The maneuver allowed Lincoln to refigure the weakness of his position into a strength in the public’s eye, reprovisioning the fort nonviolently forced the Confederacy’s hand while insulating the federal government from charges of coercion or aggression. In this way, Lincoln “cast coercion in the mold of defense,” outsmarting his opponents and shielding his administration from blame or responsibility for starting a war.42 Tellingly, Lincoln and his cohorts described the fall of Sumter to each other in the terms of “winning by losing.” Lincoln told friend and adviser Orville Browning that the fort, in falling, “did more service than it otherwise could”; Bostonian Oliver Ellsworth described the loss of Sumter as “the greatest victory the people ever realised; it has done its work effectually.”43 As these language choices show, Lincoln’s administrative tactics were quite similar to his self-satiric political and campaign strategies. During the Fort Sumter crisis, Lincoln let everything go except the main chance; in forcing the South to live up to its own grandiloquent rhetoric, he redefined the seceded states as the aggressor instead of a victim of federal strength.
Though the stakes and nature of the problem differed, Lincoln used a similar strategy in response to Chase’s underhanded seeking of the Republican nomination in 1864 while still serving as Lincoln’s secretary of treasury. In this case, as with Fort Sumter, Lincoln turned a seemingly negative situation to his own strategic advantage. Though friends advised Lincoln to accept Chase’s resignation or at least to forbid him from such political maneuvering, Lincoln said that he would prefer to let “Chase have his own way in these sneaking tricks than getting into a snarl with him by refusing him what he asks.” This deference was not mere politeness or timidity. Rather, he understood that Chase would be less of a threat if he kept busy with his cabinet duties than if he were free to launch a presidential campaign. Additionally, Lincoln was well aware that Chase’s presidential ambitions would make him work harder to be seen as an effective and distinguished treasury secretary. This ploy is evident in a joke attributed to Lincoln wherein he responds to calls to remove Chase with a “little story.”
That reminds me of a farmer out West. He was ploughing with his old mare Nance one hot summer day, and his son was following another plough in an adjoining furrow. A horse-fly got on Nance’s nose, and the son kept yelling to his daddy to stop and get the fly off the mare’s nose. The father paid no attention to his vociferous son for a while. Finally the son kept yelling about the fly on Nance’s nose until the old man answered,—
“Now, low-a-here, jist keep quiet; that ere fly on Nance’s nose makes her go faster.”
Like most Lincoln stories, this one turns humor into satire by repurposing an apolitical joke to specifically political purposes, as an allegory to simplify a complex political situation. In this case, Chase’s ambitions to replace Lincoln are rendered as a benefit to Lincoln’s administration; the “horsefly” of ambition spurs Chase to go about his work with greater energy. To keep Chase in his cabinet, Lincoln killed his treasury secretary’s presidential bid with kindness. In one of Chase’s many letters complaining about Lincoln’s “disjointed method of administration,” he admitted that “the President has always treated me with such personal kindness and has always manifested such fairness and integrity of purpose, that I have not found myself free to throw up my trust. . . . So I still work on.”44 Here as elsewhere, Lincoln used his opponent’s strength against him by appealing to his vanity and ambition. In his dealings with Chase and in the Fort Sumter crisis, Lincoln redefined the terms of engagement to his own advantage. Such nuanced statesmanship belies his aw-shucks demeanor and humble background and, thus, underscores the synergy Lincoln saw among modesty, political rhetoric, and political practice.
CHAPTER 3
The Rail-Splitter President
“So you’re Abe Lincoln?”
“That’s my name, sir,” answered Mr. Lincoln.
“They say you’re a self-made man,” said the Democrat.
“Well, yes,” said Mr. Lincoln, “what there is of me is self-made.”
“Well, all I’ve got to say,” observed the old man after a careful survey of the statesman before him, “is, that it was a d——n bad job.”
This story, purported to be an exchange between Lincoln and an old Illinois Democrat after Lincoln had been chosen as the state’s Republican candidate for president in 1860, demeans Lincoln’s awkward appearance (but, then, so did Lincoln) while reinforcing his success story.1 Taking his physical appearance as representing the quality of his rise in the world, the joke mocks Lincoln as the ultimate embodiment of the self-made man. Self-made men personify the ideals (and, as the above joke shows, the paradoxes) of representative democracy. That is, if elected officials are supposed to be somehow of the electorate but superior, to stand for our ideals and interests but also to work in a national instead of local milieu, then we need politicians who can move comfortably between Washington, D.C., and places like rural Illinois and translate them to each other. Lincoln’s satire and his personal history helped him to assure voters and politicians that he could do precisely this. The concept of representation also implies that the representative is not just a stand-in for his or her constituents but also a model for them. Through the nascent antebellum rhetoric of the self-made man, Lincoln fostered an image of himself as representative in this way. He was deeply invested in this rhetoric, which, at midcentury, “represented a heroic ideal,” and he consciously crafted an identity and narrative to fit it. Indeed, historian Richard Hofstadter, in characterizing the “myth of the self-made man,” contends, “Keenly aware of his role as the exemplar of the self-made man, he played the part with an intense and poignant consistency that gives his performance the quality of a high art.”2
This manufactured identity that mapped to the familiar rags-to-riches storyline began with Benjamin Franklin’s own self-fashioning in his Autobiography and reached its apotheosis in the person of Abraham Lincoln, the backwoodsman-turned-president.3 Lincoln’s rise coincided with the era of the self-made man in American culture. Beginning in the 1830s, a spate of novels, self-help books, and conduct manuals narrated paths to economic and moral success through hard work and self-culture. Such overlaying of individual and national progress mirrored Lincoln’s story and his politics. Lincoln labored to perpetuate his folksy image, which emphasized both his connection to common people and his impressive, lifelong efforts at self-improvement. Lincoln highlighted the very fact of his self-making by foregrounding both his current position and his humble origins, a move that celebrated his rise while mitigating satiric attempts to paint him as a backwoods rube. Analysis of Lincoln’s and his campaigns’ use of the rhetoric and politics of the emergent concept of the self-made man reveals how visual satires that ridiculed Lincoln’s humble origins ultimately backfired, instead making him appear more representative of Americans rather than less qualified for office.
The Politics of Self-Making
The story of Lincoln’s rise was made famous not only by mythologizers, such as Horatio Alger, but also by Lincoln himself. For instance, in an 1832 handbill in which he first offered himself as a candidate for the Illinois General Assembly, Lincoln announced, “I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of this county, and if elected they will have conferred a favor upon me, for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate.”4 In this speech the twenty-two-year-old Lincoln highlighted his solitary condition: he lacked wealthy and influential benefactors, and leaving home to strike out on one’s own was an important element of the myth of the self-made man. He then described the political work he wished to do as “labors,” connecting farming and manual labor to the political process in a concrete way.
Lincoln certainly shaped his life narrative to conform to the rhetoric of the self-made man, who, in general, tended “to boast of his achievement, to exaggerate the obsc
urity of his origin.”5 Lincoln was born in a log cabin and did rise from tremendous poverty, but he seems to have exaggerated his penchant for physical labor. Indeed, in his early years, Lincoln was considered almost indolent. Neighbor John Romine remembered that Lincoln in his Indiana days “was awful lazy: he worked for me—was always reading & thinking—used to get mad at him.” Lincoln’s cousin Dennis Hanks, too, thought that “Lincoln was lazy—a very lazy man—He was always reading—scribbling—writing—Ciphering—writing Poetry &c.&c.” Lawyer Stephen T. Logan thought Lincoln, upon his arrival in Springfield, to be “sort of a loafer.” Lincoln’s own stepmother said he “didn’t like physical labor—was diligent for Knowledge—wished to Know.”6 Lincoln’s childhood preference for headwork over physical labor was not appreciated in a time and place when and where thinking was not yet fully embraced as actual labor. He came of age in a transitional historical moment when Americans were just beginning to redefine what constituted work, distinguishing mental and physical labor, and finally accepting both as real work.7 So, in playing up in later years the very labor he seems to have loathed, Lincoln stressed his familiarity with both types of work and implied their permeability: that is, one could begin, out of necessity, with hard work and then self-educate oneself into headwork. He was careful to valorize labor while self-fashioning himself as a representative of those who could move beyond it. It seems that the further Lincoln got from his humble roots, the more he emphasized them.
For instance, Lincoln had a hand in the public relations blitz of self-made–man imagery that anchored his 1860 campaign. Illinois Republican politico Richard J. Oglesby, not Lincoln, came up with the famous “rail-splitter” and “Honest Abe” nicknames, but there is evidence that Lincoln understood the benefits of such symbols and approved, even encouraged, their use. The rail-splitter tactic—following in a well-hewn political tradition that stretches back through Andrew Jackson’s “Old Hickory” image, William Henry Harrison’s log-cabin campaign, and Zachary Taylor’s “Rough and Ready” persona—was certainly effective; one Lincoln scholar calls the designation of Lincoln as a rail-splitter “the greatest publicity stunt ever staged for a political candidate.” It functioned by aligning to the standard narrative of self-making in that it “made much more of where he had begun life than where he had ended up.”8
Lincoln’s previous mentions in political speeches of his laboring past, in part, sanctioned the rail-splitter symbol. In the 1860 campaign biography that he composed in the third person for attorney and journalist John Scripps, Lincoln described in detail his early poverty, his work as a laborer, surveyor, and merchant, and his various attempts to keep “soul and body together.” He also included references to rail-splitting. Of his childhood, he said, “A. though very young, was large of his age, and had an axe put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twentythird [sic] year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument—less, of course, in plowing and harvesting seasons.” In this sentence Lincoln pictured himself as “constantly handling” the ax—a symbol of both labor and national progress—put down only to begin the equally important nation-building work of agricultural labor. He described his family’s emigration to Illinois: “Here they built a log-cabin, into which they removed, and made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised a crop of sow[n] corn upon it the same year. These are, or are supposed to be, the rails about which so much is being said just now, though they are far from being the first, or only rails ever made by A.”9 Lincoln here acknowledges and authenticates the mania for the “Lincoln rails” started at the Chicago convention, associates them with the self-sufficiency of western yeomanry, and, in assuring readers that he had split many another rail, situates the rails as emblematic of continuing labor instead of a one-time effort. Nearly two-thirds of this biography, which was written explicitly for a political campaign, narrates the struggles of Lincoln’s prepolitical life, a striking proportion that indicates Lincoln’s awareness of the political value of his origin story.
William Dean Howells’s 1860 campaign biography The Life of Abraham Lincoln also structures Lincoln’s story through tropes of the self-made man. Because Lincoln corrected a facsimile of this biography, we can assume that he at least tacitly agreed with its approach. In narrating Lincoln’s youth, Howells stresses his “decent poverty” and an education that came mostly through “the rough and wholesome experiences of border life,” through which Lincoln “ripened into a hardy physical manhood, and acquired a wide and thorough intelligence, without the aid of schools or preceptors.” In describing Lincoln’s hardscrabble youth and cobbled-together education on the frontier as ultimately healthful, Howells resituates difficult circumstances as valuable opportunities for self-making. His description of Lincoln’s use of the ax mirrors Lincoln’s own verbiage: “Abraham was a hardy boy, large for his years, and with his ax did manful service in clearing the land. Indeed, with that implement, he literally hewed out his path to manhood; for, until he was twenty-three, the ax was seldom out of his hand, except in intervals of labor, or when it was exchanged for the plow, the hoe, or the sickle.”10 Other than a few rhetorical flourishes, this sentence repeats Lincoln’s own description of his ax work (quoted above), with the important exception that Howells makes crystal clear the importance of the ax as a symbol of self-making in the wording “he literally hewed out his path to manhood” through “that implement.” In Howells’s political hagiography, the ax was not just a tool of national progress but also of individual improvement.
For Howells, Lincoln’s supposed aptitude for labor is a metaphor for his governing style. Howells describes Lincoln’s travel to sessions of the Illinois legislature in the terms of a striving youth making sacrifices for betterment of self and state: “Lincoln used to perform his journeys between New Salem and the seat of government on foot, though the remaining eight of the Long-Nine traveled on horseback.” In the copy that he reviewed, Lincoln crossed out this passage and wrote in the margin, “No harm, if true; but, in fact, not true.” This comment demonstrates Lincoln’s awareness of the usefulness of such fictions, especially since the correction was to be implemented only in future editions published after the 1860 election. Howells used similar rhetoric in describing Lincoln’s political approach in Congress: “as Abraham Lincoln never sat astride of any fence, unless in his rail-splitting days; as water was never carried on both of his square shoulders; . . . so, throughout his Congressional career, you find him the bold advocate of the principles which he believed to be right. He never dodged a vote. He never minced matters with his opponents.”11 The implication here is that his work as a laborer gave Lincoln a practical bent that made him less likely to equivocate politically.
Of course, the mythos of self-making had been deployed by politicians before Lincoln. It was Lincoln’s political idol, Henry Clay, who coined the term “self-made man” in 1832, ten years before the epithet would be applied to Lincoln himself.12 Previous generations of Lincoln’s fellow Whigs had worked to associate ideas of national progress through internal improvements with the individual ethos of self-improvement. Many have noted the similarities between the 1860 Lincoln campaign’s use of the rail-splitter image and Harrison’s 1840 “log cabin and hard cider” campaign. But Lincoln, unlike the Virginia aristocrat Harrison, really did split rails and did emerge from poverty. A closer predecessor to Lincoln in terms of the political value of rustic self-presentation might be Tennessee congressman David Crockett.
Like Jackson before him and Lincoln after him, Crockett was a westerner, a veteran of the Indian wars, and a minimally formally educated, self-made man. Crockett was initially elected to Congress as a Jacksonian Democrat but split with Jackson over the issues of internal improvements and Western Tennessee land grants. After this split, Crockett liked to say that he was still a Jacksonian but that Jackson was not. According to the ghostwritten Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East, Crockett said,<
br />
as long as General Jackson went strait [sic], I followed him; but when he began to go this way, and that way, and every way, I wouldn’t go after him: like the boy whose master ordered him to plough across the field to the red cow. Well, he began to plough, and she began to walk; and he ploughed all forenoon after her. So when the master came, he swore at him for going so crooked. “Why, sir,” said the boy, “you told me to plough to the red cow, and I kept after her, but she always kept moving.”13
This joke prefigures Lincoln’s use of humor as political allegory in its repurposing of a farming anecdote to attack Jackson as politically shifty. Its rusticity is highlighted by the northeastern context—a dinner party in Massachusetts—in which Crockett allegedly told the joke, again foregrounding his frontier roots.
After his political switch, the Whigs exploited Crockett—who, his biographers say, was politically naive—and refashioned him into a living legend and political attack dog. The basis of those attacks was Crockett’s own back story as a legendary frontiersman. In his 1834 autobiography, Crockett described his origins in a manner similar to how Lincoln would characterize his own twenty-six years later. Crockett highlighted his modest beginnings: “I stood no chance to become great in any other way than by accident. As my father was very poor, and living as he did far back in the back woods, he had neither the means nor the opportunity to give me, or any of the rest of his children, any learning.” Crockett claimed that his schooling only totaled about one hundred days. This parallels Lincoln’s description of settling “in an unbroken forest,” which limited him to attending “A.B.C. schools by littles” such that “the agregate [sic] of all his schooling did not amount to one year.”14
The National Joker Page 9