The language of this humor combines the human and the nonhuman: frontier screamers, also known as ring-tailed roarers, advertise themselves as “half-horse, half alligator, part earth-quake, and a little of the steamboat.”45 In one exchange, a screamer declares: “I can whip my weight in wild cats and ride straight through a crab apple orchard on a flash of lightning. Clear meat-ax disposition!”—answered by, “I can tote a steam boat up the Mississippi and over the Alleghany mountains. My father can whip the best man in Old Kaintuck and I can whip my father.”46 A female screamer can “laugh the bark off a pine tree, swim straight up a cataract, gouge out alligators’ eyes, dance a rock to pieces, sink a steamboat, blow out the moonlight . . .”47
Both the negative and positive aspects of the frontier are taken to weird extremes in this humor. The self-reliance and courage of the frontiersman becomes the unleashed braggadocio of the ring-tailed roarer. Closeness to nature becomes a complete merging of the human and nonhuman: a man or a woman is simultaneously a horse, a meat-axe, an alligator, a rooster, a streak of lightning, sired by a hurricane or an earthquake.
Lincoln, who knew his era’s culture from top to bottom, tapped into the kind of bawdy or scatological humor that was common on the frontier. He was sometimes called a “smutty” or “dirty” jokester, a label he didn’t reject. Once when someone suggested that he collect his humor in a volume, he held his nose and said, “Such a book would stink like a thousand privies.”48 A friend said, “Lincoln had 2 characters—one of purity—& the other as it were an insane love in telling dirty and Smutty Stories.”49
Because only a fraction of his jokes have survived, it’s impossible to say how many of them were coarse. But the ones that have been passed down appear to be relatively tame by current standards. He told a story about a sleepy boy who went to bed, his cat curling up beside him, when his fawning mother begged him to come show her house guests what a “fine, pretty and moral boy” he was. The boy growled, “Mother—damn it—let me alone till I f—k this damned old she cat and get her with kitten.”50 Another of Lincoln’s favorite jokes had him climbing a tree while a friend fell asleep below; for fun, Abe defecated into what he thought was his friend’s hat on the ground, not knowing that the friend had put Abe’s hat in its place.51 In another tale, Lincoln put a patriotic spin on scatology: he said that after the Revolutionary War, when the American hero Ethan Allen was visiting England, he used an outhouse and was asked by his hosts if he had seen the picture of George Washington they had hung there in mockery. Allen replied that he had not seen it but thought it was an appropriate place for the picture, because “nothing . . . Will Make an Englishman Shit So quick as the Sight of Genl Washington.”52 Lincoln also loved telling the story of a man who, while cutting a turkey at a dinner party, “expended too much force and let a fart—a loud fart so that all the people heard it distinctly.” The company fell silent, but the man bravely went on with his task, announcing, “Now by God I’ll see if I can’t cut up this turkey without farting.”53
Herndon noted that Lincoln told the latter story “to show the power of audacity, self-possession, quick-wittedness, etc.,” explaining that “the nib of the thing was what Lincoln was after.”54 Like the often vulgar frontier humor Lincoln knew well, his dirty jokes flouted the prudish conventions of bourgeois society. There were important differences, however, between Lincoln’s storytelling and frontier humor. None of his extant stories possess the structurelessness of frontier humor. Mark Twain once called the tall tale—the frontier exercise in hyperbole and lies rendered in a disconnected, rambling fashion—the one truly indigenous form of American humor.55 A typical hero of frontier humor, George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood, boasts, “I ladles out my words at random like a calf kicking at yaller jackets,” while another one, Joseph Glover Baldwin’s Ovid Bolus, endlessly “lied from a delight of invention and the charm of fictitious narrative Lincoln used images from frontier humor and other sources—so much so that he called himself “a retail dealer,” explaining that only about one out of six of his stories were original with him.57 Despite this heavy debt to popular sources, he was original as a storyteller. He did not string together directionless exaggerations, as did authors of tall tales. In most of his stories, he replaced disconnection with structure, obfuscation with meaning, and a message based on aggression with one envisioning democratic togetherness and human equality.
Whereas tall tales rambled without reaching a climax, Lincoln’s stories, even when lewd, were typically brief and purposeful. As his secretary John Nicolay said, “They were always short. Lincoln’s worst enemy never accused him of telling a long story. And they never lacked point . . .—told not for themselves alone, but in illustration of some point he saw and wished to make clear to others.”58Actually, he sometimes intentionally dragged out stories to stall for time or divert attention, but he kept their message in mind. Lincoln’s friend David Davis testified, “He used them for a purpose, and learned to use them because he could accomplish in a few minutes by one of his inimitable stories what would have exhausted hours to clear away by argumentative appliances.”59 William Herndon pointed out that “he loved a story however extravagant or vulgar, if it had a good point. . . . [I]f it exposed no weakness or pointed no moral, he had no use for it either in conversation or in public speech; but if it had the necessary ingredients of mirth and moral no one could use it with more telling effect.”60
THE FRONTIER CARNIVAL
By the mid-1820s, Abe was eager to move beyond the raw life of the Indiana frontier, but he could not go out on his own without reaching the legal age of twenty-one. Meanwhile, he learned much from frontier culture, which was crude and chaotic.
Lincoln was raised in what has been called a carnival culture: a folk society, aligned with nature’s rhythms, that brought together the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, the conventional and the subversive. Gatherings at frontier militia musters, elections, revivals, and court days were extraordinarily varied and cacophonous. Mingled together were prostitutes and maidens, gamblers and preachers, peddlers of fake and real products, all engaged in some kind of pitch, con, sport, or fight.61 This was the frontier carnival: the rawest expression of American democracy.
Lincoln knew the carnival well. As a youth he participated in logrollings, cornhuskings, weddings, court days, elections, house-raisings, dances, and other frontier events. Logrolling referred to the communal gathering and burning of logs a settler had cleared from the land, house-raising to the construction of a cabin with the aid of neighbors, housewarming to the party held in a house once it was built, cornhusking to the stripping of corn by competing groups. Most of these activities took place between the late fall and the spring. Several lasted for days. A house-raising could involve three days’ work by thirty neighbors. Elections typically stretched out over three days. At weddings, the marriage service was followed by all-night dancing and, within the next couple of days, by a party at the groom’s house known as the infare. There was also the frontier custom of the delayed funeral, whereby a funeral service was deferred until long after burial (sometimes up to a year) to allow for a “decent” time for grieving.
These and other frontier festivities were attended by people of all classes. Farmers and manual laborers mixed with judges, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and teachers. Not only were these events democratizing; they fostered a sense of cultural unity, too. Hospitality on the American frontier—both to neighbors and to complete strangers—became legendary. Mutual aid, enlivened by festivities and games, was a way of life.
All kinds of games and competitions took place at social events. Abe was almost always welcome there, as his strength was considered valuable in competition: “Whenever he appeared at logrollings, a joyous whoop went up, for his great strength was an asset to any team. . . . The team which enrolled Abe Lincoln usually defeated the other.”62
The negative side of these social activities was that they regularly involved drunkenness and violence. Liquor flowed freely. As Lincoln later recalled, “[T]o have a rolling or a raising, a husking or a hoe-down, any where without [alcohol] was positively insufferable.”63 It was considered bad manners not to offer liquor and just as impolite to refuse it. At elections, ten-gallon barrels of whiskey, positioned near polling booths, were provided by candidates.
Then there were the fights. Friendly games often deteriorated into fights so savage that today’s extreme fighting, with combatants punching and kicking each other in cages, seems tame by comparison. The only restraint on the frontier was that if an opponent cried “Enough!” the fight was over; other than that, there were few rules. A foreign visitor touring the Midwest observed that combatants “tear one another’s hair, bite off noses and ears, gouge out eyes, and, in short, endeavor to destroy or mutilate each other.”64 The western traveler Timothy Flint met many one-eyed people in “the region of gouging,” his name for the frontier, where, in his words, “Fights are characterized by the most savage ferocity. Gouging, or putting out the antagonist’s eyes by thrusting the thumbs into the sockets, is part of the modus operandi. . . . Kicking and biting are also ordinary means used in combat; I have seen several fingers that had been deformed, also several noses and ears, which have been mutilated, by this canine form of fighting.”65 Victors gained the respect and friendship of both their opponents and the community. Flint, for example, saw “a tall, profane, barbarous, and ruffian like looking man” who was “emphatically pronounced the ‘best’ man in the settlement” because he had “whipped” all the rest and had gouged out the most eyes.66 A diarist in Kentucky reported that “all the country round stood in awe” of a fighter who “was so dexterous in these matters that he had, in his time, taken out five eyes, bit off two or three noses and ears and spit them in the faces” of his opponents.67
How did Lincoln fit in with this raucous frontier culture? This was his natural element, said some, such as an acquaintance who said that “the young Lincoln of Pigeon Creek, like all his Indiana cronies, was pretty much of a rowdy,” and another who called him “nothing more than a wild harum scarum boy, and jumping and wrestling were his only accomplishments.”68
Jumping, wrestling, and other sports, yes; rowdy or harum-scarum activity, probably not. As well suited to the frontier carnival as Abe was, he was actually very different from most of its participants. Because he drank only moderately, drunkenness was not an issue for him. As for strength contests and rough-and-tumble fighting, he thrived on the former but shunned the latter.
He avoided fights when he could and, like his father, fended them off with a show of unusual toughness when he couldn’t. An example from the Indiana years was when Abe had a spat with his Pigeon Creek neighbor William Grigsby. The date and cause of the conflict are disputed—some say it occurred in 1826 over the ownership of a puppy; others date it three years later, caused by bad feelings over the “Chronicles of Reuben,” Abe’s satirical poem about the Grigsby family. William Grigsby challenged Abe, who refused the challenge, explaining that the fight would be unfair due to Abe’s greater strength and size. In his place, Abe offered his stepbrother John D. Johnston. In most versions of the story, Johnston was getting the worst of the fight when Abe stepped in, grabbed Grigsby, tossed him aside, and then confronted a crowd of Grigsby’s supporters who were present, announcing that he was “the big buck of the lick,” adding, “If any one doubts it, he has only to come on and whet his horns.” There was some scuffling, but no one wanted to tangle with the tall, powerful Abe, and the crowd dispersed.69
We see Abe’s unusual response to frontier culture when we look at his two trips by flatboat to New Orleans.70 The trips, the first beginning in Rockport, Indiana, in April 1828 and the second in New Salem, Illinois, in March 1831, occurred when rivers were swollen due to postwinter melt and spring rains—a customary time to transport northern produce for sale or barter in the slave states. Abe made his first 1,276-mile journey with Allen Gentry (the son of a local storekeeper) and the second 1,627-mile one with his stepbrother John, his second cousin John Hanks, and the businessman Denton Offutt. Abe helped build the flatboats—the first measuring fifteen feet by forty feet, the second, eighteen feet by fifty feet, each navigated with long oars called sweeps and a rear rudder—which were dismantled and sold as lumber in New Orleans before the return trip north by steamboat. The trips south took three to four weeks, the return trips about two weeks.
Vast stretches of wilderness interspersed with river towns—among them Memphis, Walnut Hills (Vicksburg), Natchez, Fort Adams, Baton Rouge, Donaldsonville, and Convent—made the trips both an extended frontier journey and a southern tour culminating in the cosmopolitan experience of New Orleans, with its creole population of French, Spanish, and Germans mingled with numerous free and enslaved blacks, the latter visible everywhere—at the pier, on the streets, and in auction houses.
Did Abe have a life-altering revelation about the horrors of slavery in New Orleans? That dramatic story, once common in Lincoln biographies, has been modified in recent times due to fragmentary evidence. On the first trip, Abe allegedly told Allen Gentry upon seeing an enslaved girl being examined on the auction block, “Allen, that’s a disgrace.”71 On the second trip, John Hanks recalled, “[W]e Saw Negroes Chained—maltreated—whipt & scourged. Lincoln Saw it—his heart bled— . . . I Can say Knowingly that it was on this trip that he formed his opinions of Slavery: it ran its iron in him then & there—. . . . I have heard him say—often & often.”72 Lincoln, though, recalled that Hanks didn’t make it to New Orleans, having returned home from St. Louis. But whether or not Hanks or Lincoln misremembered details of the trip, William Herndon also reported that Lincoln talked of witnessing slavery in New Orleans. This certainly makes sense, given the inescapable presence of the South’s peculiar institution in that city.
However, it is doubtful that the trip south reshaped Lincoln’s opinions on slavery. Lincoln’s statement that he hated slavery as long as he could remember takes us back long before New Orleans, to his earliest childhood years in Kentucky, where he probably witnessed slavery firsthand and heard it denounced in the pulpit. At any rate, it’s difficult to identify a transformative moment in Abe’s feelings about slavery, which seem to have been negative from the start. As Leonard Swett noted: “He believed from the first, I think, that the agitation of Slavery would produce its overthrow, and he acted upon the result as though it was present from the beginning.”73
Actually, what may be the most striking aspect of the New Orleans trips is how little they changed Abe, who returned from the trips as resistant to the excesses of frontier life as when he’d embarked on them. As in his quarrel with Grigsby, he used toughness to escape, rather than engage in, a fight. One night when he and Allen Gentry were tied up below Baton Rouge, they were assaulted by club-wielding blacks. As Lincoln related the incident in his third-person account to a biographer, he and Gentry “were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them. They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat, and then ‘cut cable,’ ‘weighed anchor’ and left.”74 This brief recollection played down an extremely violent episode, one that left Abe with scars
