Reading the proclamation.

In the end, America’s great moral issue of the 19th century was settled by a military decision. All the social, economic, and moral questions about slavery ended 150 years ago when President Lincoln considered slaves as part of the Confederacy’s military power and issued his Emancipation Proclamation.

The result, as the Post reported on October 11, 1862, would be profound—militarily, if not morally. The Confederacy was then supporting an army of 225,000 with an enslaved workforce of nearly 3.5 million. Every freed slave would diminish the Confederacy’s economic strength and military resources.

Much as he wanted to end slavery entirely, Lincoln’s first priority was to restore the Union. He told writer Horace Greeley that if he could accomplish that task without freeing a single slave, he would. But the military situation of 1862 brought military and moral needs into a rare alignment.

Slave auction house in Atlanta, Georgia.

Even so, Lincoln did not simply act on his own abolitionist principles. He made the proclamation highly conditional. It did not abolish slavery outright, but gave the rebellious states of the Confederacy an ultimatum. They could return to the Union within 100 days and keep their slaves, or else lose them when Federal troops eventually occupied their territory.

In the July 22, 1865, issue of the Post, F. B. Carpenter presented his interview with Lincoln in which the president discussed issuing his proclamation. “Things had gone on from bad to worse,” he said referring to Gen. McClellan’s defeat on the Virginia peninsula that cost 15,000 casualties. “I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game.”

He wrote up the proclamation then read it to his cabinet, not to get their advice but to hear their reactions. No one raised an objection that Lincoln hadn’t already considered until Secretary of State William Henry Seward spoke up. He approved of the proclamation but questioned its timing. Since it would be announced after a string of Union army defeats, it might seem to the public like an act of desperation. “His idea,” said the president, “was that it would be considered our last shriek on the retreat.” Seward told Lincoln to “postpone its issue, until you can give it to the country supported by military success, instead of issuing it, as would be the case now, upon the greatest disasters of the war!”

Lincoln and his cabinet, as they were seated at the reading of the proclamation.

So Lincoln set it aside and waited. “From time to time I added or changed a line, touching it up here and there, waiting the progress of events. Well, the next news we had was of Pope’s disaster, at Bull Run (and another 10,000 casualties.) Things looked darker than ever.”

On September 13, 1862, he met with a delegation of ministers from Chicago who pleaded with him to abolish slavery. The president said nothing about his proclamation and seemed to argue against emancipation of any kind. “Now, then, tell me, if you please, what possible result of good would follow the issuing of such a proclamation as you desire?”

He wished, he said, to view the matter practically for its advantages in suppressing the Confederacy.

Former slaves of Virginia who sought refuge within Union lines.

It was true that slavery was essential for powering the South. If he ended slavery, it would weaken the enemy, encourage friends of the union, and draw the support of European powers. But what power did he have? Lincoln asked, repeating arguments he must have posed to himself over and over.

“Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states? Is there a single court, or magistrate, or individual that would be influenced by it there? … And suppose they could be induced by a proclamation of freedom from me to throw themselves upon us, what should we do with them? How can we feed and care for such a multitude?”

He told the delegation that he had received a lot of advice on the slavery issue by religious men.

Some argued for, others against, slavery, but all were certain “that they represent the Divine will. … I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me. … It is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is I will do it!”

Ex-slaves enlistees in the Union Army.

Perhaps Lincoln already knew what the Almighty wanted him to do in this matter. The U.S. Treasury Secretary told Mr. Carpenter that, after the victory at Antietam, Lincoln said the time for the enunciation of the emancipation policy could no longer be delayed. “Public sentiment would sustain it, many of his warmest friends and supporters demanded it—and he had promised his God he would do it!” This last part was uttered in a low tone and apparently heard by no one but Secretary Salmon Portland Chase sitting next to him. He asked the president if he correctly understood him. Mr. Lincoln replied, “I made a solemn vow before God that, if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves!”

Today, historians question the power of Lincoln’s proclamation. “Did he free the slaves?” they ask, “or did they free themselves?” We now know that most slaves didn’t wait for liberation, but fled from the plantations to the Union lines. There, they set about caring for themselves, finding what work they could in the Union camps, starting farms where possible, and, for many of the men, enlisting in the army.

The liberation of America’s black people couldn’t have occurred without their own initiative. But it also couldn’t have occurred without Lincoln’s decision of September 22, 1862.

Mr. Lincoln Discusses His Proclamation The Saturday Evening Post

That fact must surely have occurred to John Wilkes Booth in the days after he murdered Abraham Lincoln. He would have preferred being remembered as the greatest tragedian of his time, but he could be content with the enduring reputation as the Confederacy’s great avenger.

But how would he have felt if he knew he’d be remembered as a dark, leathery figure in a sideshow, exhibited to the general public for 25¢ (5¢ for children)?

The mummy, referred to as “John” by its owners, toured the country in the 1920s and ‘30s, oblivious to all the history books. As Alva Johnston reported in 1938,

Historians of the old school allege that John Wilkes Booth was killed in Garrett’s barn in Virginia on April 26, 1865, twelve days after he assassinated Lincoln.

In 1869 the body was turned over by the War Department to the Booth family and buried in the Booth plot in the Greenmount Cemetery at Baltimore. The body was identified by members of the family and by a dentist’s report.

But stories of Booth’s escape sprang to life from the moment of his death. Revisionists soon had two explanations of how Booth escaped from that barn.

Theory No. 1 is that Booth was warned and made his escape several hours before the barn was surrounded; No. 2 is that he escaped by an unwatched door after the barn was in flames.

For years afterward, people came forward with incredible stories of Booth’s escape.

John Wilkes Booth, before he lost his looks.

In April, 1898, American newspapers had carried reports that John Wilkes Booth had been seen in Brazil… This report brought two witnesses to light who testified that Booth had made his escape in 1865.

The first of these was Mrs. J. M. Christ [no relation]… In 1865, according to her story, she and her husband were on board the Mary Porter in Havana six weeks after the assassination when John Wilkes Booth came aboard and sailed with them to Nassau. She stated that, because Booth was still suffering from a broken leg, she gave up her cabin to him, and at the end of the voyage he rewarded her by giving her his ring with “J. W. B.” engraved inside. Having kept the secret for thirty-three years, Mrs. Christ now felt entitled to talk.

On the following day, Wilson D. Kenzie gave an interview to the same paper. He said that he had known Booth intimately at New Orleans and had been at the Garrett barn in Virginia when the man supposed to be Booth was killed. Kenzie said that the slain man was a sandy-headed fellow who bore no resemblance to Booth.

Then, in 1886, Finis L. Bates notified the War Department that he knew where they could get their hands on the real John Wilkes Booth. He was living in Texas under the name of John St. Helen. Bates had been nursing St. Helen through a long illness and, as Johnston wrote, “On what he apparently thought was his deathbed, St. Helen confessed himself to be John Wilkes Booth.”

The War Department expressed “no interest” in the matter, and Bates let the matter rest until St. Helen’s death in 1903.

The reward Finis Bates couldn't collect.

An undertaker at Enid embalmed the body in the expectation that the Booth family or the War Department would claim it. It remained unclaimed for years. Bates finally procured it.

This transfer was sanctioned by an Oklahoma judge, apparently on the theory that he would accord decent burial to his former client. Instead of this, Bates set out to commercialize his acquisition. He leased and rented his old friend… to showmen from time to time.… and wrote a book with the title The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, and the subtitle, “Written for the Correction of History.”

John St. Helen, it turned out, was actually a drifter named David George. Mummified and displayed as John Wilkes Booth, he proved to have none of his namesake’s box-office appeal.

The star's mobile dressing room enabled the owner, when necessary, to leave town quickly.

The post-mortem career of this John Wilkes Booth… has been marked by almost continual failure and disaster. He has scattered ill-luck around almost as freely as Tutankhamen is supposed to have done. Nearly every showman who exhibited John has been ruined.

John … has had a strange knockabout existence. He has been bought and sold, leased, held under bond, kidnapped and seized for debt; has been repeatedly chased out of town by local authorities for not having a license or for violating other ordinances; has been threatened with hanging by indignant [Yankee] veterans. Up until 1937 he has been a consistent money loser.

At the Waco Cotton Palace about eighteen years ago, the mummy attracted the attention of William Evans, the Carnival King of the Southwest, who started John on his big-time career. Evans had intended to use John as the headliner of his carnival, but the new attraction was a disappointment from the start. John never paid expenses.

Bates died. His widow was disappointed in her first efforts to market the Booth chattel, but she finally sold it to the misguided Carnival King for $1000. It brought Evans nothing but bad luck. He suffered setback after setback in the carnival business, until he finally quit and retired to a small potato farm at Declo, Idaho.

Two owners later, “John” became part of the Jay Gould Million-Dollar Show, which toured Minnesota and South Dakota.

The spell of adversity which pursued John for many years was reversed last season, when the Harkins became connected with the Jay Gould Million-Dollar Show which toured Minnesota and South Dakota.

In fact, Johnston told Post readers, it appeared that John Wilkes Booth had just completed his most successful season since 1865.

The mummy toured less frequently over the years, and was last seen in public in 1976, shortly before it became the property of a private collector.

Could the lonely drifter David George have been John Wilkes Booth? Even if Booth had escaped his death in a Virginia barn, would he have denied himself all the recognition and notoriety he’d gain by revealing his identity? As Johnston reflected,

In his days on the legitimate stage, John Wilkes Booth had been a great actor. Some of his contemporaries thought him greater than his father, Junius Brutus Booth, or his brother, Edwin Booth.

John Wilkes Booth was, however, an almost perfect ham. Vanity was his ruling motive. His assassination of Lincoln was an act of pure vanity. Booth had gone through the Civil War without fighting; he could not bear to have the war heroes towering over him; he killed Lincoln in the hope of stealing the show from the fighting men.

The poor ham broke into history, but it might have given him pause, back in 1865, if he could have looked forward to 1920 and could have seen what was left of him competing unsuccessfully with bulldog-faced cows and six-legged sheep.

The Assassin’s Mummy; or, John Wilkes Booth’s Second Career The Saturday Evening Post

The subject of over 10,000 books, Lincoln has become our most familiar president. He is also one of the most popular. A Post editorial in 1961, claimed that people around the world, “feel for Old Abe a reverence, trust and affection that they reserve for their truest friends. He… always steps down from his monuments and—plain, decent, wise, tolerant, good and great—puts out his hand to help us.”

The problem with this image is that it doesn’t fully agree with the evidence. In fact, it often contradicts the accounts of people who knew him well. In his 1959 essay on Lincoln, Jacques Barzun offered the personal recollection of William Herndon who worked closely with Lincoln for years as his law partner. Herndon had known Lincoln the man before he became the martyr and national icon.

He said that Lincoln was a man of sudden and violent moods, often plunged in deathly melancholy for hours, then suddenly lively and ready to joke;

that Lincoln was self-centered and cold, not given to revealing his plans or opinions; and ruthless in using others’ help and influence;

that Lincoln was idle for long stretches of time, during which he read newspapers or simply brooded;

that Lincoln was a man of strong passions and mystical longings, which he repressed because his mind showed him their futility, and that this made him cold-blooded and a fatalist.

As we know from other sources, Lincoln was subject to vague fears and dark superstitions… He was subject, as some of his verses show, to obsessional gloom about separation, insanity and death.

None of which denies that Lincoln could be sociable, funny, or statesmanlike. But there was undeniably a side of Lincoln that he kept hidden, even from his closest friends. The key to understanding this hidden side, Barzun believed, was knowing the one thing Lincoln valued all his life: language.

Not one but several persons who remembered his childhood remarked on the boy’s singular determination to express his thoughts in the best way. [According to] his stepmother… “He didn’t like physical labor. He read all the books he could lay his hands on. . . . When he came across a passage that struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper and keep it there till he did get paper, then he would rewrite it, look at it, repeat it.”

Years later, Herndon said Lincoln could be a “very patient man” but when people began talking to him in vague abstractions, glittering generalities, and misty ideas, he could become enraged.

Language was vitally important to Lincoln. He spent hours mastering his skills of expressing himself powerfully through deceptively simple language. His legal studies helped him sharpen his genius for expression.

Legal thought encourages precision through the imagining and the denial of alternatives. The language of the law foresees doubt, ambiguity, confusion, stupid or fraudulent error, and one by one it excludes them. [It must avoid] misunderstanding, and this is the foundation of any prose that aims at clear expression.

His ability to convey complex ideas to any audience, said Barzun, set him apart from his peers and convinced him he was marked for a special destiny. If you read Lincoln’s words, his letters, speeches, and debates, he added, you realize Lincoln’s personality was not that of a shrewd, humorous, saintly man, but a combination of traits that are found in the biographies of great artists:

passionate, gloomy, seeming-cold, and conscious of superiority.

Lincoln’s faith in his power to communicate led him to believe in a great personal destiny. The opinion of others was less important to him than his relationship with the greater Lincoln he felt inside himself. He believed his talent for expression had set him apart for greatness. It had lifted him up from a life of splitting rails and running a failing grocery store. It enabled him to distract listeners from his early struggle, his election failures, and his occasional gloom and doubts.

As he focused increasingly on the man of destiny inside himself, he grew detached from others.

William Herndon called Lincoln a man of sudden and violent moods. (Photo by Matthew Brady, 1864, first published in a 1947 Post.)

In conduct, this detachment was the source of his saintlike forbearance… Lincoln’s detachment was what produced his mastery over men.

Had he not towered in mind and will over his cabinet, they would have crushed or used him without remorse. Chase, Seward, Stanton, the Blairs, McClellan had among them enough egotism and ability to wreck several administrations. Each thought Lincoln would be an easy victim.

[Yet] their dominant feeling was exasperation with him for making them feel baffled. They could not bring him down to their reach.

John Hay, who saw the long struggle, confirms Herndon’s judgments: “It is absurd to call him a modest man. No great man was ever modest. It was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Sumner could never forgive.”

Lincoln’s extraordinary power was to make his spirit felt—a power I attribute to his peculiar relation to himself.

He regarded his face and physique with amusement and dismay, his mind and destiny with wonder. Seeming clumsy and diffident, he also showed a calm superiority, which he expressed as if one half of a double man were talking about the other.

It may be that, even after another 10,000 books, the true, inner nature of Lincoln will remain unknown to us. But if he always remains a mystery to us, it’s possible that it was always a mystery to himself.

What Lincoln Was Hiding The Saturday Evening Post

The other afternoon, the long-promised balloon ascension for military purposes took place. The elevation attained was not very great [500 feet], though it was perfectly satisfactory as an experiment. The aeronauts were Prof. Lowe, Gen. Burns, of the Telegraph Company, and H.C. Robinson, operator.

Thaddeus Lowe had spent years touring and lecturing on balloon flight in America and Europe. Just months before, he had attempted to fly his balloon from Cincinnati to the east coast. Unfortunately, he came down in Unionville, South Carolina, a distinctly anti-Union town. Local authorities of the recently seceded state arrested him as a spy. He was released only when he convinced the authorities he was flying for scientific, not military, purpose.

Lincoln’s Secretary of War saw the military potential just as quickly as the South Carolina authorities. He summoned Lowe to Washington to demonstrate how a lighter-than-air craft could allow observers to instantly report the movement and disposition of the enemy.

The balloon was connected with the War department by telegraph. The first message ever telegraphed from a balloon was then sent to the United States by Prof. Lowe. It was as follows: —

View of balloon ascension: Prof. Thaddeus Lowe observes the Battle of Seven Pines or Fair Oaks from his balloon "Intrepid" on the north side of the Chicahominy, 1862. Mathew Brady Collection.

Balloon Enterprise,

Washington, June 17

“To the President of the U. States:

SIR: This point of observation commands an area nearly fifty miles in diameter. The city, with its girdle of encampments, presents a superb scene. I take great pleasure in sending you this first dispatch ever telegraphed from an aerial station, and in acknowledging  my indebtedness to your encouragement for the opportunity of demonstrating the availability of the science of aeronautics in the military service of the country.

Yours, respectfully,

T. S. C. Lowe

Mr. Lincoln was very much pleased with the experiment, and endorsed it as certain to prove of great value in military movements.

Washington June 19.— Prof. Lowe made another balloon ascension this morning, and was, as before, provided with means of telegraphing his reconnoisances. He distinctly saw the rebel encampments at Fairfax Court House. The result of his discoveries remains a secret with the authorities of the War Department. President Lincoln also made an ascension. The telegraph wire runs up to the balloon, where an operator is stationed, and thus puts the aeronaut and War Department in constant communications.

If this last statement is to be trusted, Abraham Lincoln might have earned the further distinction of being the first sitting president to fly.

The US Air Force Turns 150 Years Old? The Saturday Evening Post

On that day, Colonel Ellsworth and his regiment were clearing out the Confederate troops in Alexandria, Virginia, right across the Potomac, within sight of the Capitol and White House. On June 5, 1861, the Post quoted from the Army’s official report:

It appears that Ellsworth was marching up the street with a squad of men to take possession of the telegraph office, when, in passing along, he noticed a Secession flag flying from the top of a building. He immediately exclaimed—“That has to come down” and, entering the building, made his way up to the roof with one of his men, hauled down the rebel emblem, and wrapping it around his body, descended.

“While on the second floor, a Secessionist came out of a door with a cocked double-barreled shot-gun. He took aim at Ellsworth, when the latter attempted to strike the gun out of the way with his fist. As he struck it, one of the barrels was discharged, lodging a whole load of buckshot in Ellsworth’s body, killing him instantly. His companion instantly shot the murderer through the head with a revolver, making him a corpse a second or two after the fall of the noble Ellsworth. The house was immediately surrounded and all the inmates made prisoners.”

The remains of the deceased were brought over to the Navy Yard this morning. The doleful peals of all the bells in the city are announcing the sad news to the citizens. The President visited the Navy Yard and saw the remains of his friend Colonel Ellsworth.

Like Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant, Ellsworth was a representative man of his time. While still a teenager, he left his New York home and travelled to the wilds of Illinois where he took several jobs, worked hard, and lived frugally. In the late 1850s, he was inspired to form an elite militia corps. Its soldiers would wear the distinctive uniform of the French Zouave soldiers, and would be trained for agility and strength. Each man would be moral, sober, and utterly dedicated to the corps and its training. Soon Ellsworth was travelling the country, putting on demonstrations and drill practices with his Zouaves before amazed and enthusiastic crowds.

But it ended when he struck up a conversation with Abraham Lincoln after a demonstration in Springfield. Elmer Ellsworth immediately hung up his fanciful Zoave uniform and disbanded the militia so he could became a law clerk at Lincoln’s firm.

Lincoln appears to have taken Ellsworth under his wing, encouraging him, inspiring him, and acting very much like an older brother. He probably recognized himself in this earnest young man who was taking the hard, solitary road to success. In turn, Ellsworth became devoted to Lincoln and, eventually, a valuable part of his presidential campaign. He followed him to Washington after his election and was a frequent guest at the White House. Then, in May, with a fresh commission from the president, Ellsworth marched off to his fate.

Washington, May 25— The remains of Col. Ellsworth were this morning conveyed to the East room of the White House, where they lay in state for several hours. The President and his family visited the remains and took a farewell look at the face of their much-loved friend, before the crowd was admitted.

Even Lincoln’s closest associates admitted that he rarely shared his thoughts or feelings. But on this occasion, he made no effort to hide his grief, as Senator Wilson of Massachusetts observed when he visited Lincoln on May 24.

As we entered the library we observed Mr. Lincoln before a window, looking out across the Potomac… He did not move until we approached very closely, when he turned round abruptly, and advanced toward us, extending his hand: “Excuse me,” he said, “but I cannot talk.”

We supposed his voice had given away from some cause or other, and we were about to inquire, when to our surprise the President burst into tears, and concealed his face in his handkerchief. He walked up and down the room for some moments, and we stepped aside in silence, not a little moved at such an unusual spectacle, in such a man and in such a place. After composing himself somewhat, Mr. Lincoln sat down and invited us to him. “I will make no apology, gentlemen,” said he, “for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard. Just as you entered the room, Captain Fox left me, after giving me the painful details of his unfortunate death. The event was so unexpected, and the recital so touching, that it quite unmanned me.”

Ellsworth was honored as a hero, and the souvenir hawkers were soon busy.

The flags which Col. Ellsworth seized and carried, the oil cloth on which he fell, &c, have been divided, and the pieces are carefully preserved by curiosity hunters. A resident of Paterson, New Jersey, boasts of possessing and exhibiting a piece of cheese which the gallant Colonel had in his haversack!

For months, newspapers and politicians spoke the name “Ellsworth” to evoke the spirit of patriotism and sacrifice. It was soon obscured by the growing casualty lists and, by war’s end, was barely remembered, just one death among 600,000.

The Final Letter from Elmer Ellsworth

Elmer Ellsworth Last Letter May 23, 1861

THE LAST LETTER— The following letter gives us a higher idea of Colonel Ellsworth than we previously had. We had looked upon him as a dashing, daring, but reckless and somewhat superficial soldier—this letter shows, however, both depth and nobility of character, and that he was at heart a religious and believing man. There is a tone of sadness in the letter, almost ominous of his approaching end;

Head Quarters, First Zouaves, Camp Lincoln:
Washington, D.C., May 23, 1861

My Dear Father and Mother—The Regiment is ordered to move across the river tonight. We have no means of knowing what reception we are to meet with. I am inclined to the opinion that our entrance to the city of Alexandria will be hotly contested, as I am just informed a large force have arrived there to-day. Should this happen, my dear parents, it may be my lot to be injured in some manner. Whatever may happen, cherish the consolation that I was engaged in the performance of a sacred duty; and tonight, thinking over the probabilities of tomorrow, and the occurrences of the past, I am perfectly content to accept whatever my fortune may be, confident that He who noteth even the fall of a sparrow will have some purpose even in the fate of one like me.
My darling and ever loved parents, good-bye. God bless, protect, and care for you.

Elmer

[Saturday Evening Post, June 8, 1861]

Lincoln’s Early Loss The Saturday Evening Post

There are several reasons why Protestant Christians still rely on a translation made four centuries ago. There is tradition and familiarity. But there is also the power of the English language used in this work.

By good luck, or by the grace of God, King James commissioned this translation at a time when the expressive power of English was undergoing an incredible growth. As a 1951 Post article noted, the King’s translators proved highly creative in setting the biblical language of Aramaic and Greek into

the haunting phrases [that have] imprinted so deeply on the thoughts and imagery of all English-speaking people: “apple of his eye,” “powers that be,” “widow’s mite,” “filthy lucre,” “as a lamb to the slaughter,” “pearls before swine,” “worthy of his hire,” “broken reed,” “birds of the air,” “loaves and fishes,” “army with banners,” “clear as crystal,” “thorn in the flesh,” “still small voice,” “salt of the earth” —these are only a few.

The King’s goal was to produce a skilled, consistent, and rigorously edited version of scriptures (an earlier English translation of the Old Testament had included the commandment, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”) In the process, though, his scholars created a masterwork  that influenced all writers of English for centuries. The power of its message, set to its best advantage amid the imagery and cadence of deathless poetry, could reach out beyond the faithful to touch agnostics and non-believers.

Abraham Lincoln is a good example. He openly challenged the teachings of the Christian faith as a young man. He firmly refused offers to pray with others. He purposely eliminated the word “God” from his speeches, preferring the ambiguous term, “Maker.” And he professed no faith in any life after death. Yet as the Post article, “How Well Do You Know the Bible?” notes, Lincoln might have been—

the President who read the Bible most in office was Lincoln; the White House guards used to find him, before he had had breakfast in the morning, turning the pages of his Bible in the small room he used for a library.

He had read the whole Bible and memorized long pas­sages from it. Its words and phrases came frequently and effectively from his lips in speeches, political de­bates, and even casual conversation. Once, at a Cabinet meeting where his advisers were discussing the new green­back dollar bills that were issued during the Civil War, the question came up of what official slogan to print on them.

“In God we trust,” was suggested, but Lincoln had a more whimsical idea. “If you are going to put a legend on the greenbacks,” he said, “I would suggest that of Peter: ‘Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee,”’ quoting Acts iii. 6 verbatim.

Lincoln’s two greatest utterances, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, are filled with the rich word poetry of the King James Version, and we have the almost unanimous word of his biographers that he found the Bible his principal solace at a time when the nation he headed was undergoing its most terrible internal trials. In the summer of 1864, when he was living in a cottage at the Soldiers’ Home on the outskirts of Washington, a friend named Joshua. Speed entered his room unexpectedly and found the President sitting near the window, read­ing his Bible by the light of failing day.

“I am glad to see you so profitably engaged,” remarked Speed, with a touch of lightness. .

“Yes,” said Lincoln. “I am profit­ably engaged.”

“Well,” said Speed, “if you have recovered from your skepticism I am sorry to say I have not.”

The tall President rose from his chair, placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and looked him earnestly in the eye. “You are wrong, Speed,” he said. “Take all of this book upon rea­son that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a hap­pier and better man.”

The King James Bible: A Best-Seller Turns 400 The Saturday Evening Post

Lincoln’s contemporaries, seeing him for the first time, might have noticed the same two things that struck Lew Wallace when he first saw Lincoln.

Later in life, Wallace was a best-selling author, a celebrated Union general, and a territorial governor. But in 1851, he was just another attorney who rode the judicial circuit with other lawyers. One evening, just after sundown, he rode into Danville, Illinois, and entered the local tavern. He found it crowded with people attending court business. As he edged his way into the crowd, he heard occasional bursts of laughter over the noise of the bar. Working his way toward the sound, he found that two teams of lawyers, from Indiana and Illinois were have a joke-telling contest.

One of the contestants representing Illinois, he said, “arrested my attention early, partly by his stories, partly by his appearance. Out of the mist of years he comes to me now exactly as he appeared then. His hair was thick, coarse, and defiant; it stood out in every direction. His features were massive, nose long, eyebrows protrusive, mouth large, cheeks hollow, eyes gray and always responsive to the humor. He smiled all the time, but never once did he laugh outright. His hands were large, his arms slender and disproportionately long. His legs were a wonder, particularly when he was in narration; he kept crossing and uncrossing them; sometime it actually seemed he was trying to tie them into a bow-knot. His dress was more than plain; no part of it fit him… Altogether I thought him the gauntest, quaintest, and most positively ugly man”

What was even more memorable to Wallace was Lincoln’s ability to hold a room’s attention — and his apparently bottomless fund of jokes.

“About midnight, his competitors were disposed to give in; either their stores were exhausted, or they were tacitly conceding him the crown. From answering them story for story, he gave two or three to their one. At last he took the floor and held it… Such was Abraham Lincoln. And to be perfectly candid, had one stood at my elbow that night in the old tavern and whispered: “Look at him closely. He will one day be president and the savior of his country,” I had laughed at the idea but a little less heartily than I laughed at the man. Afterwards I came to know him better, and then I did not laugh.”

Humor was an essential part of Lincoln, and a critical element in his success.  As a Congressional candidate, he used it to fire up crowds and put down hecklers. Running for the senate, his humor enabled him to score points off the well known and skilled politician, Stephen Douglas. When, for example, Douglas told a debate crowd that Lincoln was unqualified and unskilled, he added that Lincoln had once run a general store, selling cigars and whiskey. He added, “Mr. Lincoln was a very good bartender.”  Lincoln retorted, “Many a time have I stood on one side of the counter… and sold Mr. Douglas whiskey on the other side.”

When Douglas accused Lincoln of being “two faced,” Lincoln shot back, “If I really had two faces, do you think I’d hide behind this one?”

Humor also proved valuable to Lincoln as president. As Robert M. Yoder noted in a 1954 Post article,

“If a time-wasting friend lingered too long. Lincoln could disengage himself by telling a story which ended the conversation. He answered questions with stories; he avoided answering by telling stories. If the conversation headed in directions he didn’t like, he could change the subject with a story.”

And, as we know now, humor helped Lincoln maintain his sanity.

“‘If I couldn’t tell these stories,’ Lincoln once told a congressman — and gravely—’I would die.’ Humor was of tremendous importance to this sensitive and sorrowful man; almost a sort of oxygen for the soul. It offended a good many citizens that Lincoln could joke in times so tragic, but those close to Lincoln understood the emotional process involved. It was jesting-that-I-may-not-weep.”

Yoder offered several examples of Lincoln’s jokes. Some are familiar, but the number of unfamiliar stories suggests that Lincoln knew far more jokes than have been recorded.

When a courier appeared at the War Office to announce a major Union victory, the officers were surprised that Lincoln showed no excitement. Lincoln dismissed the courier and cheerfully told the men in the room,

“Pay no attention to him… He’s the biggest liar in Washington. He reminds me of an old fisherman I used to know who got such a reputation for stretching the truth that he bought a pair of scales and insisted on weighing every fish in the presence of witnesses. One day a baby was born next door and the doctor borrowed the fisherman’s scales. The baby weighed forty-seven pounds.”

“A man reached the theater one night just as the curtain rose. Eager to catch the opening speeches, and engrossed in the action, he put his tall silk hat on the seat beside him, open end up.  He didn’t notice that he had a neighbor…  a woman of bountiful proportions, for whom the theater seat wasn’t going to be a bit too large.… She sat. There was a crunch. She jumped up.The gentleman…  surveyed the expanse of satin beside him. “Madam,” he said, ‘I could have told you my hat wouldn’t fit you before you tried it on.’”

“My client is in the position of the farmer who was walking peaceably down the road when a dog raced out of a farmyard and attacked him. The farmer was carrying a pitchfork. In defending himself, he killed the dog. “What made you kill my dog?” the dog’s owner demanded. “What made him try to bite me?” “Why didn’t you come at him with the other end of the fork?” “Why didn’t he come at me with his other end?”

“A drunk wandered into a revival meeting (Lincoln related) and, after mumbling, ‘Amen,’ a few times, fell asleep. As the meeting closed, the preacher cried, ‘Who are on the Lord’s side?’ The congregation stood as one — all except the slumbering drunk. That shout didn’t wake him, but the next one did. ‘Who are on the devil’s side?’ the revivalist cried. That roused the sleeper. Seeing the preacher standing, the drunk rose too. ‘I didn’t exactly understand the question,’ he said warmly, ‘but I’m with you, parson, to the end.’ He looked around at the silent crowd, all seated. ‘But it seems to me,’ said the drunk, ‘that we’re in a hopeless minority.’

Lincoln’s easy use of humor changed America’s taste in politicians. Previously, Americans had preferred solemn, humorless men with the gravity of Old Testament prophets. We now expect our legislators and presidents to occasionally tell, and laugh at, jokes.  We believe a sense of humor reflects a sense of reason and proportion, and an ability to perceive the outrageous.

In many regards, Lincoln was a man ahead of his times. He saw, sooner than most of his contemporaries, what we all recognize: laughter is necessary for keeping our sanity.

“If I Couldn’t Tell These Stories, I Would Die”: Lincoln and Laughter The Saturday Evening Post

Here’s what he’d say: Franklin would honor Lincoln for “securing the blessings of liberty to the People of the United States … that these blessings ought rightfully to be administered, without distinction of color, to all descriptions of people.”

Benjamin Franklin fired the first shot of America’s Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln absorbed the last. The gunfire was, of course, about slavery. Franklin knew quite a bit about involuntary servitude; his father indentured him, for a predetermined period of time, to his brother James—a form of servitude from which there was no legal escape.

Slavery was far more common in colonial North America than most people realize. Tens of thousands of slaves lived in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and other northern colonies. Thus, when Franklin became leader of Pennsylvania’s abolitionist movement, he had much to do.

The singular event that, more than any other, energized emancipation forces was a Supreme Court decision regarding Dred Scott, a slave whose master had died. Since Scott spent time with his owner in Illinois and in Wisconsin territory (both nonslave regions) and had two children in those places with his new wife (also a slave), he sued the heirs to his master’s estate for his freedom when he was moved back to Missouri. A Missouri State Court denied Scott his freedom but determined that he could sue in Federal Court if he chose to. Scott and his wife did just that, but lost in Federal District Court as well. Scott, in 1857, appealed his case the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a split decision that has forever stained the entire era, a majority of the high court’s justices ruled that Scott, as a slave, was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue in Federal Court. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the majority opinion, further stated that all blacks (whether slave or free) never were, and would never be, citizens of the United States. The Court’s majority went even beyond the issues in the Dred Scott matter. They also declared unconstitutional the provision of the Missouri Compromise that precluded slavery in the Western territories.

It didn’t take long for lawyers, especially those in Illinois where the Scotts spent some time, to realize the implication of the Dred Scott decision: If a slave couple (like the Scotts) leave their master, escape to Illinois, and have children there, both the parents and their offspring still belong to their owner, just as would a pair of errant horses that wandered into Illinois, plus their new foals. This meant that some persons born in Illinois were not, in reality, free, making Illinois a de facto slave state.

A group of young attorneys living and working in Springfield, the Illinois capital, thereafter became active in politics, determined to somehow reverse the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling. They prevailed upon one of their number, the eloquent Abraham Lincoln, to carry the torch of Illinois freedom into the political arena via the new Republican Party. (They even promised to sustain his law practice while Lincoln was on the stump.) Lincoln challenged Democrat Stephan Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat for Illinois. A substantial portion of the debates between Lincoln and Douglas revolved around the Dred Scott decision and the related issues of free vs. slave statehood for entering territories.

Lincoln, in a typically long-winded pre-Fourth of July (1857) speech argued that the people of Illinois, not the Supreme Court, had the right to determine the status of persons born within the state’s own borders. He said that, “Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and the great men of that day, made this Government divided into free States and slave States, and left each State perfectly free to do as it pleased on the subject of slavery.” Douglas won the Illinois Senate seat that year, but the debates launched Lincoln to national prominence within the Republican Party. Lincoln made a February 27, 1860 lecture at Cooper Institute that showed him a more suitable presidential candidate than the current frontrunner, New York Senator William Seward.

In his oration, Lincoln asked (and answered), “Who were our fathers that framed the Constitution? I suppose the ‘thirty-nine’ who signed the original instrument may be fairly called our fathers who framed that part of the present Government.” Using carefully documented evidence from their public pronouncements on slavery, Lincoln proved that a majority of “our fathers” opposed the spread of slavery from the original slave states. The strongest opponents of all, Lincoln said, “were several of the most noted anti-slavery men of those times — as Dr. Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris.”

Lincoln’s supporting footnote for this assertion included “Franklin’s Petition to Congress for the Abolition of Slavery” of February 1790 (mentioned in a previous blog). Moreover, Lincoln, in that footnote, quoted Franklin’s core demand: “That you will be pleased to countenance the restoration of liberty to those unhappy men, who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who, amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen, are groaning in servile subjection; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people; that you will promote mercy and justice toward this distressed race; and that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men.”

Benjamin Franklin’s 1790 Petition to Congress, aimed at “the gradual abolition of slavery,” finally achieved its objective 75 years and 600,000 casualties later. The U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment (1865) reads simply, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Franklin’s role in the abolition movement proved pivotal by opening the issue to Congressional debate. To achieve this end, Franklin employed the same sequence of steps he used to create Pennsylvania Hospital and other enterprises: 1) Establish or take over a group dedicated to the goal; 2) Solicit public support through newspaper articles; 3) Raise money for the effort; 4) Write letters to important persons about the mission; 5) Petition the ruling powers for action. If these measures didn’t work, Franklin went to plan B: Publicly mock the opposition with biting satire and then repeat steps four and five.

Franklin’s effort to drum up public backing for abolition included every means an experienced media mogul would likely employ, including themed jewelry as a fashion statement. Just as today’s AIDS and breast cancer groups sell easily identifiable adornments to their supporters, in the late 18th century cameos depicting human bondage were worn as ornaments by ladies who espoused abolition. The British started the fad. When the potter and antislavery activist Josiah Wedgwood joined the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, he had his designer create a white-on-black cameo of the group’s seal. It depicted a kneeling African slave — chains and shackles around his wrists and ankles, arms raised in prayer — surrounded by the question, “Am I not a man and a brother?” Wedgwood’s factory made many such cameos, which abolitionists mounted in bracelets, brooches, tie-pins and combs. It was an effective emblem for the enlightened. (England abolished slavery in 1807.)

The cameo, its motto, and its image became as popular among American abolitionists as it was for their counterparts in England. Soon everything from painted silks to snuffboxes depicted what Franklin called “the suppliant.” (Today, the image is available on T-shirts, mugs, and mouse pads.)

Today, some malign Franklin for having owned slaves and for advertising slaves in his newspaper. It would be more appropriate, instead, to applaud Franklin for his transformation from slave owner to abolitionist — and an aggressive one at that — who spent the last three years of his life trying to end what he called the “atrocious debasement of human nature.”

If Franklin returned to the United States today, he would first be welcomed home by Philadelphia’s mayor, a man of African ancestry. Later, Franklin might meet to discuss foreign affairs with the black woman who served as the nation’s Secretary of State. He would be honored at the White House by our black president from whom he’d no doubt learn about Abraham Lincoln, his Cooper Institute speech of 1860, and the Civil War. And, although horrified by the extent of the bloodshed, Franklin would commend the outcome, for it represents the worthy culmination of his last public undertaking.

Abraham Lincoln The Saturday Evening Post

What would Ben Franklin say about the accomplishments of these two great men? Let’s consider Charles Darwin in this blog and Abraham Lincoln in the next.

Franklin knew both of Charles Darwin’s grandfathers. Dr. Erasmus Darwin was one of the great intellectuals of his age. Indeed, had he not been overshadowed by his illustrious grandson, Erasmus would be the Darwin we speak of today. As both a physician and a poet, Erasmus Darwin made his mark. His massive four-volume poem Zoonomia acknowledged the evolution of species but offers a wrongheaded explanation of the process.

By Franklin’s time, most men of learning accepted the idea that the species were not fixed but did, instead, change with time. They knew this from the fossils found in successive layers of rocks. The mechanism proposed by Erasmus Darwin and his colleagues suggested that acquired changes in an organism could be passed on to the next generation. If an animal, such as an antelope, needed a longer neck to reach higher leaves on a tree, the animal would will his or her neck to be a bit longer and transmit this change to their offspring.

Franklin also knew Charles Darwin’s maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood. The great potter created a beautiful white-on-blue porcelain piece featuring a profile of Benjamin Franklin to honor his famous friend.

Charles Darwin did not learn about evolution by sitting on his grandpa’s knee. Erasmus died several years before Charles was born. Instead, Charles was sent to college to become a physician like his grandfather and father before him. The medical profession, however, didn’t hold the young man’s interest. Luckily, Charles was selected to work as a naturalist on a multiyear voyage of the HMS Beagle, a trip that would ultimately change the trajectory of human knowledge.

I need not review here the conclusions of Charles Darwin about the process of evolution. Instead, I’ll describe how Darwin did what he did. After returning from his voyage on the Beagle, Darwin was convinced that evolution was the fact, but he didn’t understand the mechanism whereby species would change over time. He therefore took the critically important step of joining a pigeon fancier’s club and spent many hours talking to breeders about how they introduce changes in successive generations of animals. Every breeder knows that there exists within every litter random variation among littermates. The breeder selects as parents for the next generation those animals with favored traits. In this way, animals change over time.

Who or what, Darwin wondered, served as the breeder in nature? In his autobiography, Darwin explained how he came to the answer. He had been reading the works of Robert Malthus, a Protestant minister, who wrote a book on population. Malthus, using rectory statistics from English parishes, stated that populations increase faster than food supplies. Thus, there was always a competition for food among the members of a generation. Darwin took this idea and realized that nature itself acted as a selective breeder by producing more organisms in every generation than could be sustained by the available resources. The natural variation between each member of every generation, whether plants or animals, would mean that some are more fit to survive in a challenging environment than are their siblings and cousins. Those favorable traits that allow this to happen are then passed on to the next generation.

Thereafter, Darwin always credited Malthus with providing the vital clue to unlocking the secret of nature’s great mechanism for allowing succeeding generations of life to adapt to an ever-changing environment.

And where did Malthus get his ideas? The parson, it turns out, had read the writings of Benjamin Franklin whom, in 1751, produced a pamphlet designed to convince Great Britain that it should do everything it can to acquire (or snatch) the central part of North America from the French. In describing the way the continent would gradually become populated, Franklin offered a concept we today call “population dynamics.” He wrote, “there is no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each others’ means of subsistence.”

This is simply another way of stating Darwin’s conclusion that overpopulation and the struggle for resources have an impact on survival.

Franklin, of course, was not concerned with the evolution of species nor, for that matter, did he ever say anything about that particular subject. Nevertheless, were Franklin to return today in time to witness the celebrations honoring the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal masterwork, On The Origin of Species, he would no doubt feel a sense of pride in the role his own writings played in the evolution of Darwin’s thinking.

Charles Darwin The Saturday Evening Post

On the 200th anniversary of his birth, our nation continues to strive to advance Lincoln’s ideal to build a more perfect union. Certainly, that was the goal of the February 10, 1945 Post article Thoughts on Peace on Lincoln’s Birthday. The commemorative feature presented ideas on peace of two great Americans.

A Lincoln scholar who published a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Honest Abe, Carl Sandburg found his inspiration for the poem The Long Shadow of Lincoln presented in the Post feature from one of the president’s messages to Congress in 1862. Artist Norman Rockwell drew inspiration from the last paragraph of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address that reads: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

In the introduction to the article, Post editors wrote: “In the heart-lifting symbolism of Norman Rockwell’s great painting there is thought for all of us. For here we find not only the crippled soldier who must learn a new way of life, the builder who will help put a shattered world together, the teacher and her brood, and the sorrowing family of a fallen warrior, but also the hand of brotherhood extended to the downtrodden and, in the background, the less fortunate races of humankind who must not be forgotten if peace is to be anything more than an armistice. Here, in the faces and attitudes of these people, are determination and tolerance and the yearning for a better world.”

Abraham Lincoln: A Tribute The Saturday Evening Post

Here’s what he’d say: “I told you so!” Franklin, after all, both created the job of president and promoted the abolition of slavery, so Barack Obama’s inauguration represents the final conjunction of two of Franklin’s most significant contributions to life in America.

Franklin first proposed a central government for British North America during the Albany Congress in 1754, fully 27 years before the U.S. Constitution incorporated his ideas in our founding document. The head of this central government would be a president-general, appointed by the British monarch. In this way, Franklin hoped the constant feuding between the 13 colonies would end, easing trade.

Regarding slavery, as a young Philadelphia businessman, Franklin owned a slave couple, which he later sold because they were too costly to maintain. Moreover, his Pennsylvania Gazette frequently advertised slaves for sale. The justification for slavery in North America revolved around the status of Africans as either “beasts” or infidels — heathens who didn’t know Christian teachings and hadn’t been baptized. This stance led to heated debates about what happened when Africans became Christianized.

Gradually the notion took hold among certain sects that blacks who converted to Christianity should be freed from bondage. Quakers were among the first to insist on this principle, excommunicating meeting house members who held Christianized slaves. This, in turn, fueled missionary zeal among those who saw slavery as ungodly. They set up schools to teach blacks the reading skills needed to study and absorb the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In 1758, a school for Negroes was opened in Philadelphia. Many slave owners disparaged such schools, claiming that Africans were incapable of learning to read or write. Franklin, however, came to the opposite conclusion. In 1763 he visited one such school and wrote about the experience to a British friend, saying that he had “visited the Negro School … and had the Children thoroughly examin’d.” Franklin reported, “They appear’d all to have made considerable Progress in Reading for the Time they had respectively been in the School, and most of them answer’d readily and well the Questions of the Catechism; they behav’d very orderly, show’d a proper Respect and ready Obedience to the Mistress, and seem’d very attentive.” Franklin concluded, “From what I then saw, [I] have conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained. Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children.”

Franklin, during the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention, was effectively governor of Pennsylvania and head of his state’s delegation to that assemblage. Shortly after the convention ended, however, Franklin returned to private life, at least for a while, retiring from Pennsylvania’s presidency on November 5, 1788. By then, Franklin was already president of an organization started 10 years earlier by righteous-minded Quakers called The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage and for Improving the Condition of the African Race. The group’s stated objective was “to use such means as are in their power, to extend the blessings of freedom to every part of the human race.”

As soon as his government duties ended, Franklin got down to the business of abolishing slavery. He used his considerable energy, skill, and prestige to make things happen. He thus became the leader of the abolitionist movement.

Franklin approached the antislavery project with a level of commitment equaling his dedication to civic achievement during his earlier tradesman days. In November 1789, Franklin issued “An Address to the Public” in which he called slavery “such an atrocious debasement of human nature” that eliminating it without proper preparation could “open a source of serious evil.”

Franklin’s antislavery campaign ultimately led to America’s Civil War. Our nation’s new constitution put off for 20 years any laws limiting slavery. This would allow congressmen to set the matter aside and deal with more pressing questions, such as how to pay off national debts and whether to maintain a standing army during peacetime.

However, Benjamin Franklin, the nation’s patriarch, sent a petition to the First Continental Congress soon after it convened. This document, from Franklin’s pen, raised religious and moral issues to condemn slavery.

Franklin’s petition reminded Congress that they had been given power for “promoting the Welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to the People of the United States” and declared “that these blessings ought rightfully to be administered, without distinction of Color, to all descriptions of People.” The document asked Congress for “the Restoration of liberty to those unhappy Men, who alone in this land of Freedom are degraded into perpetual Bondage … groaning in servile Subjection.” Franklin’s signature at the bottom of the petition, seemingly larger than usual, insured open debate on the subject. And debate they did: The discourse laid out the issues that continued to come up with increasing animosity for the next 70 years.

Indeed, Franklin opened a can of worms that Congress could not close. At the time, however, the balance between free and slave states shackled progress towards emancipation. The debate in our nation’s capital over the contentious issue of slavery, however, eventually split the country in two.

Abraham Lincoln was, in effect, carrying out Benjamin Franklin’s objective when he emancipated slaves in the conquered regions of the South.

If Ben Franklin came back to life today, he’d burst with pride over the outcomes of two of his favorite projects: the abolition of slavery and the formation of a national American government. However, he’d wonder why it took more than 230 years for these two objectives to coalesce in the election of a black president of the United States of America.

America’s First Black President Barack Obama The Saturday Evening Post