“shoddy”; “Old Ape Lincoln, and a figure of an ape’s head”; “Old Abe, a fine specimen of an Illinois guerilla”; the president a spirit rapper, and the like) along with many virulently racist signs. Among them was one showing Lincoln riding a black man to the White House, another picturing a black man perched on Lincoln’s shoulders, a third illustrating “Massa Bob Lincoln and His Chosen Bride,” which showed Robert promenading “with a negress on his arm.” Lincoln’s goals were summed up on a sign that read “Abolition platform: emancipation, miscegenation, and amalgamation.”49
Perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of the 1864 race was Lincoln’s silence in the face of constant racist assaults. His only extant comment on miscegenation was his remark to two journalists who in August asked him, “Now Mr P[resident] are you in favor of miscegenation[?]” He answered, “That’s a democratic mode of producing good Union men, & I dont propose to infringe on the patent.”50
This wasn’t just another evasive joke about a testy issue. It had a kernel of truth: he did, after all, want “good Union men” coming from anywhere, including from “the democratic mode” of interracial relationships. A good number of the formerly enslaved people then serving in the Union military were from such relationships, and Lincoln considered them vital to the war effort. In any case, his reluctance to engage in open battles against his racist opponents reflected his confidence that such battles were being carried on, with signal success, by his favorite popular humorist.
PETROLEUM VESUVIUS NASBY TO THE RESCUE
Largely forgotten today, David Ross Locke was regarded in the nineteenth century as a strong influence on the fall of slavery. As the humor character Petroleum V. Nasby, Locke took on the Democratic horde. If cultural battles largely replaced open political ones for Lincoln during the war years, Locke emerged as perhaps the strongest anti-Democratic soldier on the cultural front. His immensely popular writings, it was said, were as responsible for the North’s victory as were Sherman’s troops. The Massachusetts politician George S. Boutwell, secretary of state under President Grant, declared in a speech at Cooper Union that “the crushing of the Rebellion could be credited to three forces: the Army, the Navy, and the Nasby Letters.”51 Charles Sumner affirmed, “Unquestionably [the Nasby letters] were among the influences and agencies by which disloyalty in all its forms was exposed, and public opinion assured upon the right side. It is impossible to measure their value. Against the devices of slavery and its supporters, each letter was like a speech or one of those songs that stir the people.”52 When Locke died in 1888, his obituary recalled of his Civil War writings, “They were copied into newspapers everywhere, quoted in speeches, read around camp fires of union soldiers, and exercised enormous influence in molding public opinion north in favor of vigorous prosecution of the war.”53 The New York Herald remarked of Nasby, “He was the most quoted man of letters in the country, and his oddities were repeated by statesmen, soldiers, the clergy—everybody.”54
Among those who repeated them was Lincoln, who read the Nasby sketches as they appeared in periodicals and books from 1861 onward.
Born in 1833 in Vestal, New York, near Binghamton, David Ross Locke came from an abolitionist family. His father, the tanner and shoemaker Nathaniel R. Locke, was a devout Methodist who strongly opposed slavery—“one of the original anti-slavery men of the country,” as a biographical sketch described him.55 David went to work at twelve for local newspapers and eventually found his way to Ohio, where he became a newspaper publisher and editor. In March 1861, he made his first appearance as the anti-Confederate Petroleum Nasby in an Ohio newspaper. He went on to become the editor of the Findlay (Ohio) Jeffersonian and then the Toledo Blade, where many other Nasby sketches appeared. The pieces were reprinted in countless newspapers throughout the North.
Locke and Lincoln admired each other immensely. They met twice in the 1850s, when the journalist Locke was in Illinois reporting on candidate Lincoln. They had an especially friendly meeting in Quincy, Illinois, in October 1858, just after the sixth Lincoln-Douglas debate. The two joked and talked politics. Later, Locke respected Lincoln’s performance as president. He was, Locke said, “The greatest man, in some respects, who ever lived, and in all respects the most lovable—a man whose great work gave him the heart of every human being—with a heart—throughout the civilized world. During the Civil War, Lincoln enjoyed Locke’s writings so much that he shared them with others, even in pressing situations. He committed to memory several of the sketches, which he recited spontaneously at key moments. When he didn’t have one stored in his brain, he pulled out a Nasby book and read from it. As Locke recalled, “He kept a pamphlet which contained the first numbers of the [Nasby] series in a drawer in his table, and it was his wont to read them on all occasions to his visitors, no matter who they might be, or what their business was.”
On a typical evening, a group of politicians and citizens appeared in the president’s office with a pile of official papers for him to consider. He eyed the documents wearily and pushed them aside. He asked one of the party, “Have you heard of Nasby? . . . There is a chap out in Ohio who has been writing a series of letters in the newspapers over the signature of ‘Petroleum V. Nasby.’ . . . I am going to write to ‘Petroleum’ to come down here, and I intend to tell him if he will communicate his talent to me, I will ‘swap’ places with him.”57 He pulled from his drawer a Nasby pamphlet and read one of the sketches aloud. He periodically broke out into an explosive laugh, of which a witness said, “The ‘neigh’ of a wild horse on his native prairie is not more undisguised and hearty.” Once he was done reading, he put down the pamphlet, resumed a serious look, and went back to work.
Locke said that in 1863 he received a letter from Lincoln, who wrote, “Why don’t you come to Washington and see me? Is there no place you want? Come on and I will give you any place you ask for—that you are capable of filling—and fit to fill.”58 The Ohioan went to Washington and spent “a delightful hour” with the president, though a government appointment did not result (which may have been just as well for Lincoln; Locke’s penchant for alcohol was as strong as that of his humorous persona, Nasby).59 Locke was back in Washington the next year, this time asking Lincoln to pardon an Ohio soldier who had deserted the army and gone home to save his relationship with a woman, who had started seeing someone else. The soldier won her back but faced execution for desertion. Lincoln extended a pardon, which Locke found characteristic: “No man on earth hated blood as Lincoln did, and he seized eagerly upon any excuse to pardon a man when the charge could possibly justify it. . . . He was as tender-hearted as a girl.”
What was it about David Ross Locke that made him unique in Lincoln’s eyes? In a word, Locke performed crucial cultural work for the president and the Republican Party. He fought political battles with an intensity and viciousness that Lincoln, as a unifying president, avoided. Locke’s mission as a humorist was to expose the racism and fundamental amorality of the growing number of Northern Democrats who took advantage of war weariness and complacency on slavery by calling for a peaceful compromise with the South, regardless of slavery.
Appalled by the reactionary drift of the Democrats, Locke appeared in newspapers as Petroleum V. Nasby, the ill-spoken, drunken lout who impersonated Democratic views. By grossly exaggerating these views, Locke made them laughably monstrous. If Lincoln loved American humor for its “grotesqueness,” Locke gave him that in spades, along with a sharp political message that sliced through Democrats. As the Detroit Tribune remarked, “During the war, Nasby’s pen was ‘mightier than the sword.’ Probably no such cheer came from any other pen to the Union soldier as came from his. To the enemy it was a rapier keen and dreaded.”60
Rarely in the cultural annals has political satire been taken to such caustic extremes as in the Nasby papers. Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby was as inflammable as his first name, as explosive as his middle name, and as nasty as his surname sounds.
To us, it’s shocking that Lincoln’s favorite humor character used the N-word liberally. Coming from Petroleum Nasby, however, the word was scathingly ironic—an ugly reflection of the racism Locke saw among conservatives. The Nasby character exposed the stupidity of Lincoln’s proslavery enemies.
In absurdly inept prose, full of misspellings and non sequiturs, Nasby, the quintessential Copperhead, calls for permanent white rule. His motto is “Ameriky for white men!” Declaring that “the crude, undeodorizd Afrikin is a disgustin obgik,” he is enraged by the increasing number of free blacks in the North.61 He yells, “Fellow-whites, arouse! The enemy is onto us! Our harths is in danger! When we hev a nigger for judge—niggers for teachers—niggers in pulpits—when niggers rool and controle society, then will yoo remember this warnin!” Well before the miscegenation controversy, Nasby asserted that rule by Republicans would give rise to interracial marriages. Insisting in that “the alarmin amalgamashun uv the races must be prohibbytid,” he asks, “Do yoo want to marry nigger wenches? Do yoo want yoor gushin daughters tied by indissoluble ties to disgustin buck niggers?”62 In 1864 he announced that he had learned “to spell and pronounce Missenegenegenashun.” “It’s a good word,” he wrote, if you want to knock down “a man uv straw that yoo set up yerself.”
Continuing to lampoon the proslavery crowd, Nasby has the Lincoln administration inevitably leading to black citizenship. He demanded: “Do yoo want a buck nigger to march up to the poles with yoo to vote? Do yoo want their children mixt with yoors in skools? Do yoo want em on juries and holdin offis in yoor township? My God! think uv it!”
In his frantic effort to prevent such “horrors,” Nasby calls for the revoking of the Emancipation Proclamation and the reinstatement of slavery. As the “Paster uv the Church uv the Noo Dispensayshun,” he bolsters his racism with scriptural evidence, such as the curse of Ham and Saint Paul’s return of an enslaved man to his owner. He has his Ohio congregation sing a hymn he has written: “Shel niggers black this land possess, / And mix with us up here? / Oh, no, my friends, we rather guess / We’ll never stand that ’ere.”63
Abandoning the pulpit, Nasby is drafted into the Union army and is shocked when he learns that he is fighting to emancipate “niggers.” He deserts his regiment and joins the Confederate army, only to find his pay, clothing, and food wretchedly poor. And so he deserts again, this time marrying a Southern woman, who, to his revulsion, turns out to be an octoroon (that is, one-eighth black). He leaves her and returns to Wingerts Corners, Ohio, where he devotes himself to Democratic politics.
Locke castigates the Copperheads by making them Nasby’s heroes. Nasby praises Clement Vallandigham (“the grate Vallandigum”), Fernando Wood (“Fernandywood, . . . that Sterlin Patryot and unkorruptible chrischen gentleman”), Samuel Cox (“the elegant Samcox”), the Ohio editor Samuel Medary (“Sammedary”), and Franklin “Peerse” (“that hi-toned man and wool-dyed Dimokrat”).64 He at first objects to the Democrats’ choice of “Micklellan,” a War Democrat, as their presidential candidate, but supports the ticket because of Little Mac’s running mate, the Copperhead George H. Pendleton. At one point, Nasby has a dream of a future utopian society in which blacks have been exterminated, Jefferson Davis is emperor, and Copperheads are royalty (Nasby is excited to find himself the “DOOK DE NASBY!”).
Utterly opposed to the war, which he says was “conseevd by John Brown and innoggeratid by A. Linkin,” Nasby goes to Washington and sees the president. Introducing himself as “a free-born Dimocrat,” who knows “that you er a goriller, a feendish ape, a thirster after blud,” Nasby says, “I speek.”65 He tells Lincoln he will back the war only if the president follows his commands to “revoak the Emansipashen proclamashen, . . . protect our dawters frum nigger eqwality, disarm yoor nigger soljers, and send back the niggers to ther owners to conciliate them.” Incensed by Lincoln’s unresponsiveness to these requests, Nasby leaves in a huff, saying, “Linkin! Goriller! Ape! I hev dun.”
Given Locke’s actual affection and respect for Lincoln, it must have been very hard for him to maintain the outrageous Copperhead pose. But maintain it he did. Petroleum Nasby announces his misery when Lincoln wins the 1864 election and becomes apoplectic when in early April 1865 Richmond and Petersburg fall to the Union:
Lee surrenderd! Why, this ends the biznis. Down goes the curtain. The South is conkered! CONKERED!! CONKERED!!! Linkin rides into Richmond! A Illinois rale-splitter, a buffoon, a ape, a goriller, a smutty joker, sets hisself down in President Davis’s cheer, and rites despatchis!66
The one time Locke dropped the Nasby mask was just after the Lincoln assassination. In reporting the event, Nasby comes close to calling Lincoln “the Goriller” and John Wilkes Booth “a patriot,” but he checks himself:
The nashen mourns! The hand uv the vile assassin hez bin raised agin the Goril—the head uv the nashen, and the people’s Father hez fallen beneath the hand uv a patr—vile assassin.
Immediately, however, Locke reassumes the Nasby persona; he has his bigoted rube regret that the president had not been killed in 1862, before the damage to Southern slavery had been done.
Lincoln’s enjoyment of Locke’s humor reveals that below his veil of moderation and caution lay a radically progressive self. Within the political centrist on his tightrope lurked a leftist abolitionist who loathed racism and wanted dramatic social change. Or to point to Petroleum V. Nasby’s middle name, Vesuvius, Lincoln was what Emily Dickinson called “a reticent Volcano,” “Vesuvius at Home”—phrases that captured the politically cautious but inwardly radical antiracist Lincoln. These Dickinson phrases could be applied as well to the outwardly conventional but rebellious Mary Todd Lincoln.
Because Locke’s words as Nasby were in exact reverse to his real meaning, we see the future America that Locke (and, by association, Lincoln) envisaged—an integrated nation in which people of color enjoyed full citizenship rights, and interracial marriage was permitted.
Because Locke’s writings were far more popular than those produced by Copperheads or Southerners, we can glean that the Northern public was more forward thinking on race than is customarily believed. While the publication of scurrilous and racist material about Lincoln by his political opponents points to a depth of feeling among those hostile to him and his problack policies, Nasby could never have been so successful unless there was a large number of Northerners who found the racists’ claims absurd and repellent. Nasby’s popularity points to a broad sympathy in the North toward the humanity of enslaved people and rejection of the racial ideas put forward to justify slavery.
This became increasingly true over the course of the war. A major reason for the public’s enlightenment on race was Lincoln’s embrace of black participation in the war.
AFRICAN AMERICANS AS SOLDIERS AND HUMANS
Early on, Lincoln ignored calls from Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, Simon Cameron, and others to enlist black troops. He feared that doing so would cause one or more of the border slave states to bolt to the Confederacy. When in March 1862 General David Hunter raised the First Carolina Colored Regiment by inducting contrabands, Lincoln refused to support it, just as he rejected Hunter’s decree of emancipation for Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. However, the Second Confiscation Act of July 1862 permitted the president to use contrabands in any military
