On Monday morning, September 22, 1862, five days after the terrible Battle of Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln sent his cabinet “sudden and peremptory” orders to attend an unscheduled meeting at the White House. Some may have suspected, but none were sure what had prompted the urgent summons.
When Lincoln stepped into the room at noon, each cabinet member tried to read in the president’s face what was on his mind. It must be something dire—perhaps worse news from George McClellan, who had let Robert E. Lee’s badly damaged Confederate army withdraw across the Potomac without demolishing it after Antietam. That had been the war’s bloodiest day: 23,000 men killed, wounded and missing, more than half of them Union men. Some called the battle a draw, some considered it a Union victory because it turned Lee back to Virginia.
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, no fan of McClellan or Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, had written in his diary the night before that “the Rebels have crossed the river without being hurt or seriously molested—much in character with the general army management of the war. Little is said on the subject. Stanton makes an occasional sneering remark, [Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P.] Chase now and then a better one, but there is no general review, inquiry, or discussion.”
At first the president chatted genially about nothing. Then he produced a thin paperback volume and started to read aloud. It was not news from the front, however, but the latest collection of outrageous tales from newspaper humorist Artemus Ward, whose real name was Charles Farrar Browne.
This article was titled “High-handed Outrage at Utica,” and it began: “In the faul of 1856, I showed my show in Utiky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York. The people gave me a cordual recepshun. The press was loud in her prases. 1 day as I was givin a descripshun of my Beests and Snails in my usual flowry stile what was my skorn & disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord’s Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and drag him out on the ground.”
It went on from there, more ridiculous with each paragraph, telling how the raging citizen mauled the wax Judas, declaring that it had no place in righteous “Utiky.” Finally, Lincoln got to Ward’s punch line: “I sood him, and the joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3rd degree.”
According to Stanton: “Not a member of the Cabinet smiled; as for myself, I was angry, and looked to see what the President meant. It seemed to me like buffoonery.” But Chase wrote in his diary that Stanton was the only one who did not seem to enjoy the president’s excursion into nonsense. Stanton, in fact, had once actually walked out when Lincoln told one of his homespun tales during a meeting. The president apparently tolerated his disrespectful actions because Stanton was so valuable to the war effort.
All chuckling subsided when Lincoln at last disclosed why he had called them together. He told his cabinet that he had been waiting for weeks, promising himself, as Welles wrote, that “if God gave us victory in the approaching battle he would consider it an indication of Divine will.” Lincoln had decided that Antietam was victory enough—“God had made his decision in favor of the slaves”—and the time had come to make the most meaning ful statement of public policy since the Declaration of Independence. After weeks of drafting and redrafting, he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that as of January 1, 1863, all slaves in the rebellious states would be free.
Stanton recalled that he was astonished at the announcement, and rushed forward to shake Lincoln’s hand. “Mr. President,” he said, “if reading chapters of Artemus Ward is a prelude to such a deed as this, the book should be filed among the archives of the nation and the author should be canonized. Henceforth I see the light, and the country is saved.” To that, everyone present said, “Amen.”
Lincoln invited comments from those present, accepting a few minor changes to the text. Then he sent it to be formally inscribed and published in the next day’s newspapers, setting off great rejoicing among the capital’s African Americans, slave and freedman alike.
That day in September is just one of many times when Lincoln laughed to distract himself from the “terrible weight of care and sense of responsibility” the 16th president carried as he led the nation in its fratricidal war. But it is far from the best example, either of the president’s own wit or of the works of the rambunctious satirists whose writing so amused Lincoln and the rest of the country during those troubling times.
There was a vast contradiction between Lincoln’s unforgettable, almost poetic use of the language on somber occasions and the free-form spontaneity of his everyday conversation. This was the politician who closed his first inaugural address with the hope that “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” That same man carried with him an encyclopedic collection of jokes and sometimes bawdy stories, filed away in his prodigious memory, to be pulled out of his head at just the right instant.
Most of Lincoln’s repertoire was accumulated during the years he spent as a circuit-riding lawyer, in courtrooms, taverns and boarding houses across Illinois. A fellow attorney and humorist recalled with envy that the future president “saw ludicrous elements in everything.”
German-born reporter Henry Villard, who had covered Lincoln in Springfield, was at first put off by the future president’s “notorious” storytelling, but quickly learned to appreciate how skillfully he used it “to explain a meaning or enforce a point, the aptness of which was always perfect.” Old Abe’s cache of anecdotes numbered in the hundreds, and the list that others attributed to him is still growing even today.
Allen Thorndike Rice, who collected reminiscences of Lincoln’s friends, wrote that “Story after story and trait after trait, as varying in value as in authenticity, has been added to the Lincolniana, until at last the name of the great war President has come to be a biographic lodestone, attracting without distinction or discrimination both the true and the false….It may, indeed, be doubted whether his entire presidential term would have sufficed to utter the number attributed to him.” Still, the Lincoln material that is documented in authentic accounts by his friends and associates is more than enough to qualify him as the most irrepressibly humorous president in American history.
Many of those accounts make clear that in his 49 months as president Lincoln used humor to solace himself and those around him when things were darkest. Once when asked why he so often turned away grief with a jest, he said: “I laugh because I must not cry. That’s all—that’s all.”
New York Times correspondent Sarah Jane Lippincott Clarke, known to her readers as Grace Greenwood, once met with Lincoln, who praised her for her work in promoting abolition. She later wrote that she had studied the face of “the man on whose single life hung the destinies of a country and the redemption of a race. It was always the same impression. Under the pleasantest light of his eyes I divined a depth of melancholy unfathomable.” Yet the reporter said she understood the “‘saving grace’ of those gifts of imagination and humor, which gave him temporary ‘surcease from sorrow,’ and the soul-weariness of helpless pity.”
New York Assemblyman, later Senator, Chauncey Depew echoed Greenwood’s assessment. He wrote that Lincoln “virtually carried on in his own mind not only the civic side of the government, but all the campaigns. And I knew when he threw himself (as he once did when I was there) on a lounge, and rattled off story after story, that it was his method of relief, without which he might have gone out of his mind.”
Rice considered Lincoln “melancholy without being morbid….that this sense of humor often enabled him to endure the most cruel strokes, [things] that called for his sense of pity and cast a gloom over his official life. On these occasions he would relieve himself by comparing trifles with great things and great things with trifles. No story was too trivial or even too coarse for his purpose—provided that it aptly illustrated his ideas or served his policy.” Lincoln himself once wrote: “You have little idea of the terrible weight of care and sense of responsibility of this office of mine….if to be at the head of Hell is as hard as what I have to undergo here, I could find it in my heart to pity Satan himself.”
Less than three months after the bloody Battle of Antietam, Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside succeeded McClellan and suffered a lopsided defeat to Robert E. Lee’s Confederates at Fredericksburg. After visiting the battlefield, Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin was summoned to the White House upon returning to the capital. Lincoln pressed him for details of what he had seen, and Curtin described the mass Union massive casualties, many of them still lying on the field.
“Mr. President,” he concluded, “it was not a battle, it was a butchery.” Lincoln’s face betrayed his anguish. Seeing that the president looked as though he was about to break down, Curtin took his hand and apologized for bringing such crushing news, saying, “I am deeply touched by your sorrow, and at the distress I have caused you….I would give all I possess to know how to rescue you from this terrible war.”
The president looked down at Curtin, clearly moved by his concern. “This reminds me,” he said, “of an old farmer out in Illinois that I used to know. He took it into his head to go into hog raising. He sent out to Europe and imported the finest breed of hogs he could buy.” Lincoln explained that the farmer’s two mischievous sons let one of the hogs out of its pen, after which it chased one of them up a tree and went after the other. “The only way the boy could save himself was by hanging onto the hog’s tail. The hog would not give up his hunt nor the boy his hold! After they had made a good many circles around the tree, the boy’s courage began to give out, and he shouted to his brother, ‘I say, John, come down, quick, and help me let this hog go!’” The president concluded: “Now, Governor, that is exactly my case. I wish someone would come and help me let this hog go!”
That tale was typical of Lincoln: Although unscripted, it precisely fit the moment. It was a considered reaction to improve a gloomy situation, in this case Governor Curtin’s spirits.
No doubt Edwin Stanton was annoyed when the White House doorkeeper interrupted a cabinet meeting to announce that Orlando Kellogg, who had served in Congress with Lincoln, was waiting outside to tell a story. Lincoln said to let him in immediately. He shook hands warmly with Kellogg and introduced him to the cabinet, proclaiming: “This is my old friend Orlando Kellogg, and he wants to tell us the story of the stuttering justice. Let us lay all business aside, for it is a good story.” So they did, “and the wheels of the public business stopped, although the clouds of war were lowering, while the humorous Kellogg, with Lincoln convulsed with laughter, furnished them a little lubrication with a ‘good story.’”
Just as he did on many other occasions, Lincoln listened with enjoyment to a story by an old friend that day, seemingly not worried that some of his cabinet members might be offended by a brief intermission for levity. Sadly, any clue as to what was so funny about the stuttering justice seems to have been lost to history.
While much of the time the president’s wit seems in retrospect to have been purposeful—to charm a new acquaintance, disarm a courtroom opponent, gently turn away an office-seeker or cushion another day of suffering—it flowed so naturally that it must certainly have been born of his personality. Whenever Lincoln ran into an acquaintance on the street, he was likely to say, “Oh, that reminds me of a story…” and be off. What came next did not have to have a clear point.
There was one tale, for example, about a traveler passing by in the rain when a man with a whiskey voice shouted from a window, “Hullo! Hullo!” When the traveler asked what he wanted, the whiskey voice responded, “Nothing.” The traveler asked, “Well, what in the devil do you shout hullo for when people are passing by?” The answer was, “Well, what in the devil are you passing by for when people are shouting hullo?”
Of course, not everyone is good at telling jokes. What apparently made the president’s wit so memorable was not just the content, the words themselves, but what Villard describes as the “grotesque joviality” of his delivery. A fellow Illinois lawyer reported that Lincoln “laughed as loudly as others at his own witticisms, and provoked laughter as much by the quizzical expression of his homely features, and the heartiness of his own enjoyment, as by the drollery of his anecdotes.”
Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s partner and bodyguard, recalled that the president “frequently said that he lived by his humor, and would have died without it. His manner of telling a story was irresistibly comical, the fun of it dancing in his eyes and playing over every feature. His face changed in an instant; the hard lines faded out of it, and the mirth seemed to diffuse itself all over him, like a spontaneous tickle. You could see it coming long before he opened his mouth, and he began to enjoy the ‘point’ before his eager auditors could catch the faintest glimpse of it.”
Lincoln’s wartime secretary, John Hay, once wrote that the president had an “intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority” that galled proud rivals such as Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase. Hay was referring to serious matters of state and politics, but Lincoln was quick to defend his own standing as a champion raconteur as well.
For example, Lawrence Gobright, The Associated Press chief correspondent in Washington, relayed a tale about an old gentleman who once came to Lincoln seeking a job. The president tried to fend him off by telling a boisterous story. The two men roared with laughter at its conclusion, but instead of departing, the applicant responded with his own tale—which the president conceded topped his own. But Lincoln was not content to let that outcome stand. The following day he sent for this new friend and told him a better story, to which the old gentleman responded with a still better one. The president was still “loth to surrender,” according to Gobright; the contest went on for a whole week, until finally the visitor admitted that Lincoln’s latest was the best he had ever heard. The president ushered him out with a smile—pleased to have bested a worthy challenger.
Lincoln sometimes amused his companions even when he didn’t intend to. Once when he traveled into Virginia to review the army, Charles A. Tinker, chief telegraph operator for the War Department, remembered how funny the president had looked riding beside grandly attired and mounted generals like McClellan and Joseph Hooker: “[H]is figure had the appearance of a huge clothespin on a line, his long legs dangling at the sides of the animal, and his pantaloons climbing to his knees, his silk hat on the back of his head, and his body doubled up and pounding the saddle in his frantic efforts to ‘keep up with the procession’” and maintain his presidential dignity.
During the war years there was so little to laugh about that Lincoln was inclined to spread that little around— he seemingly was so generous in spirit that he felt compelled to share whatever amused him. Thus when the latest volume of satire arrived from the likes of Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Kerr or the Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby, he could not wait to read it aloud, regardless of the company.
Some of those accounts captured the spirit of the times perfectly. Early in the war, for example, when reports of Union success in battle sometimes stretched the imagination, Kerr took a fictional jaunt across the Potomac River with a proud military escort: “Upon reaching the scene of strife, my boy, we discovered that the ten western Calvarymen [sic] had routed the rebels, killing four regiments, which were also carried away. On our side nobody was killed or wounded. In fact, two of our men, who went into the fight sick with the measles, were entirely cured.”
Some such tales reflected the racism that was endemic to the 19th century, even among Americans who were in favor of emancipating the slaves. John
Hay pointed out that Lincoln could recite verbatim, for instance, an impassioned effort by “the saint and martyr Petroleum V” Nasby to enlist help against the arrival of freed slaves in the border states. Addressing the Ohioans of “Wingert’s Corners,” the fictional Nasby urged them to “Arowse to wunst! Rally agin Conway! Rally agin Sweet! Rally agin Hegler! Rally agin Hegler’s family! Rally agin the porter at the Reed House! Rally agin the cook at the Crook House! Rally agin the n—— widder in Vance’s addishun! Rally agin Missis Umstid! Rally agin Missis Umstid’s childern by her first husband! Rally agin Missis Umstid’s childern by her sekund husband! Rally agin all the rest of Missis Umstid’s childern! Rally agin the n—— that kum yesterday! Rally agin the saddlekulurd gal that yoost a be here! Ameriky fer white men!” Hay, who became a close friend of Lincoln’s, recalled the night when he and the senior secretary, John G. Nicolay, were working in their White House office past the president’s bedtime. Lincoln suddenly appeared in the office door wearing his nightshirt, chuckling at a caricature in a book he held open.
Intent on sharing it with his staffers, he seemed “utterly unconscious,” said Hay, that “with his short shirt hanging about his long legs & setting out behind like the tail feathers of an enormous ostrich [he] was infinitely funnier than anything in the book….What a man it is! Occupied all day with matters of vast moment, deeply anxious about the fate of the greatest army of the world, with his own fame & future hanging on the events of the passing hour, yet he has such a wealth of simple bonhommie [sic] & good fellow ship that he gets out of bed and perambulates the house in his shirt to find us that we may share with him the fun.”
No one who compares prewar portraits of Abraham Lincoln from private life with those made late in the conflict can doubt that the burden of a wartime presidency aged him tremendously. Yet this same commander in chief, who loved to swap yarns with every new acquaintance, admitted to Bishop Charles Gordon Ames in 1863 after the disastrous Battle of Chancellorsville, “I am the loneliest man in America.” Such was the depth and breadth of Lincoln’s character, which encompassed a wealth of compassion, courage and wisdom—but also the gift of humor.
Veteran journalist Ernest B. Furgurson is the author of Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War and Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor, 1864.
Originally published in the June 2009 issue of Civil War Times.
