these cartoon and print satires in the 1860s are unclear. Confederate caricatures were certainly much less plentiful than their Northern counterparts. Volck, the pro-Confederacy artist most discussed
by modern scholars, is a case in point. He was forced into underground distribution of his prints in small numbers, and his influence was, thus, limited to a local audience of like-minded subscribers. His works likely went unseen in the seceded states during the war and, as such, had little to no effect on the Confederate war effort. So, while Volck is considered the most recognizable of Confederate caricaturists today, his fame arose after the war, due to a recovery of his works thirty years after the war ended.24