Happy belated birthday to Abraham Lincoln (2/12)

[Terabith]

Happy belated birthday to Abraham Lincoln (2/12).

 

Abraham Lincoln, our sixteenth president, was quite possibly our greatest president ever. He led the Union through the horrors of the Civil War, ensuring that the United States remained united. He ended slavery. And honestly, I don’t know where to start with him.

 

He loved long, ridiculous anecdotes. He loved poop jokes. His favorite story to tell combined the two. He had this whole spiel about Ethan Allen, Revolutionary War hero. According to Lincoln, Allen visited England after the war, and his hosts kept trying to get a reaction out of Ethan Allen by constantly insulting George Washington. He wouldn’t crack, so finally they showed him their portrait of Washington in the outhouse. So the Brits were standing outside the outhouse, waiting for Allen to come out after he pooped, and when he came out all unperturbed, they asked him what he thought of their portrait of Washington in the outhouse. Ethan Allen supposedly said, “I think it’s a very appropriate place for nothing will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of General Washington.”

 

Lincoln kept a book of poop jokes in the desk in the Oval Office and claimed they were the only thing that kept him going during the Civil War, which I guess is fair.

 

Actually, Lincoln’s comedy came up a lot. He kicked off the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet by reading aloud a really long and really bad comedic speech by a humorist Artemis Ward. I found a copy, and I think it involves poop, but it also completely fails to be funny, which I thought at first was maybe humor not translating well 150 years later, but also maybe not, because after reading it, Lincoln asked his Cabinet, “Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh?” Then he read the Emancipation Proclamation, which must have been a shock for anyone who kinda tuned out during the bad comedy speech but was still giving a wry chuckle while doing the nineteenth century equivalent of playing on their phone.

 

He was also a genuine mutant.

 

He was one of our tallest presidents, at 6’4,” but even for a man as tall as that, his arms were disproportionately long. And then he strengthened them by a lifetime of axe swinging. He was not just strong. He was super strong. Numerous witnesses described him routinely, regularly carrying boxes of stones that weighed over a thousand pounds through the town of New Salem, Illinois. Some witnesses said it weighed more than 1,200. He used that strength to wrestle men. A lot of men. In fact, during his very first campaign speech, when he was running for the office of the New Salem Assembly, a small fight broke out while Lincoln was speaking. Rather than calling for security, Lincoln waded off the stage and into the audience, picked up one of the combatants by the throat, and threw him twelve feet in the air.

 

That’s not even getting into the time he won a debate with Colonel Edmund Dick Taylor by ripping open his opponent’s shirt.

 

The context is that Colonel Dick Edmund Dick Taylor liked to lambast the “rich big Whigs.” Instead of taking down his opponent’s arguments piece by piece, which as one of the greatest orators of all time, Lincoln absolutely could do, he just sidled up to the man and when he started making fun of the Whigs, Lincoln ripped the man’s vest open and revealed a fancy ruffled shirt with a massive gold chain. This caused the audience to laugh uproariously, and Lincoln chose that moment to make his exit.

 

Politics were different in the 1800’s.

 

Another great moment from the campaign trail was when Lincoln almost convinced a group of children to burn down a hotel. He had gotten bored with always winning the ax throwing contests he engaged in with another lawyer, so he convinced three kids to throw an inflated pig’s bladder into the fireplace. It predictably exploded, sending showers of sparks everywhere. Lincoln tried to put the fire out with a broom, but the broom caught fire. He only barely managed to keep the hotel from burning down. The whole thing was basically a Three Stooges skit, except starring the man on the penny.

In addition to being superhumanly strong, with freakishly long arms, there’s another reason Lincoln was a mutant. There was something deeply weird about his face. Most people, including Lincoln himself, described him as ugly. There’s a story Lincoln used to tell, about a man who gave him a knife. The man said, “I was given this for being the ugliest man in the world; it is now your trophy, until you find someone uglier than you,” and Lincoln claimed he held onto it his entire life. He had warts, scars, enormous ears and eyes that looked like they were constantly threatening to sink into his face, maybe in protest of his nine-inch-long nose. There’s never been a good picture of Lincoln.

 

But it seems like that might actually be the problem. Lincoln’s secretary, John Nicolay, said photographs could never do Lincoln justice. He said Lincoln’s features were “too complex to be recorded accurately by photographers, painters, or sculptors.” Nicolay said that all art was “powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip in the long gamut of expression from grave to gay, and back again from the rollicking jollity of laughter to that far away look…”. You’d think that this was just one man’s obsession, but it turns out that a lot of people agreed with him, including a New York Herald reporter who said, “I have never seen a picture of him that does anything like justice to the original…he is a much better-looking man than any of the pictures represent.” And the editor of the Chicago Tribune said that Lincoln was at one moment hideous and at another had eyes that sparkled with “a countenance that was wreathed in animation.”

 

And it seems like all the accounts were like that. Walt Whitman said of Lincoln, “Though hundreds of portraits have been made, by painters and photographers, I have never seen one yet that in my opinion deserved to be called a perfectly good likeness, nor do I believe there is really such a one in existence.” Lincoln’s appearance “baffles interpretation.”

 

Honest Abe Lincoln: president and mutant superhero.

[Starr]

Our family loves these. Thanks 

[Eos]

Wow, very weird!  Thank you for this very unexpected piece.  I've always thought he was handsome 🙂 

[Brittany1116]

I certainly will not give this ammunition to my Lincoln-loving kids. I simply cannot share that he loved poop jokes with boys who also love poop jokes.

[Guest]

I’m a Lincoln fan. 
I swear I’m going to take up axing. I wonder if the program works for 51-year old moms.