The National Joker

by Thompson, Todd Nathan;

  Now, in the language of Judge Douglas, “I submit to you gentlemen,” whether there is not great cause to fear that on some occasion when Gen. Scott suspects no danger, suddenly Gen. Pierce will be discovered charging upon him, holding a huge roll of candy in one hand for a spy-glass; with BUT labelled on some appropriate part of his person; with Abrams’ long pine sword cutting in the air at imaginary cannon balls, and calling out “boys there’s a game of ball for you,” and over all streaming the flag, with the motto, “We’ll fight till we faint, and I’ll treat when it’s over.”21

  Lincoln here narrated the drawing of a political cartoon, complete with captions. While this does not tell us what Lincoln thought of his own image in caricature, it does imply that his impressive satiric repertoire also included the art of visual caricature, even if he did not draw.

  Cartoon Race: The 1860 Presidential Campaign

  The ameliorative effect of Lincoln’s self-constructed homespun image operated even in caricatures intended to represent him pejoratively, especially in the initial “rail-splitter” images of the 1860 campaign. Frank Bellew’s “A ‘Rail’ Old Western Gentleman,” for example, which mocks the reliance of Lincoln’s campaign on the “rail-splitter” theme, was presumably intended negatively but may not necessarily have appeared as such to its audience. In drawing Lincoln’s arms, legs, and torso as banded-together sticks, Bellew implies that Lincoln’s candidacy consisted of nothing but those rails. In a sense it echoes a Democratic newspaper in Illinois that claimed tongue-in-cheek that splitting rails seemed to be Lincoln’s only qualification for president, “aside from his personal beauty.”22 In disparaging this homespun image, Democrats and Lincoln’s other opponents risked offending Americans with humble backgrounds and who identified with Lincoln’s laboring past. By capturing Lincoln’s unattractive visage and his mussed hair and imagining his spindly body as made of rails, Bellew may have helped to embellish Lincoln’s image as a Western Cincinnatus even as he attempted to puncture it.

  Lincoln benefited more from cartoons that compared caricatured images of the leading candidates, especially given the striking discrepancy in physical appearance between Lincoln and Democratic challenger Douglas, who was shorter and presented himself as an immaculate gentleman. A Douglas biographer offers the following account of their respective appearances at an 1858 debate in Ottawa, Illinois.

  They presented a striking contrast. Lincoln, tall, angular, and long of limb; Douglas, short, almost dwarfed by comparison, broad-shouldered and thick chested. Lincoln was clad in a frock coat of rusty black, which was evidently not made for his lank, ungainly body. His sleeves did not reach his wrists by several inches, and his trousers failed to conceal his huge feet. . . . Altogether, his appearance bordered upon the grotesque. . . . Douglas, on the contrary, presented a well-groomed figure. He wore a well-fitting suit of broadcloth; his linen was immaculate; and altogether he had the appearance of a man of the world whom fortune had favored.

  Lincoln was by this time a relatively wealthy man and as such could certainly have afforded better-tailored suits and a haircut for a key debate, but he may have recognized the satiric-as-political effects of emphasizing the juxtaposition of the already obvious physical and stylistic differences between himself and Douglas in order to portray himself as a “man of popular origin.”23

  This is apparent in the comparative language Lincoln employed in a July 17, 1858, speech in Springfield. Lincoln began his speech, “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.]” In this cartoon-like caricature of Douglas’s visage, Lincoln connected fame to corruption and nepotism: “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.”24 By describing his own face as “poor” and Douglas’s as “fruitful,” Lincoln characterized physical difference as class distinction, associating himself with the people and Douglas with elites and the sycophants who preyed upon those elites.

  Lincoln modestly invoked in 1858 a distinction between his own “poor, lean, lank face” and Douglas’s “round” face that would become central to caricaturists’ shorthand for the candidates in the 1860 presidential election. “Honest Old Abe and the Little Boy in Search of His Mother—A Sensation Story,” from a July 1860 issue of Phunny Phellow, a pro-Union humor magazine with low-quality paper and poor typography and layout but excellent political cartoons, effectively captures this difference. Again, because Lincoln’s actual physical appearance seemed itself a caricature, it, in some ways, minimized the work that a caricaturist could do in burlesquing it. In the cartoon, Lincoln is depicted as ugly, with wild hair and overly sharp features, but while he carries the identifying ax to split rails, he is, otherwise, not cruelly caricatured, at least when compared to the outlandish image of the man-child Douglas, who is savagely portrayed as a pouting child with a “Kansas” feather in his hat, associating him with his 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.25

  The motif of Douglas as a little boy searching for his mother derives from his unorthodox (at the time) decision to actively campaign after being nominated by the Northern Democratic Party. Douglas claimed that he was traveling east to visit his elderly mother but, instead, spent time electioneering in New England. His familial excuse, as well as his short stature, gave satirists all the material they needed to burlesque his motives. For example, the pamphlet A “Wide Awake” Poem (1860) claims in its subtitle that it would document “The Wanderings of the Little Giant ‘in Search of His Mother.’” The poem describes,

  this babe of the West—

  In his best bib and tucker, nice breeches, and vest,

  . . . in search of his mother.

  Upon arriving in New England, the “young giant,” a play on Douglas’s nickname, “the Little Giant”

  came to the clam-bakes, and stopped at the fountains;

  He blustered, and blabbered, and waddled about,

  His mother scarce knowing her darling was out!

  In this way, the poem depicts Douglas simultaneously as a petulant child and a sneaky political operator. Lincoln, of course, compares favorably to the image of Douglas put forth in A “Wide Awake” Poem. The poet, Almon H. Benedict, admits of Lincoln, “No beauty, ’tis true, but often the case is, / There’s greatness of soul with the plainest of faces.” Here Benedict attempts to refigure Lincoln’s homeliness as evidence of his moral fortitude. In this sense, Lincoln was “not like the rover—so oily and pliant” and, therefore, “more of a statesman, he’s more of a giant!” These juxtaposed images lead to a punning co-option of Douglas’s moniker as “giant”: Lincoln, Benedict’s poem argues, deserves it more because of his height, his “sound head, and a MIGHT BACKBONE!” which are abstract political qualifications materialized into physical qualities.26

  The poster “‘Boy’ Lost!” broadside, on the other hand, borrows the language of a missing persons or fugitive slave advertisement to mock Douglas’s self-importance: “Talks a great deal, and very loud; ALWAYS ABOUT HIMSELF. HAS AN IDEA THAT HE IS A CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY” (fig. 5.2). Douglas’s physical appearance was also, of course, fair game, and his shortness and girth—“He is about five feet nothing in height, and about the same in diameter the other way. He has a red face, short legs, and a large belly”—became metaphors for his childlike obstinacy and soaring ambition.27 Lincoln, however, could be mocked for being too tall or too ugly, but height and homeliness could not serve as easy shorthand for immaturity. Lincoln was often called “Old Abe,” a sobriquet that implies aged wisdom. Lincoln was first given this nickname at age thirty-eight in Chicago, thoug
h his friends often note that the label was odd because he never looked nor acted old for his age. After the 1860 election, Lincoln told a visitor, “All through the campaign my friends have been calling me ‘Honest Old Abe,’ and I have been elected mainly on that cry.”28

  Lincoln’s height also gave him an advantage in caricatures that literalized the notion of a political race in their depictions of the candidates. Sporting metaphors for political contests originated in Britain, dating from political cartoons of elections as horse races from the 1760s. As changes in the American electoral system in the early 1800s opened up political participation, politics and sports became linked in the United States as well. Cartoons often featured a candidate in the lead but not yet a winner, thus urging supporters who viewed the image to vote in order to help finish the event. Several 1860 poster cartoons equate Lincoln’s lankiness with the ability to win such a sprint. “A Political Race” depicts an enormous Lincoln striding over Douglas’s head to take the lead in the race as onlookers cheer (fig. 5.3). Douglas gasps, “I never run so in my life,” while John C. Breckinridge, the 1860 Southern Democrat nominee, complains, “That long legged Abolitionist is getting a head of us after all,” and a trailing John Bell, the Constitutional Union party nominee, says, “Bless my soul—I give up.” None of these candidates comes up even to Lincoln’s waist, and, as such, none can hope to keep stride with the “long legged Abolitionist.”29

  “Lincoln, Douglas, and the Rail-Fence Handicap,” a poster printed in Buffalo, New York, in July 1860, offers a similar image, with Lincoln easily leaping over a huffing and puffing Douglas on the way to the White House (fig. 5.4). In this cartoon, however, there is an obstacle on the race course: a rail fence. Whereas Douglas wonders, “How can I get over this Rail Fence,” Lincoln carries a maul and replies, “It can’t stop me for I built it.” Sport-themed cartoons often “asked voters to cast their ballot for the most manly candidate” at a time when the vote was limited to a white, male polity.30 Lincoln’s laboring past and noted athletic prowess as captured by caricaturists certainly aided viewers in making such decisions.

  In both posters. Lincoln is two to three times taller than the other candidates, though his head is approximately the same size as the others’. Caricatures generally tend to increase the proportion of head size to body size, often making it account for one-quarter or more of total body size instead of the more anatomically correct one-eighth.31 But, in emphasizing Lincoln’s lankiness, these cartoons keep his head in fairly normal proportion to his body, especially when compared to the squat bodies and huge heads of the other candidates depicted. “May the Best Man Win—Uncle Sam Reviewing the Army of Candidates for the Presidential Chair,” discussed below, effectively captures this difference (fig. 5.5). This cartoon compares Lincoln and the other candidates for the 1864 election. The “race” metaphor also continued in 1864, as evidenced by a pro-Lincoln song whose chorus is

  O clear the track for Honest Abe,

  McClellan is behind him,

  He can never win the race,

  He can’t keep up with Lincoln.

  In “May the Best Man Win,” most of the candidates pictured have enormous heads and pudgy bodies. Again, while Lincoln’s head is not much larger than those of the others, he is much taller and, therefore, looks more correctly proportioned.32 In this way, Lincoln escaped a common ploy of caricaturists; his unusual height seemed to save his image from some of the usually negative attributes of caricature.

  “Long Abe a Little Longer”: The Growth of Lincoln’s Image

  Cartoon depictions of Lincoln after he became president continued to play up the folksy qualities that had constituted their portrayal of the western “rail-splitter” candidate. Even when Lincoln by virtue of his position became the very type of “great man” that he had attacked Douglas for being in 1858, he was able to maintain his image as a rustic, self-made man. Over the next four years, Lincoln’s rail-splitter image would fuse with standard American symbols of authority and patriotism, such that the symbolism of “greatness” itself changed.

  Early in 1864, whether Lincoln could win reelection was still very much in doubt; a series of decisive Union victories on the battlefield, though, eventually ensured a landslide over Democratic candidate General George B. McClellan. Caricatures also seem to have aided Lincoln’s bid for reelection, often by making Lincoln’s prodigious height a metaphor for his sustainability and greatness as a leader.33 Lincoln was obviously a better-known commodity when he stood for reelection, yet political cartoonists continued to draw, and draw on, his height as a visual metaphor: in 1864 it came to stand more for his growing authority and stature than for his ability to win a political race.

  For example, Bellew’s “Presidential Cobblers and Wire-Pullers Measuring and Estimating Lincoln’s Shoes,” in the March 5, 1864, New York Illustrated News, an illustrated newspaper in the ilk of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly, depicts a hoard of parties, in the act of measuring Lincoln’s shoes, interested in challenging his hold on the presidency (fig. 5.6). But, since these “Cobblers and Wire-Pullers”—including the editors of various New York newspapers—are pictured as Lilliputians, they are discovering that Lincoln’s are “big shoes to fill.”34 In using the fact that Lincoln had large feet as a way to literalize this cliché, Bellew implies that those who sought to replace Lincoln were not up to the gargantuan responsibilities of the job. As in previous examples, the sleeping Lincoln appears to be of normal proportions while many of the tiny “Cobblers and Wire-Pullers” all have heads that make up over a third of their height.

  Lincoln was once again fortunate in 1864 to run against a much-shorter Democratic opponent: General McClellan was known as “Little Mac.” Caricaturists were quick to capitalize on the eight-inch height difference between the candidates; as they had with Douglas, cartoonists evoked McClellan’s smallness by picturing him as a child and Lincoln as an adult. For example, Thomas Nast’s “May the Best Man Win” compares Lincoln and the other candidates for the 1864 election (see fig. 5.5). Like Douglas before him, the five-feet-eight McClellan is depicted as a boy, here seen glowering over a toy drum. Because of his stature and the toy drum, McClellan’s military uniform looks more like a child’s dress-up costume than a symbol of respect and prowess. Similarly, in Bellew’s “The Good Uncle and the Naughty Boy,” from the December 1864 Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun, Lincoln and Uncle Sam, towering over a crying McClellan, admonish him for conspiring with the Confederacy, depicted as another boy (fig. 5.7).35 In both cases, Lincoln’s height advantage leads the cartoonist to visualize him as more mature than McClellan, who is drawn as a petulant child.

  In September 1864, “This Reminds Me of a Little Joke” appeared in Harper’s Weekly, which supported Lincoln steadfastly throughout the 1864 campaign (see fig. 1.6). In Bellew’s cartoon, a gigantic Lincoln holds the diminutive McClellan in the palm of his hand. Lincoln’s comment “This reminds me of a little joke” was often attributed to Lincoln as a nod to his noted (either celebrated or vilified) sense of humor and penchant for telling stories. More noteworthy here is the size difference between Lincoln and McClellan.36 One key difference between images like “This Reminds Me of a Little Joke” and “May the Best Man Win” and those of Lincoln from the 1860 campaign is that Lincoln—though still folksy—is now also associated with the symbols of American government instead of those of a rural outsider. But even as an “establishment” candidate in 1864, Lincoln benefited from caricatured portrayals of him as a fun-loving, rough-hewn westerner; these now-familiar images of Lincoln commingled with markers of officialdom—the suit, the desk—rather than being replaced entirely by those markers.

  After the November elections, several cartoonists depicted Lincoln’s size as increasing, a lengthening that corresponds to that of his tenure in office as well as his growing reputation. The most striking example of this visual metaphor is Bellew’s “Long Abraham Lincoln a Little Longer,” in Harper’s Weekly on November 26,
1864, soon after the election (fig. 5.8). This image is simultaneously the biggest exaggeration of Lincoln’s physical attributes and the most respectful, dignified treatment of the president of all the cartoons surveyed in this chapter. Such an apparent contradiction is possible because Bellew exaggerates Lincoln’s length in order to pay him respect, associating his height with his endurance as a leader and for his impressive and increasing list of achievements. This cartoon is evidence that if, as one scholar of political cartoons argues, “a cartoon is really an exaggeration to get at an underlying truth,” that truth need not always be critical of the exaggerated subject. Indeed, cartoonists may use the same exaggeration to get at different truths.37 Whereas in the 1860 election Lincoln’s height became a visual metaphor for his ability to win a political race, that height, in and after the 1864 campaign, was re-rendered as a metaphor for Lincoln’s greatness.

  Another postelection cartoon aptly captures how Lincoln could be both praised and maligned in caricature or, rather, praised as imperfect. “With All Thy Faults” is a two-page spread in the Phunny Phellow of January 1865 (fig. 5.9). The cartoon depicts Columbia and Lincoln sharing a poignant moment; Columbia holds Lincoln’s hand and says, “With all thy faults I love thee still!” Lincoln is huge, folded into his chair, with tousled hair and an appropriately serious countenance. This scene and Columbia’s words aptly summarize the Lincoln image in caricature: flawed but earnest and competent, full of integrity. The difference between this 1865 exchange between Lincoln and Columbia and the 1860 exchange in “Good Gracious, Abraham Lincoln” is quite striking and effectively captures the changes that Lincoln’s image underwent over four years (see fig. 3.5). In “With All Thy Faults,” Columbia, instead of drawing back aghast as she does in “Good Gracious, Abraham Lincoln,” leans toward Lincoln, tenderly holds his hand, and looks into his eyes. Lincoln, instead of wryly smiling and carrying rails, sits in a chair in his office—behind him are books and a U.S. map on the wall that says, “THE UNION FOREVER”—and he looks serious, careworn, presidential.38