If Abraham Lincoln had been a humorless man, would he ever have been elected President of these United States? It is debatable. Certain it is that his ability to make men laugh and to laugh with them was the base of his popularity from the day he first appeared as a jack-of-all-trades on the Sangamon River in Illinois.
Thrown in with a crew of raft-builders, his stories soon had them clamoring for more. Even funnier than his yarns was his way of telling them, his own enjoyment of them. Forty years later a survivor of the crew told me that while he could not recall a single one of the stories, he still laughed when he remembered Lincoln and how as he came to the end he would "whoop and roll off the log he straddled." After he had gone his way the log, which was his favorite seat, was preserved. "Abe's Log," they called it.
Wherever Lincoln attempted in the next few years to make a place for himself, his fun-making gathered men to him. That he was no mere clown they of course soon discovered, but their respect was all the stronger because of the humor with which he salted his sterner qualities.
On the circuit which he traveled so many years as lawyer and politician, the classic example of his practical jokes was his piloting of the court traveling on horseback across Fox River. The river was in flood, running wild across the prairies. The travelers, thoroughly bewildered, asked one another how in the world they were to cross. There was only one way, Lincoln said. They must strip, tie their clothes in a bundle to the back of their saddles, and swim for it. Whatever objections may have been raised were overruled and they prepared and started, Lincoln in the lead. For an hour their horses waded through water which never reached the stirrups, and when they saw they were approaching a town they realized it was their town, and that to reach it had not been necessary to cross Fox River. Lincoln had played a trick which set the whole circuit rocking with laughter.
This type of practical joking was and had been for many years the most popular diversion of the bar in the pioneer communities of the West and South. Altogether the most complete authentic and amusing picture of it is to be found in Baldwin's Flush Times in Alabama. Lincoln owned the book — the very copy which he carried with him on the circuit being now in the collection of the Hon. Henry Horner, Governor of Illinois. The "flush times" of which Baldwin wrote belonged in the 1830s, but the types which he caricatured still flourished. Lincoln doubtless could have named their counterparts in every county seat of Illinois where he practiced.
It was a motley crowd of humbugs and windbags which Baldwin presented. To hoist these ridiculous gentlemen on their own petards was the finest spirit of the humorous and unpretentious members of the bar, and Flush Times is rich in its tales of how it was done.
Lincoln's favorite in the collection was the Earthquake Story as told by Cave Burton, Sig., of Kentucky. The pages of Lincoln's copy of Flush Times show how often he must have read this story to his friends, or passed it on that they might read it for themselves.
A way of disciplining those whose manners were obnoxious, as well as those social and political rivals who were regarded as humbugs, was the anonymous communication to the newspapers ridiculing the objectionable person. Lincoln at one time published a series of such letters, signed Aunt Rebecca, aimed at a political opponent whose views he disliked. A couple of saucy young women, one of them his future wife, Mary Todd, took up the series under his nom de plume when he laid it down, ridiculing the philandering propensities of the gentleman.
As there were no libel laws to protect the victim of such attacks, there was nothing for him to do but thrash his tormentor or challenge him. Lincoln's vietim chose the latter, and the duel was all but fought, to the great injury of his growing political prestige. It was his first severe lesson that the fun-making which had done so much for him could be carried too far.
By the time of the Great Debates with Stephen Douglas, which introduced him politically to the country, the practical joke, the story for the sake of the story, the long satirical communications to the newspapers, the doggerel had disappeared from his technique.
By the time he had reached the White House his humor was a finished product, used instinctively as a weapon in handling men and situations. This shows particularly in his use of the story. Certainly no man ever carried such a collection of stories to the White House.
Where did he get them? people wondered. He had drawn on the rural supply of every pioneer community in which he had lived from boyhood up, and apparently never forgot one or where it came from. Knowing his love of stories, men brought them to him. "I mustn't forget to tell that to Lincoln," was every man's mental and spoken note. And Lincoln himself never forgot to ask a friend he hadn't seen for a time, "Any new stories?"
He was also an inveterate reader of "funny books." Back in Indiana he and his friends had read in the woods on Sunday afternoons one of the earliest joke books to find its way into this country from England — Quinn's Jests, or the Facetious Man's Companion. Later it was Flush Times, Phnixiana (by one John Phnix, Squibob), Artemus Ward, The Nasby Papers, Hood's Poems — any collection he could get his hands on.
John Hay pictures him coming after midnight with a volume of Hood in his hand to show Hay and Nicolay the little caricature, An Unfortunate Bee-ing — "Seemingly utterly unconscious," says Hay, "that he with his short shirt hanging about his long legs, and setting out behind like the tail feathers of an enormous ostrich, was infinitely funnier than anything in the book he was laughing at."
As Lincoln's love of stories became generally known, clever publishers both here and in England took to crediting items in their collections to him — naming books after him. There was Old Abe's Jokes, which announced on its title page that it was "Fresh from Abraham's Bosom, containing all issues excepting the greenbacks to call in some of which this book is issued." Two editions of Kempt's American Joe Miller were published in London in '65, containing many stories attributed to Lincoln. The first volume appeared in January; the other came after his assassination, and the editor in his preface pays a touching tribute to Lincoln.
It would be idle to suppose that all the stories attributed to Lincoln in these jest books or otherwise ever passed his mouth. "Lincoln's latest" was often no doubt something Lincoln had never heard. Even certain stories told of him which one would like to believe were his, because of their peculiar aptness, are doubtful. There is that perfect answer that he is said to have made to the anxious citizen who came to him to tell him that Grant drank. "Could you tell me the brand of the liquor he uses? I would like to send a barrel to some of my other generals."
Major Eckert, who organized the military telegraph, once asked him if the story was true. It would have been very good if he had said it, replied Lincoln, but he did not. He supposed it was charged to him to give it currency.
"The original of the story," he went on, "was in King George's time. Bitter complaints were made to the king against General Wolfe. It was charged that he was mad. 'Well,' said the king, 'I wish he would bite some of my other generals, then."'
Undoubtedly many stories which did originate with him are told by different writers in such different forms as to make their authenticity seem questionable. For instance, that very good bootblacking story Carl Schurz tells in his Reminiscences. According to him, an Englishman traveling in this country called on Mr. Lincoln and said, "I have heard with astonishment that gentlemen in America black their own boots."
"That is true," said Mr. Lincoln. "But do not gentlemen in your country do that?"
"No, certainly not," the Englishman replied.
"Well," said Mr. Lincoln, "whose boots do they black?"
The more common version places the dialogue in the White House, where Charles Sumner exclaimed, "Why, Mr. Lincoln, do you black your own boots?"
"Yes; whose boots should I black?"
The public delighted in the story. Whether it was authentic or not, it was like him.
As for the Grant story, the public accepted it because it so perfectly illustrated what they had come to see was his way with men.
Lincoln could use Scripture to fix a value, explain an act, expose humbuggery, with the ease and sureness of his stories.
When the decision to issue greenbacks had been made, the Cabinet debated solemnly whether or not the motto on its hard money. "In God we trust," should be put on the new currency. Lincoln listened and finally said quizzically, "Why not say, 'Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee'?"
Quite as quick-witted was an appeal to Bible history when called upon to explain the appointment to an important post of a man who had been concerned early in the war in a radical organization bordering on sedition.
"He did behave ugly, didn't he?" Mr. Lincoln said. "But I have scriptural authority for appointing him. When Moses was on Sinai getting a commission for Aaron, Aaron was at the foot of the mountain setting up a false god; but Aaron got his commission just the same."
He would even poke fun at political necessities which he himself regarded.
"My Cabinet has shrunk up North," he told a friend in 1864 after the resignation of Postmaster-General Blair. "I must find a Southern man. I suppose if the twelve apostles were to be chosen nowadays the shriek of locality would have to be heeded."
Good-humored as Mr. Lincoln's stories and sayings usually are, they could — often did — show the bitterness he felt over the pretensions of men, their excuses for failure.
The night after the first Battle of Bull Run he lay on his office couch listening to explanations.
"Ah, yes," he said finally. "I see. We beat the enemy and then ran away from him."
Looking down on the encamped Army of the Potomac after the retreat from Antietam, he said to a friend, "What is that?" "Why, Mr. Lincoln," the man replied, "it is the Army of the Potomac." "No," he said ironically; "you are wrong. It is General McClellan's bodyguard."
"See here," said Lincoln to a gentleman who begged a brigadier-generalship for a friend. "See here. You're a farmer. Suppose you had a large cattle yard full of all sorts of cattle — cows, oxen, and bulls — and you kept killing and selling and disposing of the cows and oxen, taking good care of your bulls. By and by you would find you had nothing but a yard full of old bulls, good for nothing under heaven. Now, it will be just so with the army if I don't stop making brigadier generals."
A fleet had been fitted out; its destination was properly enough kept secret. Consumed by curiosity, a visitor, after beating about the bush, bluntly asked, "Where has it gone?"
"I will tell you," whispered Mr. Lincoln. "It has gone to sea."
He had reason enough to believe that a good many bankers of the country considered themselves first. One day a party was introduced by the Secretary of the Treasury, who said, "I can vouch for their patriotism and loyalty, for as the Good Book says, 'Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also."
"There is another text," Mr. Lincoln replied. "'Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together."'
Taking it all in all, no man ever used seasoned humor more potently for the public good than Abraham Lincoln.
Publication Date: February 20, 1932