President Obama has a new complaint: “Lincoln — they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”
More abused than Abraham Lincoln? Obama has no idea.
He has yet to experience anything like the hatred poured on his distinguished predecessor. Lincoln was the single most despised president in American history.
The vitriol began even before he was elected. After securing the Republican nomination in 1860, he was branded the “Black Republican.” Southern newspapers obsessed over his physical appearance. He was “the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a human frame” and “a horrid looking wretch . . . sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper and the night man.”
They didn’t like his views any better. Lincoln was “a blood-thirsty tyrant,” a “border ruffian” and “a vulgar mobocrat.” An Alabama group proposed a motto: “Resistance to Lincoln is obedience to God.” Throughout the emerging Confederacy, Lincoln was burned in effigy. His name didn’t even appear on Southern ballots.
Lincoln won the election anyway and tried to reassure Southerners about his intentions. In the grip of secessionist hysteria, they refused to hear him. His speeches, spewed a Louisiana editorialist, demonstrate “profound ignorance,” display “dishonest and cowardly efforts to dodge responsibility” and “have no equals in the history of any people, civilized or semi-civilized.”
Following Lincoln’s inauguration, the Charleston Mercury dubbed the new president “the Ourang-Outang at the White House.” Others called him “the Illinois Ape,” a “Baboon,” and “the original gorilla.” A Virginia congressman called him “a cross between sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass.” This was their colorful way of saying that Lincoln was less than human.
As the nation descended into Civil War, the loathing continued. Cartoonists depicted Lincoln as a drunk. Some portrayed him as a vampire or the devil.
Confederate schoolbooks became instruments of propaganda. “A despotism is a tyrannical, oppressive government,” said one children’s reader. “The administration of Abraham Lincoln is a despotism.”
Many of Lincoln’s critics were in the North. As the 1864 election approached, the New York World condemned the GOP ticket of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson: “The age of statesmen is gone; the age of rail-splitters and tailors, of buffoons, boors and fanatics, has succeeded,” it wrote. “In a crisis of the most appalling magnitude, requiring statesmanship of the highest order, the country is asked to consider the claims of two ignorant, boorish, third-rate backwoods lawyers, for the highest stations in government. Such nominations, in such a conjecture, are an insult to the common-sense of the people.”
The detestation survived even after John Wilkes Booth murdered the president. Lincoln’s death “seemed . . . like a gleam of light on a winter’s day,” commented a grave-dancing Confederate soldier. “Could there have been a fitter death for such a man?” asked a South Carolina diarist. A Texas newspaper rejoiced: “It is certainly a matter of congratulation that Lincoln is dead, because the world is happily rid of a monster that disgraced the form of humanity.”
Obama may have his detractors — but also he has it easy compared to the hatred thrust upon Abraham Lincoln.
John J. Miller directs the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College and authored “The First Assassin,” a novel about Lincoln and the Civil War.