Lincoln’s reputation as an allegorist is apparently well founded, as he leveraged fables to simplify or redefine complex situations before and during the Civil War. For example, Lincoln’s old friend Joshua Speed recalled Lincoln adapting one of Aesop’s fables in his reply to William Cabell Rives, who when serving on a Washington commission seeking to avoid the Civil War, apparently urged Lincoln to surrender federal property, including forts, in the South. According to Speed,
Mr. Lincoln asked him if he remembered the fable of the Lion and the Woodsman’s daughter. Mr. Reeves [sic] said that he did not. Aesop, said the President, reports that a lion was very much in love with a woodsman’s daughter. The fair maid, afraid to say no, referred him to her father. The lion applied for the girl. The father replied, your teeth are too long. The lion went to a dentist and had them extracted. Returning, he asked for his bride. No, the woodsman said, your claws are too long. Going back to the dentist, he had them drawn. Then, returning to claim his bride, the woodsman, seeing that he was disarmed, beat out his brains. “May it not be so,” Mr. Lincoln said, “with me, if I give up all that is asked.”
Zall notes that the story as Lincoln tells it differs from the contemporary translation of Aesop by Thomas James, wherein the woodsman merely drives away “the unreasonable suitor.”8 Lincoln’s revision here makes the story more ominous and, therefore, a better fit to the martial decisions of the time. But the fable operates like a joke, in that it personifies abstract complexities into recognizable character types (the woodsman, the kind daughter, the lion), allowing Lincoln to explain his perspective from a new point of view on surrendering federal property in the South.
Jesus also taught through parables, and the Bible provided Lincoln with another trove of images and stories that he could use to make political points. Because nineteenth-century Americans were, in general, extremely literate in biblical language and narratives, biblical allusions operated as a kind of lingua franca. Lincoln took considerable advantage of this fact. For instance, in accepting the Republican nomination to run against Stephen A. Douglas for a seat in the U.S. Senate, Lincoln in his House Divided speech on June 16, 1858, quoted Ecclesiastes 9:4 to excoriate Douglas for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln, speaking of Douglas and the act, told the crowd, “They remind us that he is a very great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones. Let this be granted. But ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion.’ Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion for this work, is at least a caged and toothless one.”9 Lincoln was responding, in part, to rumors that Douglas might garner Republican support for his reelection bid, in which case Lincoln would no doubt be asked to step aside.10 In aiming Ecclesiastes 9:4 squarely at Douglas and his tarnished reputation, Lincoln made the passage satiric by giving it a specific referent. In doing so, he leveraged his crowd’s moral assumptions for use against his satiric target and political rival. Democrats, in turn, during the 1858 campaign used Lincoln’s own metaphor against him, describing him as a “puppy-dog fighting a lion.”11
Secular sources of wit abounded in nineteenth-century America as well, and Lincoln also mined comic almanacs, joke books, and newspapers for humor that he could apply to his political life. J. H. Cheney tells of seeking Lincoln on a legal matter in spring 1859 and finding him “in the office reading what I took to be a comic almanac. He seemed to be very much amused and would frequently chuckle to himself.” The George Philip Hambrecht manuscripts at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, in listing Lincoln’s books, offer multiple entries of the well-known Joe Miller’s Jests and the American Almanac; Robert Bray’s annotated list of Lincoln’s books also includes the eighteenth-century joke books Joe Miller’s Jests and Quin’s Jests.12
In fact, many Lincoln stories are actually old Joe Miller jokes repurposed for modern events. For example, Admiral John Dahlgren—who was in charge of the Washington Navy Yard and spoke often with Lincoln—recorded in his diary Lincoln’s use of a very old joke, which in the 1845 edition of Joe Miller’s Jests had been about King George III and General James Wolfe, who won fame for taking Quebec in the Seven Years’ War. In 1862 Lincoln used the joke to describe his old political enemy James Shields, who, now a general, had fought off Stonewall Jackson at the Shenandoah Valley. Dahlgren writes, “About five o’clock A.M. the President came in from his room half dressed, and sat down between the Secretary [Stanton] and myself. He was reminded of a joke, at which we laughed heartily.” In the next day’s entry, Dahlgreen elaborates, “The President remarked yesterday that Shields was said to be crazy, which put him in mind that George III had been told the same of one of his generals, viz., that he was mad. The king replied he wished he would bite his other generals.” Here Lincoln kept the context of the original joke—that is, King George and the Seven Years’ War—but clearly offered an analogy to Shields by remarking that he was “said to be crazy.” The satiric target of this joke was not Shields, nor even necessarily “other generals,” but, rather, military standards and propriety that had little to do with actual fighting. Lincoln retold this joke in an interview a year later with updated referents: he replaced King George with himself, changed Wolfe to Ulysses S. Grant, and switched whiskey for madness.13 This shows just how adaptable such jokes were for Lincoln.
A similar adaptability is at work in an old joke that Lincoln seems to have told for different purposes at different times. A version of the joke had been in circulation since the seventeenth century, but Lincoln probably knew it from Seba Smith’s update of it in his Jack Downing letter “My First Visit to Portland,” initially published in 1830 and reprinted in 1858 in W. S. Burton’s Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor. According to Reverend George Minier, who had known Lincoln when he was a circuit lawyer, he told the joke to express bafflement at tariffs.
[T]here is something obscure about it. It reminds me of the fellow that came into a grocery down here in Menard County, at Salem, where I once lived, and called for a picayune’s worth of crackers; so the clerk laid them out on the counter. After sitting awhile, he said to the clerk, “I don’t want these crackers, take them, and give me a glass of cider.” So the clerk put the crackers back into the box, and handed the fellow the cider. After drinking, he started for the door. “Here, Bill,” called out the clerk, “pay me for your cider.” “Why,” said Bill, “I gave you the crackers for it.” “Well, then, pay me for the crackers.” “But I haint had any;” responded Bill. “That’s so,” said the clerk. “Well, clear out! It seems to me that I’ve lost a picayune somehow, but I can’t make it out exactly.” “So,” said Lincoln, after the laugh had subsided, “it is with the tariff; somebody gets the picayune, but I don’t exactly understand how.”
Obviously, there is nothing inherently political about this joke, which basically plays out a verbal shell game. The tariff issue is only brought in at the beginning and the end, as a contextualizing frame. By presenting himself as the confused clerk, Lincoln put himself in the politically awkward position of denying pretensions to technical knowledge on the subject. The implied argument is not that the tariff is necessarily bad for the country but that it is confusing and feels like fraud. In this way Lincoln—always a supporter of Whig policies of protective tariffs as encouraging industrial growth—aimed at collegiality with his audience, whom he expected to be confused by and suspicious of the tariff. Since it is only the frame and the idea of bafflement that makes the joke germane to the tariff issue in the first place, it is not surprising that Lincoln used the same joke in other political circumstances. For instance, when he told it in 1856, it was set in a restaurant, crackers became ginger cake, and Douglas’s plan of popular sovereignty was substituted for the tariff. Chicago lawyer John J. McGilvra recalled hearing Lincoln tell the same story at a White House gathering in response to a guest’s Kentucky story during the winter of 1863–64.14
Of course, Lincoln was not the only person in mid-nineteenth-century America recirculating old jokes. Newspapers and magazines also spread and popularized humor, and Lincoln, an avid
consumer of popular media, was not averse to repurposing newspaper and magazine wit for political speech. When, for instance, he used the language of a tall tale in his sixth debate with Douglas on October 13, 1858, to describe Douglas’s evolving principle of popular sovereignty as “thin as the homoepathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death [Roars of laughter and cheering],” he was recycling an image from Harper’s Monthly.15 If his auditors recognized it, they could feel a sense of commiseration with the candidate as a fellow devourer of printed media. If they did not, he came off as an original humorist.
Sometimes, Lincoln did not even have to tell a whole joke to get an audience response, so confident was he of his auditors’ familiarity with circulating humor. In his seventh and final debate with Douglas on October 15, 1858, Lincoln mocked Douglas’s ongoing fight with the James Buchanan administration. In fall 1857, proslavery Kansans dominated the Lecompton constitutional convention—mostly because Free Soilers had considered delegate elections fraudulent and boycotted the vote—and submitted a proslavery constitution to Congress. Buchanan, in a December 8 special message to Congress, urged admission of Kanas as a state despite its unrepresentative constitution. Douglas, concerned that the Lecompton constitution would hurt his reelection chances, denounced the president’s message then and had been at loggerheads with him ever since.16 Lincoln complimented Douglas for being “more severe upon the Administration than I had heard him upon any former occasion.” He wanted Douglas to “give it to them with all the power he had” but also admitted that he “would be very much obliged if they would Give it to him in about the same way.” Summarizing his feelings on the subject, Lincoln told the crowd, “All I can say now is to recommend to him and to them what I then commended—to prosecute the war against one another in the most vigorous manner. I say to them again—’Go it, husband!—Go it, bear!’ [Great laughter.]”17 Here Lincoln offers only the punch line to a well-known joke about a frontier woman who cannot decide whom she wants to win a fight between her rough-and-tumble husband and a bear. His setup mirrors the joke’s but does not allude to it at all; Lincoln trusted his audience’s comic literacy and felt that he need not point to the allegorical comparison he was making. The punch line is also funny in its rendering of Lincoln and Douglas as a married couple, given the increasing animosity of the debates.
Other examples of Lincoln repurposing newspaper and magazine quips are myriad. For instance, in illustrating “a fair sample of the way some people always do business,” Lincoln retold a popular story from Harper’s Weekly about a cooper who accidentally enclosed his son in a barrel after asking him to get inside and hold up the top as he finished assembling it. Lincoln also offered an anecdote—which had appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1856—about pigs crawling through fence rails so crooked that “every time the hogs got out they found themselves back in the same pasture again”—in order to prove “the absurdity of an army plan that would follow the Yazoo River to come at the Mississippi.”18 In these cases and others, Lincoln made humorous, politically neutral magazine anecdotes function satirically to redescribe political or military situations.
Lincoln, Partisan Politics, and Southwestern Humor
Even more influential to Lincoln’s political style than timeless jokes was the tradition of southwestern humor, which flourished exactly during the span of Lincoln’s political career, the 1830s into the 1860s. He owned Joseph Glover Baldwin’s famous Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi (1853) and reportedly told Baldwin that he kept a copy under his pillow.19 As with the jokes and fables that he leveraged for political ends, Lincoln often retold scenes from Flush Times and other works of southwestern humor and in doing so once again transformed humor into satire. For example, an 1867 Harper’s Magazine notes Lincoln’s recourse to a scene from Flush Times in response to a petitioner asking him to release men, women, and children detained by General David Hunter, famous for his unauthorized 1862 order, which Lincoln quickly rescinded, to free slaves in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. In Lincoln’s version of the story, a judge who was fond of handing out fines blamed all present in his courtroom when a stove pipe fell and interrupted court business. He yelled to his clerk to “enter a fine against every one in the room, women and children excepted.” Though the petitioner was, doubtless, not amused at being put off by such a story, in telling it Lincoln deflected the petitioner’s implied criticism while expressing his understanding of the issues involved. Lincoln’s recourse to Baldwin’s humor is also evident in an 1865 recollection by painter Francis Carpenter, who resided at the White House for six months while completing a portrait of Lincoln. Carpenter recounted a Flush Times scene Lincoln told about Baldwin’s character Sar Kasem.20
Lincoln’s use of southwestern humor as a political-satirical tactic extends far back, to as early as 1832, when, according to J. Rowan Herndon, a New Salem settler and cousin of William Herndon, Lincoln gave a political speech in which he told a story about a “meeting-house” that
was in the woods and quite a distance from any other house. It was only used once a month. The preacher—an old line Baptist—was dressed in coarse linen pantaloons, and shirt of the same material. The pants, manufactured after the old fashion, with baggy legs and a flap in front, were made to attach to his frame without the aid of suspenders. A single button held his shirt in position, and that was at the collar. He rose up in the pulpit and with a loud voice announced his text thus: “I am the Christ, whom I shall represent to-day.” About this time a little blue lizard ran up underneath his roomy pantaloons. The old preacher, not wishing to interrupt the steady flow of his sermon, slapped away on his legs, expecting to arrest the intruder; but his efforts were unavailing, and the little fellow kept on ascending higher and higher. Continuing the sermon, the preacher slyly loosened the central button which graced the waist-band of his pantaloons and with a kick off came that easy-fitting garment. But meanwhile Mr. Lizard had passed the equatorial line of waist-band and was calmly exploring that part of the preacher’s anatomy which lay underneath the back of his shirt. Things were now growing interesting, but the sermon was still grinding on. The next movement on the preacher’s part was for the collar button, and with one sweep of his arm off came the tow linen shirt. The congregation sat for an instant as if dazed; at length one old lady in the rear of the room rose up and glancing at the excited object in the pulpit, shouted at the top of her voice, “If you represent Christ then I’m done with the Bible.”
This story comes straight from “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards,” a sketch of Sut Lovingood, the pseudonym of George Washington Harris, which recounts the above scene as a retributive practical joke on an overzealous preacher. The sketch appeared in Sut Lovingood’s 1867 book Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool. This could mean that Herndon misremembered Lincoln’s 1832 anecdote and unwittingly replaced it with Lovingood’s or, more likely, that versions of the story had been in circulation for over thirty years; Harris’s sketch certainly fits within a long tradition of camp-meeting tales. But most important here is Herndon’s description of the purpose of the anecdote, which he said Lincoln “told somewhere in his speech, in reply to some of the opposite candidates, who had represented themselves something extra.”21 Most scholars of southwestern humor see it as politically motivated but not necessarily satire. But Lincoln, in recontextualizing the comic story as a parable for politicians who “represented themselves something extra,” once again changed the joke’s referent from a general type (country preacher, rubes) to particular candidates who could be described and, thus, satirically leveled by comparison to that general type. It is in this way that Lincoln made southwestern humor function as political satire.
Lincoln had much in common with prominent southwestern humorists. First of all, many southwestern humorists were, like Lincoln, lawyers who swapped stories in small-town courthouses and taverns while riding the circuit. Baldwin was both a lawyer and a politician; A
ugustus Longstreet, author of the seminal work of southwestern humor, Georgia Scenes, was a circuit-riding lawyer; humorists Johnson Hooper (pseudonym Simon Suggs) and Solomon Franklin Smith also worked as lawyers. Contemporaries and modern critics alike have noted the influence of the profession’s tradition of oral storytelling on southwestern humor. Philip Paxton, in A Stray Yankee in Texas (1853), for instance, contends that circuit court lawyers,
living as they do in the thinly inhabited portion of our land, and among a class of persons generally very far their inferiors in point of education, rarely enjoying anything that may deserve the name of intellectual society, are too apt to seek for amusement in listening to the droll stories and odd things always to be heard at the country store or bar-room. Every new expression and queer tale is treasured up, and new ones manufactured against the happy time when they shall meet their brothers-in-law at the approaching term of the district court.
If ever pure fun, broad humor, and “Laughter holding both his sides,” reign supreme, it is during the evening of these sessions. Each one empties and distributes his well filled budget of wit and oddities, receiving ample payment in like coin, which he pouches, to again disseminate at his earliest opportunity.22
Paxton’s description evinces not only the scenes of camaraderie in which Lincoln and his fellows, like several southwestern humorists and theirs, swapped stories and honed their satiric styles but also the ways in which comic stories could circulate at regular intervals through the rural court circuit.
The National Joker Page 3