banjo-strumming black man who was said to be “coming to town.” The chorus went: “Picayune Butler, coming, coming, / Picayune Butler come to town. / Ahoo, ahoo, ahoo, ahoo, ahoo!”
A journalist leaked the incident, which the press immediately distorted. Sensational journalists invented the story that the president, when surveying the ghastly remains of those who had fallen at Antietam, had requested “Picayune Butler,” to the disgust of McClellan, who allegedly refused to hear a song that he considered an example of callous levity in the face of real tragedy. In the words of the New York World, “The ambulance had just reached the neighborhood of the old stone bridge, where the dead were piled highest, when Mr. Lincoln, suddenly slapping Marshal Lamon on the knee, exclaimed: ‘Come, Lamon, give us that song about Picayune Butler; McClellan has never heard it.’ ‘Not now, if you please,’ said General McClellan, with a shudder; ‘I would prefer to hear it some other place and time.’”101
Among satirical cartoons about the incident was one in which Lincoln is pictured standing amid the dead and the severely wounded at Antietam. He looks calm, while Lamon’s back is turned and his hand covers his eyes, as though he is crying. Lincoln coolly says, “Now, marshal, sing us ‘Picayune Butler,’ or something else that’s funny.”102
The way Lincoln dealt with the controversy tells us much about his character. Lamon wrote an explanation of the incident that he intended to release to the press, but Lincoln found it too aggressive and produced a more moderate version in which he wrote, truthfully, that he was miles away from the battlefield when Lamon sang “Twenty Years Ago” and then, at someone’s request, “Picayune Butler” and other songs. He also noted that he and the rest of his party had seen neither a corpse nor a grave during their time in the region.
It was a thoroughly convincing memorandum, but he did not release it. He told Lamon that he accepted Sir Walter Scott’s dictum that if one’s motives were good, they needed no explanation; if they were bad, they could never be convincingly defended.103 Lincoln advised his friend:
There has already been too much said about this falsehood. Let the thing alone. If I have not established character enough to give the lie to this charge, I can only say that I am mistaken in my own estimate of myself. In politics, every man must skin his own skunk. These fellows are welcome to the hide of this one. Its body has already given forth its unsavory odor.
However, Lincoln’s holding back of a written response, a common habit for him, appears to have been a mistake in this case. The Antietam controversy put him in a worse political position than he may have realized, for it made him politically vulnerable to George McClellan, whom he would soon fire. Lincoln’s critics said, in short: you dismissed the general who won the battle that saved the nation, and you defamed him by requesting a flippant song at the battle site, and then, after his successor led the disastrous effort at Fredericksburg, you told a humorous story.
Anti-Lincoln poems and cartoons fanned the controversy. When McClellan ran for the presidency in 1864, his supporters published a widely reprinted poem that included lines about Lincoln’s allegedly heartless tomfoolery:
Abe may tell his jolly jokes,
O’er blood fields of stricken battle,
While yet the ebbing life-tides smokes
From men that die like butchered cattle;
He, ere yet the guns grow cold,
To pimps and pets may crack his stories, [etc.]104
Always known for his humor, Lincoln now seemed to some as a mere clown, with no real sympathy for those who had sacrificed their lives for the Union. “A year ago we laughed at the Honest Old Abe’s grotesque genial Western jocosities,” George Templeton Strong wrote in December 1862, “but they nauseate us now.”105 Lincoln was even known to repeat jokes about himself, such as one about a Quaker woman who told a friend that she thought that the Confederate president Jefferson Davis would succeed in the war because “he is a praying man.” The friend comments, “Abram is a praying man [too].” The reply: “Yes, but the Lord will think Abram is joking.”106
The impression of Lincoln as jester in chief spawned humor books with “Abe” or “Lincoln” in the title. The first of them, Old Abe’s Joker (1863), was a silly collection that actually contained few of his own jokes but many by others—all presented under his name.
Such misrepresentation generated similar accusations against him. In 1864, the presidential election year, his chances for reelection dimmed because of his reputation as a joker.107 Two ostensibly serious people, the pious Salmon Chase and the self-important George McClellan, were running against him. Chase withdrew from the race in March after support for him failed to materialize, but he lurked in the background as an available candidate should the need arise. McClellan, the Democratic Party’s nominee, pushed the antijester theme. Signs at his rallies read “No Vulgar Joker for President,” “Old Abe Can’t See This Joke,” “Old Abe’s Jokes Have Operated for Little Mac Since Antietam.”108
Lincoln’s position was further damaged by an editorial in James Gordon Bennett’s Herald that announced, “President Lincoln is a joke incarnated. The idea that such a man as he should be President of such a country as this is a very ridiculous joke.” His traveling from Harrisburg to Washington in disguise was a joke, as was his inaugural address, whose promises he did not keep. The editorial continued: “His Cabinet is and always has been a standing joke. All his State papers are jokes. . . . His emancipation proclamation was a solemn joke.” Then there were Lincoln’s “stupendous military jokes,” such as removing Little Mac after Antietam and resorting to humor and storytelling after it. The editorial concluded sarcastically, “If President Lincoln is going to try for another election, we advise him to collect and publish his jokes . . . issued in pamphlet and book form.”109
Actually, two joke books related to Lincoln did appear in 1864. One of them, Lincolnania; or, the Humors of Uncle Abe. A Second Joe Miller was a kind of zigzag comic biography, featuring humorous incidents that involve him, many fictional, some not.110 The other, Old Abe’s Jokes, Fresh from Abraham’s Bosom, was a campaign document. Far from blasting Lincoln’s humor, this volume promoted it and combined it with serious content. As in the other books, some of the jokes or stories were not Abe’s. But many of them were. Also, they were prefaced by a pro-Lincoln biography and comments on the need for humor in anxious times.
The Abe of Old Abe’s Jokes was no heartless clown. The book emphasized that he felt the pain of the war deeply. For instance, after Fredericksburg, the president declared, “If there is a man out of Hell that suffers more than I do, I pity him.”111 His facial wrinkles, his pallid skin, and the dark rings around his eyes revealed a man who had “suffered more and deeper,” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s words, than anyone. His jokes and stories helped relieve that pain, for him and for the nation. The book pointed out that Lincoln spent many hours a week welcoming ordinary Americans to the White House, and “the simple and natural manner in which he delivers his thoughts makes him appear to those visiting him like an earnest, affectionate friend.” An important part of his naturalness was his readiness to tell good jokes and stories.
Scattered throughout the book were reminders of Lincoln’s compassion (as in a sketch in which he comforted wounded soldiers) and eloquence (in a piece praising the Gettysburg Address). A main theme of the book was that his humor and anecdotes were healthy; they proved that he had qualities that McClellan and Chase lacked, such as warmth, humility, and flexibility. One sketch in the book had the telling title “Salmon the Solemn vs. Abe the Jocular.”112 The book directly called Abe “the National Joker” and argued that he was precisely the president America needed in a time of national bloodletting—someone who, through the worst, still saw the bright side of life. Gifted with a unique popular touch, Lincoln told the kinds of stories that average Americans loved.
Trying to reach a wide audience, the book’s publisher, T. R. Dawley of New York, issued the book as a cheap pamphlet that was available at street bookstalls and railway stations. Newspaper ads announced that it contained “THE ESSENCE OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN’S LIFE.” The volume, according to the ads, could be bought “together with all the late dime publications,” including sensational pulp thrillers like Ocean Rover, Guerillas of the Osage, and Maud of the Mississippi.113
Did John Hay write Old Abe’s Jokes at Lincoln’s behest? That was the suspicion of an Indiana newspaper that noted that Hay’s publicity techniques seemed visible in the book and that doubtless the president knew of this venture.114 This may be true because parts of the book, especially the accounts of Lincoln’s daily behavior in the White House and his private comments on the war, are things that only someone close to Lincoln could have known.
At any rate, we do know that Hay considered humor a significant part of the 1864 campaign. In June, as the Idler, he wrote a long article insisting that laughter was normal and healthy in a time of war. He wrote, “We have no sympathy with the solemn cant of those who would suppress all cheerfulness, banish all recreation, and compel everyone to sit down in sackcloth and ashes. . . . It is not in human nature to be perpetually sorrowful.” As for the president, “mirthfulness is the recuperative agency by which nature preserves his energies.”115
As the election approached, Hay wrote that “humorous documents” were important to the campaign.116 He brought special attention to a recent pamphlet, Lights and Notes: By a Looker-on in Vienna, that hilariously satirized George McClellan. Hay insisted that all Republicans should get this book, which contained comic pictures and jokes caricaturing Little Mac. The pamphlet’s author, Norman Wiard, was a Canadian-born gun inventor and proprietor of a New Jersey arms factory who became a close adviser to Lincoln in 1864. He wrote the president long letters on weapons, the economy, and the soldier vote. Devoted to Lincoln, he told him that “your enemies are the enemyies [sic] of the Country.”117 That Wiard would pen a joke book attacking McClellan was understandable, as was John Hay’s hyperbolic praise of Wiard as “a genius of the first order” and his pamphlet as a “a stunner” that “ought to be circulated both in the army and every northern state.”118
Similar anti-McClellan humor appeared in the Only Authentic Life of Geo. Brinton McClellan, alias Little Mac, a yellow-covered, five-cent paperback that portrayed McClellan as a laughably inefficient, cowardly general and a waffling politician.119 This pamphlet featured cartoons of a befuddled Little Mac that showed him during the Seven Days campaign, enjoying his first-through-seventh “victories” while gazing helplessly toward the distance beneath a sign that pointed “To Richmond.” Then, as his “final act,” came a cartoon of McClellan standing astride two galloping horses, one called War, the other one Peace—a reference to the division in the Democratic Party between those who called for defeating the South, with slavery left alone, and those who wanted immediate peace, with the Confederacy established as a separate nation.
Another popular anti-McClellan piece was the poem “Tardy George,” printed during the 1864 campaign in many Northern newspapers, including Washington’s Daily National Republican, the official government organ that featured John Hay’s writings. Highlighting McClellan’s chronic indecisiveness, the poem asked, “What are you waiting for, George, I pray?,” followed by, “Are you waiting for your hair to turn, / Your heart to soften, your bowels to yearn / A little more towards ‘our Southern friends’ . . . / . . . whom you hold so dear / That you do not harm and give no fear, / As you tenderly take them by the gorge? / What are you waiting for, tardy George?”120 Journalists often referred to Little Mac as “tardy George” until the end of the nineteenth century.
Even as backers of the opposing presidential candidates weaponized stories and jokes, Lincoln found entertainment and political use in bestselling humorists of the day. Noah Brooks recalled that during the war years, “Mr. Lincoln’s reading was with the humorous writers. He liked to repeat from memory whole chapters from these books, and on such occasions he always preserved his own gravity though his auditors would be convulsed with laughter. He said that he had a dread of people who could not appreciate the fun of such things.”121
Among the president’s favorites were Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Kerr, and Miles O’Reilly. Not only did they provide him with diversion in painful moments, but they also performed cultural work that helped his political program. Most of them contributed toward his goal of unifying the nation. Humorous stories in periodicals had wide appeal in nineteenth-century America. As the cultural historian Walter Blair notes, “The newspapers were active in carrying this humorous material into every part of the nation.”122 A journalist of the day observed, “Far and wide, daily, weekly, and monthly publications issue from the press to face us with at least one feature smiling.”123 Periodically, the humorists collected their newspaper squibs and published them in books, some of which became huge sellers.
Several of the humorists positioned themselves near the center, between extremes, which explains why they appealed both to Lincoln and to Americans of different sections. Valuably for the president, they attacked popular isms that had diverted much discussion away from what for him was the main issue of the war: slavery.
Artemus Ward (the pen name of Charles Farrar Browne) is best remembered for the fact that Lincoln read his comic sketch “High-handed Outrage at Utica” to his puzzled, silent cabinet just before he read the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. What was Ward’s importance to Lincoln? If we look at his writings, we see that he performed a sizable cultural role. As a popular author and lecturer, he took many of the controversial isms of the period and put them on comic display, stripping them of the seriousness that they had for many Americans, who learned from Ward to laugh at them. We saw that Stephen Douglas had tried to tar the Republicans with the charge of espousing fanatical reform movements, and Lincoln critics like the Copperhead Samuel S. Cox ramped the charge up during the Civil War. Artemus Ward helped to defang the isms by reducing them from social threats to funny exhibits in his “museum.” Ward was the P. T. Barnum of American humor. He called himself a showman who was engaged in “show bizniss,” displaying animals like his “Boy Constructor” and “wax figgers” of notables from Jesus to Andrew Jackson.124 In his sketches, Ward presented himself as a roving entertainer who went places where popular movements or fads were practiced, like a free-love community or spiritualist séance, and deflated these movements with his humor. Mormons, spiritualists, free lovers, sensational and sentimental novelists, feminists, intemperate temperance reformers—Ward lanced them all as ludicrous.
Ward provided an answer to critics who associated the Republicans with threatening isms, which, in Ward’s hands, proved to be not so threatening after all. Formerly a Douglas Democrat, Ward during the war became a firm supporter of Lincoln. He was a kind of cultural icebreaker, bursting through a range of crazes that interfered with Lincoln’s goals: restoring the Union and abolishing slavery.
From this perspective, the president’s reading of an Artemus Ward story just before reading the Emancipation Proclamation made sense. Of all the Civil War humorists, Ward had the largest appeal. His columns were widely reprinted, and Artemus Ward. His Book, which appeared in 1862, quickly sold forty thousand copies. Ward placed himself above politics. In his sketch “Interview with Abraham Lincoln,” Ward, asked by the president for advice on choosing a cabinet, declared, “Fill it up with showmen, sir! Showmen is devoid of politics. . . . They know how to cater for the public.”125 By reading from Artemus Ward, Lincoln, in effect, was inviting his cabinet to put aside momentarily any political qualms they might have in the interest of reaching the broad public that Ward attracted. Anticipating (correctly) a backlash against the proclamation, Lincoln selected the humorist known to be enjoyed by many Americans—not just conservatives and moderates but also radicals, who laughed at Ward’s odd malapropisms even when they disagreed with his politics. Lincoln distanced himself from overt radicalism and from Puritan worship in order to avoid seeming sectional or divisive. By preceding his controversial proclamation with an Artemus Ward joke, he made the humorist an unlikely compatriot in emancipation.126
The Ward story that Lincoln chose described the showman going with his animals and wax figures to Utica, where a man attacked a wax figure of Judas Iscariot. The showman yelled to the man, “You egrejus ass, that air’s a wax figger—a representashun of the false ‘Postle.” The man beat the wax Judas to a pulp anyway, and Ward sued him, informing us that “the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.”127
This inane sketch suggested how convictions misled some irrational people. The enraged man who mistook a wax statue for a human and then pummeled it was analogous to the deception and falsity that permeated the Barnumesque culture of the era, including lies that surrounded the war itself. Just after reading this story of misdirected passion, Lincoln got to the true heart of the war by reading aloud the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. There, in that proclamation, was something solid and unmistakable. All too often, politicians of various stripes attacked false enemies—wax Judases, in effect. The time for deception was over, Lincoln was saying. The greatest enemy was slavery. The Founders, Lincoln believed, had put it on the path to extinction. Lincoln would hasten it down that path by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and later pushing hard for the constitutional amendment that would abolish it forever.
If Artemus Ward mocked many of the movements that were distracting many Americans of the day, Orpheus C. Kerr (Robert Henry Newell) and Miles O’Reilly (Charles G. Halpine) made the Civil War itself the subject of humor. When Montgomery Meigs told Lincoln he had not read Kerr’s comic pieces, the president exclaimed, “Why, have you not read those papers? They are in two volumes; any one who has not read them must be a heathen.”128 It was Kerr’s story about the monkey that asked endlessly for “more tail” that Lincoln used to describe ever-delaying General McClellan. Lincoln conceded that sometimes Kerr’s jibes against himself hit too close to home, but he laughed heartily at hits at others, such as Kerr’s comparison of Gideon Welles to a grandmother who tried to replicate Noah’s Ark for use in the navy.129 Kerr represented the kind of lighthearted treatment of the war that provided respite for the often-tormented president.
Kerr also bolstered Lincoln’s centrism by pillorying secessionist fire-eaters, self-styled “chivalric” Southern Cavaliers, and complacent Copperheads. Kerr even made comic mincemeat of the colonizationist scheme Lincoln pushed for a time early in the war. Kerr riffed on Lincoln’s interview with black leaders in August 1862, in which he called for the voluntary emigration of African Americans. Kerr, impersonating a government official, absurdly invited black people to volunteer to emigrate to Nova Zembla, a frigid, uninhabitable island off the northeast coast of Canada that, in Kerr’s words, “has great resources for ice-water, and you will be able to have ice cream every day.”130 Lincoln, who had long been aware of severe problems surrounding colonization, might have learned by laughing at Kerr’s farcical proposal. At any rate, he soon dropped the colonization scheme, which had been mainly a sop to conservatives of the Monty Blair stripe for whom colonization was the solution to slavery. Once Lincoln put himself firmly on the path to permanent, legal abolition of slavery, colonization waned in his mind, and he turned toward the progressive idea of citizenship for African Americans.
Miles O’Reilly was the pseudonym of Charles G. Halpine, who fought for the Union in an Irish regiment and wrote comic sketches that were published in periodicals and then in books. Lincoln not only considered Halpine “a most capable and deserving officer” but also enjoyed his writings.131 As Private Miles O’Reilly, Halpine wrote funny ballads about episodes and figures in the war. In his comic narrative, the president pardons him for a small offense he has committed, and O’Reilly subsequently becomes a big Lincoln booster. O’Reilly accepts Lincoln as a jokester and storyteller and, far from criticizing him for it, wants the president to hire him to transform his western anecdotes into a popular book. O’Reilly writes, “No doubt such a volume—the materials and anecdotes furnished by Mr. Lincoln and the verses by the Bard of Erin—will be equal to anything in the same line since the day of Aesop’s fables, translated by the poet Gray.”132 O’Reilly praises his humor and says that the president’s epitaph should read:
Though thraitors treated him vilely,
He was honest an’ kindly, he loved a joke,
An’ he pardoned Miles O’Reilly!
As much as Lincoln liked these humorists, in his own writing and speaking he created a style that departed from their directionlessness and sometime racism.
In noticing that the “chief characteristic” of American humor was “grotesqueness and extravagance,” he caught the wacky, presurrealistic elements of the American style that led to the tall tale, a genre Mark Twain perfected after the Civil War.133 In “How to Tell a Story,” Twain explained, “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.”134 One of Lincoln’s favorite humorists, Artemus Ward, strongly influenced Twain, who noted that Ward in his lectures spoke with no apparent logic or forethought, stringing together non sequiturs. As another commentator explained, “Grave and apologetic, [Ward] would appear to be drifting helplessly from one idea to another as if his mind were floating along a natural current of thought which he was unable to check. . . . As he drifted about ineptly in search of words and phrases, he would become ensnared in verbal traps of his own making.”135
Lincoln had long been reacting against this popular centrifugal style in his own jokes and anecdotes. Emerson praised the president as “the author of a multitude of good sayings, so disguised as pleasantries that it is certain they had no reputation at first but as jests; and, only later, by the very acceptance and adoption they find in the mouths of millions, turn out to be the wisdom of the hour.”136 Lincoln added form and point to the kinds of popular humor that were often formless. He “bounced off” the stylistic disconnectedness he saw around him and offered a meaningful alternative to it. Not only was his humor more focused than its popular counterparts, but his mature style as a speaker—pithy, condensed, and balanced—was worlds apart from the disconnectedness of the popular style.
The other difference between Lincoln and the humorists pertained to race. Most Northern humorists could expose racism among slaveholding Southerners, but they backed off from describing its pervasiveness in their own section. Orpheus Kerr, in a typical piece, impersonated a Southerner who cried, “Oh! for a nigger, and oh! for a whip; / . . . Oh! for a captain, and oh! for a ship; / Oh! for a cargo of niggers each trip.”137 Kerr also mocked certain Union generals, like Halleck and McClellan, who refused to accept contrabands into their camps. However, he went no further than that.
Nor did Artemus Ward. Although Ward was hard on secessionists, he also attacked radical abolitionists, and he was not above making racist jokes, as when he proclaimed in his odd vernacular, “Feller Sitterzuns, the Afrikan may be Our Brother. Sevral hily respectyble gentlemen, and sum talentid females tell us so, & fur argyment’s sake I mite be injooced to grant it, tho’ I don’t b’leeve it myself. But the Afrikan isn’t our sister & our wife & our uncle.”138 He also ridiculed the abolitionists’ veneration of the Puritan fathers. Insisting that he would not cater to the fashion of tracing “the growth of Ameriky frum the time when the Mayflowers cum over in the Pilgrim and brawt Plymmuth Rock with them,” he attacked the Puritans as “peple which hung idiotic wimmin for witches, burnt holes in Quaker’s tongues and consined their feller critters to the treadmill and pillery on the slightest provocashun.”139
Ward and the other Northern humorists were like sponges that soaked up cultural dross and emitted it as what a historian of journalism of the time described as “Odds and Ends,” “Flashes of Fun,” “Twinklings,” and “Sparks.”140 In that sense, they served Lincoln’s goal of cultural unity because they converted controversial topics into rib-tickling humor with wide appeal.
On the issue of race, however, these humorists were of little use politically. On that thorny topic, Lincoln received cultural help from a humorist who was less an absorptive sponge than an abrasive scouring pad. David Ross Locke, under the name Petroleum V. Nasby, launched a wholesale assault on racial prejudice that energized Lincoln’s political battles and contributed to his evolving views on race.
