Material shortages also account for the Confederacy’s paltry production and dissemination of cartoons and print satire during the Civil War. Much of the ink, paper, and machinery used for periodical production came from the North and was, therefore, unavailable; anyway, the majority of able-bodied artists and printmakers had been forced into military service. Most engravers and lithographers working in the publishing capitol of Richmond had to work almost entirely on official images instead of on satiric prints. In addition to a lack of equipment and manpower, many journals could not pay the exorbitant postage charged in the Confederacy. Partly for these reasons, “so called ‘Confederate caricature’ of Lincoln is a rare genre indeed.”25
Harris’s and Smith’s southwestern humor did reach a wider audience through the distribution of newspapers like the Nashville (TN) Union and American, located in a loyal Border State, and the Southern Confederacy, published deep in Confederate territory, especially when one considers the nineteenth-century culture of reprinting. There is certainly evidence of the popularity and circulation of the Arp letters. One observer remembered in 1882 that Smith’s Arp letters “were welcomed by a large circle of readers. During the war every solider in the field knew Bill Arp’s last.” A friend of Smith claimed in 1878, “I doubt if any papers ever produced a more thorough sensation than did the letters written by Major Smith during the war. It is true they had a certain local pungency that added zest and that pronounced sectional feeling inflamed their reception into a triumph.” Due to the popularity of their backcountry characters, Harris and Smith may have influenced their readers to share those characters’ views of Lincoln as a backwoods peer. However, such an association did not necessarily amount to a full denigration. This may be why these authors focused so insistently on their perceptions of Lincoln’s racial politics. For his part, in collecting his wartime Arp letters in book form as Bill Arp, So Called: A Side Show of the Southern Side of the War (1866), Smith sought to recontextualize these letters not as pro-Southern propaganda but as a historical document “worthy of preservation, as illustrative of a part of the war—as a side-show to the Southern side of it—an index to our feelings and sentiments.”26
The potential reach of Copperhead anti-Lincoln satires is more intriguing. The fact that Southern newspapers routinely borrowed and recirculated Northern satires on Lincoln shows that Copperhead satires may have had the very effects—demoralizing Northerners and giving hope and succor to Southerners—that Unionists feared.27 Feeks’s catalog, which includes The Lincoln Catechism, Abraham Africanus I, and Lincolniana, or the Humors of Uncle Abe, evinces the intentions and distribution strategies of one Copperhead publisher. According to the back matter of both Lincolniana and The Lincoln Catechism, these works were part of a series Presidential Campaign for 1864. Other titles listed and described include the following:
Book First Prophet Stephen, Son of Douglas
And many marvellous things shall come to pass in the reign of Abraham Africanus I. 12mo. Price 15 Cents, post free.
Book Second Prophet Stephen, Son of Douglas
And the wrath of King Abraham shall be kindled against the people because they love the Constitution and the laws of their fathers. Price 15 Cents, post free.
. . .
Songs and Ballads of Freedom
Inspired by the Incidents and Scenes of this present war, being the finest collection of Songs ever published. 12mo. Price 15 Cents, post free. Any of the above, single copies, 15 cents, one dozen, $1.50; one hundred, $10.
Trial of Abraham Lincoln
By the great Statesmen of the Republic, a Counsel of the Past, Spirit of the Constitution on the Bench, ABRAHAM LINCOLN a Prisoner at the Bar, his own Counsel. Single copies, 10 Cents, one dozen, $1; one hundred, $10.
The bottom of the page reads, “For sale by all Booksellers and Newsdealers. Democratic Clubs and Committees supplied on liberal terms.”28 Based on the series name, the titles and descriptions of the pamphlets, and their prices, these pieces were mass-printed and—costing between ten to fifteen cents, the same price range as the famously cheap dime novels of the 1860s—priced to move, excoriating Lincoln in hopes of influencing the 1864 presidential election. The discounts for bulk orders and the specifically mentioned price break for “Democratic Clubs and Committees” imply that the pamphlets were for dissemination at political gatherings as campaign fodder. Ridiculous and slanderous as the content was, these pamphlets may have achieved fairly wide distribution among Copperheads and helped to reaffirm the suspicions and fears of Northerners who already distrusted Lincoln and his war motives. But if Feeks wanted to appeal to immigrants and other Northern voters with a vested interest in the American myth of the self-made man, he could not print pamphlets that denigrated Lincoln’s famous self-making. Instead he denied that self-making (for example, by claiming an aristocratic lineage for Lincoln in Abraham Africanus I) and resorted to race-baiting and satanic imagery in his pillory of Lincoln and other Republicans.
“Penitent Punch”: Lincoln in British Caricature
The Mason and Slidell incident of 1861, in which the U.S. Navy seized from a British mail packet two Confederate commissioners bound for diplomatic postings in Europe, raised tensions between Britain and the United States to a fever pitch. Additionally, the Union’s blockade of the South caused a cotton shortage for English manufacturing. As a result, England, already culturally and economically aligned with the South, tended toward sympathy for the Confederacy at a time of strained diplomatic relations with the Union. Nor did it help Lincoln’s cause internationally that his rail-splitter image failed to speak to the British press in the same way that it did the Northern masses. English humor periodicals like Punch were consistently and rabidly anti-Lincoln. Instead of recognizing the appeal of a self-made man, British illustrators and satirists considered Lincoln to be “boorish.”29 Indeed, if Lincoln was the representative self-made man, he inhabited all the worst character traits of which British satirists had long mocked in Americans.
Colloquial American speech, for instance, was a perennial target. Punch parodied American English by reproducing its seemingly odd pronunciations via phonetic spellings reminiscent of southwestern humor.30 Plain-talking Lincoln, then, became the leading exemplar of Punch’s critique of the American butchering of the English language. Consider, for instance, this parody of Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “[W]e’ve done it, gentlemen. Bully for us. Cowhided the Copperheads considerable. Non nobis, of course, but still I reckon we have had a hand in the glory, some. . . . Rebellion is a wicked thing, gentlemen, an awful wicked thing, and the mere nomenclating thereof would make my hair stand on end, if it could be more standonender than it is. . . . All very tall talking, gentlemen, but talking won’t take Richmond. If it would, and there had been six Richmonds in the field, we should long since have took them all.”31 In addition to mocking Lincoln’s looks by referring to his unkempt hair, this imitation pillories the colloquialism (“Bully,” “Cowhided”), improper grammar, and neologisms (“standonender”) of the American chief executive as representative of uncultured American-ness, in general.
Another London illustrated humor periodical, Comic News, imagined the president as an inveterate tobacco chewer, connecting the habit with the demise of the nation-state: “Ah, sir, chewing’s one of the great insti-chew-tions of our country, some of our greatest men has chewed in their time. But the old dominion’s almost chawed up! The President here emitted from his mouth an expectoration of the most alarming magni-chew’d, and shot it with a true and steady aim right on the left boot of your amiable and boot-iful correspondent.” Another article chided Lincoln in sing-songy rhyme: “So poor America is ruled, and scolded, and schooled, by a buffoon, a monkey, a wretched old donkey, who is more fit for a flunkey than to rule this great country.”32 Both of these pieces imagine Lincoln as a vulgar “buffoon” who was a representative man of the worst qualities of his countrymen. In Comic News, anyway, if he was a model American, he was, to paraphrase T
rollope, a bad model. As these examples show, Lincoln’s folksy humility and humor did not appeal to Britons (nor to a Southern culture that valued all things English) in the same way that it did to many Northerners in the United States.
Cartoon caricatures in English humor periodicals painted a similar picture of Lincoln as an uncultured rube. For example, John Tenniel’s May 9, 1863, Punch cartoon “The Great ‘Cannon Game’” comments on a Confederate victory over Union naval forces at Charleston (fig. 4.9). It depicts a Neanderthal and racialized Lincoln, with pronounced jaws and vacant eyes, losing at billiards to a dashing Jefferson Davis. In the caption, Lincoln says in an aside, “Darn’d if he ain’t scored ag’in!—wish I could make a few winning hazards for a change.”33 Tenniel attributed colloquial speech to Lincoln not to identify him as a man of the people but, rather, to portray him as unsophisticated and inept.
Northerners were aware of the discrepancy between Northern and British readings and renderings of Lincoln’s image. The 1864 joke book Old Abe’s Jokes, Fresh from Abraham’s Bosom calls attention to this disparity in juxtaposing “An Englishman’s Portraits of Old Abe” with “An American’s Portrait of Father Abraham” on facing pages. On the left side, the “Englishman’s Portraits,” quoting from an unnamed source, begins, “To say that he is ugly, is nothing; to add that his figure is grotesque, is to convey no adequate impression.” The English “portrait” goes on to describe “long bony arms and legs” that “somehow seem to be always in the way,” “a head cocoa-nut shaped and somewhat too small for such a stature, covered with rough, uncombed and uncomable [sic] hair, that stands out in every direction at once; a face furrowed, wrinkled and indented, as though it had been scarred by vitrol [sic],” accented by “a nose and ears which have been taken by mistake from a head of twice the size.” This English version of Lincoln wears “a long, tight, badly-fitting suit of black, creased, soiled and puckered up at every salient point of the figure” with “ill-fitting boots, gloves too long for the long bony fingers, and a fluffy hat, covered to the top with dusty, puffy crape.” The “American’s Portrait” on the right begins by admitting Lincoln’s “awkward speech and yet more awkward silence, his uncouth manners, self-taught and partly forgotten,” but it also sees Lincoln “[i]n character and culture” as “a fair representative of the average American,” “the type of ‘Brother Jonathan [a nineteenth-century predecessor to Uncle Sam],’ a not perfect man and yet more precious than fine gold.”34 The descriptions are somewhat similar, but the connotations diverge widely; the American view emphasizes Lincoln as representative of the American people, thus ennobling his imperfections and awkwardness in a way that the English view could not countenance.
James Russell Lowell, in his essay “Abraham Lincoln,” similarly accounts for the difference between American and British conceptions of Lincoln: “That Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant, we learn from certain English tourists. . . . Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached with Americanism by some not unfriendly British critics; but, with all deference, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for it, or see in it any reason why he should govern Americans the less wisely.” Lowell continues, somewhat defensively, “People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, but we are glad that in this our true war of independence, which is to free us forever from the Old World, we have had at the head of our affairs a man whom America made, as God made Adam, out of the very earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown, to show us how much truth, how much magnanimity, and how much state-craft await the call of opportunity in simple manhood when it believes in the justice of God and the worth of man.”35 Lowell’s formulation mirrors that of the joke book: unlike the British, who he implied were unable to understand the importance of Lincoln’s storied rise from the people, Lowell saw Lincoln’s lack of elegance and his rough-hewn “Americanism” as positive traits for democratic governance.
Lowell’s touchiness about British views of Lincoln does call attention to his persistently negative image there. Gary L. Bunker, a scholar of Lincoln’s image in political cartoons, claims that “England’s image makers were the primary sculptors of his pejorative international reputation.”36 Some British cartoon depictions of Lincoln go further than painting him as a backwoods boor and, mirroring Southern and Copperhead images of Lincoln, associate him directly with evil. Matt Morgan, who drew first for London Fun and then for Comic News, pictures Lincoln in turns as Satan, Death, and a vampire. First, “Pull Devil—Pull Baker,” from the October 8, 1864, Comic News, repurposes an old saying (whose origins are unknown) about an intractable argument to describe the 1864 presidential contest, captured in an image of Democratic candidate General George B. McClellan and Lincoln—whose head sprouts horns—tugging on a map of the “Northern States” (fig. 4.10). Depicting Lincoln as the Devil and McClellan as Baker clearly put Morgan (and Comic News) in McClellan’s camp.37
Morgan’s “The Vampire,” in the November 26, 1864, Comic News (fig. 4.11), depicts Lincoln as a vampire hovering over a crouching Columbia, whom he threatens, “Columbia, thou art mine; with thy blood I will renew my lease of life—ah! ah!” (The vampire association is prescient, given the 2012 film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which figures the entire Confederacy and its slaveholding dominion as a conspiracy of vampires that Lincoln is trained to defeat.) The drawing propagates the image of Lincoln as a blood-thirsty, inhuman monster, much like the Lincoln-as-Satan images produced in the South. Morgan’s “In for His Second Innings,” from the December 6, 1864, Comic News uses a cricket metaphor to describe the onset of Lincoln’s second term and similarly associates Lincoln with the supernaturally undead (fig. 4.12). Lincoln removes his face/mask to reveal his true self, Death. The masked-evil trope recalls the Southern Illustrated News cartoon “Masks and Faces” in its intimation that Lincoln’s visage is a sham that hides evil intentions (see fig. 4.2). In “In for His Second Innings,” the body of a fallen soldier lies beneath a broken cannon in the background to highlight just whom and how Lincoln will reap.38 Morgan’s portraits of Lincoln are all similarly ghastly in their imagination of him as an evil antihero full of malice.
Though the British press presented a consistently negative picture of Lincoln, these images did not reach Southern readers in great numbers. Because of the Union blockade of the Southern coast, importation of prints and journals was impractical when not impossible; as such, British anti-Lincoln caricature minimally impacted Southern residents. But just how influential were such images to a Northern American audience? Comic News, for one, ran for a mere nineteen months (July 1863 to March 1865) and has only been recently rediscovered by scholars. Punch and Fun were more popular, but it is unclear how widely they circulated in the Northern states during the war. The realities of transatlantic transportation meant that the news that Punch and other British humor periodicals satirized was already weeks old and would be even older by the time American readers saw the satires. Even so, Punch did have influence and importance as an “index to current attitudes, prejudices, enthusiasms, phobias.” If Punch and other British periodicals sought to reflect British public opinion rather than changing it, that reflection was seen across the ocean.39 If Punch and other British periodicals sought to reflect British public opinion rather than changing it, that reflection was seen across the ocean. U.S. General Irvin McDowell expressed a broader anxiety about Britain’s estimation of the United States when he told a New York Times correspondent that “there was no nation in the world whose censure or praise the people of the United States care about except England.”40 Punch and other British periodicals engaged much more gleefully in censure than in praise of Lincoln as a symbol of the Union.
Even influential British illustrators came to regret their cruel pictorial treatments of Lincoln after his assassination in 1865. In his 1874 collection of cartoons, The American War, Morgan omitted some of his more damning images and mollified others with his accompanying text. He also included a nonsatiric cartoon about Lincoln’s assassination (originall
y published in Fun), with the commentary, “For once the artist pictures unbiased truth. . . . The veil was torn from all eyes, and the Star of Empire shone in the West with an unflecked radiance which has never since worn a cloud.”41 In hindsight, Morgan, in leaving out the cruelest depictions of Lincoln and confessing to previously obfuscating “the unbiased truth,” seems to recant his treatment of Lincoln.
Similarly, soon after Lincoln was assassinated, Tenniel published the cartoon “Britannia Sympathises with Columbia” in London Punch. In this image, Britannia lays a wreath on Lincoln’s deathbed, while Columbia bows her head toward Lincoln’s, and an emancipated man, undone shackles next to him, sits on the floor, his head on his knees in grief. The nonsatiric image was accompanied by a long poem, “Abraham Lincoln. Foully Assassinated, April 14, 1865.” The poem confesses to misreading Lincoln’s workmanlike manner. It begins, self-accusingly.
You lay a wreath on murdered LINCOLN’s bier,
You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace,
Broad for the self-complacent British sneer,
His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,
His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair,
His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease,
His lack of all we prize as debonair.
This ugliness and “lack of all we prize as debonair,” the poet and cartoonist have since learned, expresses not incompetence but strength of will. Lincoln—“This rail-splitter a true-born king of men”—eventually managed to “shame me from my sneer, / To lame my pencil, and confute my pen.” The poet, thus, admits his or her mistake and has come to equate Lincoln’s simplicity with kingliness. Additionally, the poet, in confessing a transformation from sneering mockery to self-effacing modesty, was apparently trying to become more like Lincoln. The poem proceeds to describe how “[t]hose gaunt, long-laboring limbs were laid to rest!” This line is important, showing as it does the transformation of Lincoln’s image in the minds of Tenniel and others: the length of Lincoln’s limbs now describes not provincial clumsiness but the physical labor (“long-laboring”) of restoring the union.42
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