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LINCOLN IN CARICATURE

By Rufus Rockwell Wilson

Author Of "Washington: The Capital City"

Illustrated With Thirty-two Plates

Printed For Private Distribution

1903

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LINCOLN IN CARICATURE


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INCOLN in caricature is a phase of the career of the great war President
that has thus far lacked adequate treatment. Yet he was the most
bitterly assailed and savagely cartooned public man of his time, and one
has only to search the newspapers and periodicals of that period to find
striking confirmation of this fact. The attitude of Great Britain toward
the Union and its President was then one of cynical and scarcely veiled
hostility, and nowhere were the sentiments of the English government
and of the English masses more faithfully reflected than in the cartoons
which appeared in London _Punch_ between 1861 and 1865, many of which
had Lincoln for their central figure. He was also frequently cartooned
in _Vanity Fair_ the American counterpart of _Punch_; in _Frank Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper_, and in _Harper's Weekly_. Indeed, nowhere were
the changing sentiments of the people of the North, their likes and
dislikes, their alternates hopes and fears, their hasty, often unjust
judgments of men and measures, more vividly reflected than in the
cartoons dealing with Lincoln which appeared in the last named journal
during the epoch-making days of his Presidency. Thus the thirty-two
plates from these sources here brought together have a value and
interest already important and sure to increase with the passage of
time, for they reflect with unconscious vividness, and as nothing else
can do, the life and color of an historic era, and how his fellows
regarded the grandest figure of that era. It is with their value
as human documents in mind that they have been rescued from their
half-forgotten hiding places, and assembled in chronological sequence,
with such comment as may be necessary to make their purpose and meaning
clear to older men, whose memory may have grown dim, as well as to the
new generation that has come upon the stage in the eight and thirty
years that have elapsed since the close of the Civil War.



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|Plate Number One--This cartoon, "Lincoln a la Blondin," which appeared
in _Harper's Weekly_, on August 25, 1860, seems to have been suggested
by Blondin's crossing of Niagara on a tight rope with a man on his
back--an event then fresh in the public mind. It also recalls an
interesting phase of Lincoln's first campaign for the Presidency, which
had its origin in a characteristic incident of the candidate's earlier
years. It was in March, 1830, that Lincoln, at that time a youth of
twenty-one, removed with his father and family from Indiana to Illinois,
locating on the bluffs of the Sangamon River about ten miles from
Decatur. There he and his kinsman, John Hanks, built a hewed log house,
and broke fifteen acres of prairie sod with the two yoke of oxen they
had driven from Indiana. They then felled the trees, cut off the logs,
and with mauls and wedges split the rails to fence in the land they had
broken. The following winter, the winter of the "deep snow" as it
was known in Illinois, Lincoln alone made three thousand rails for a
neighbor, walking three miles each day to do it. The Republican state
convention of Illinois assembled at Decatur on May 9, 1860, and the
first act of its chairman was to invite Lincoln, who was modestly seated
in the body of the hall, to a seat upon the platform. An eye-witness
describes the scene that followed as one of tumultuous enthusiasm. No
way could be made through the shouting throng, and Lincoln was borne
bodily, over their heads and shoulders, to the place of honor. Quiet
restored, the chairman again arose and said:

"There is an old Democrat outside who has something he wishes to present