President Lincoln has been made responsible for so many jokes, writes
Ben. Perley Poore, that he reminds one of a noted Irish wit who, having
been ruined by indorsing the notes of his friends, used to curse the
day when he learned to write his name, as he had obtained such a
reputation for willingness to oblige that he could not refuse. Mr.
Lincoln might well have regretted ever having made a joke, for he was
expected to say something funny on all occasions, and has been made
answerable for all manner of jests, stories and repartee, as if he
had combined all the elements of humor, commonplace heartlessness and
coarseness, mingled with a passion for reviving the jokes of Joe Miller
and the circus clowns. Yet he did say many excellent things. On one
occasion Senator Wade came to him and said:
“I tell you, Mr. President, that unless a proposition for emancipation
is adopted by the government, we will all go to the devil. At this very
moment we are not over one mile from hell.”
“Perhaps not,” said Mr. Lincoln, “as I believe that is just about the
distance from here to the Capitol, where you gentlemen are in session.”
On one occasion, at a reception, when the crowd of citizens and
soldiers were surging through the salons of the White House, evidently
controlled by the somewhat brusque Western element, a gentleman said to
him:
“Mr. President, you must diminish the number of your friends, or
Congress must enlarge this edifice.”
“Well,” promptly replied Mr. Lincoln, “I have no idea of diminishing
the number of my friends; but the only question with me now is whether
it will be best to have the building stretched or split.”
At one of these receptions, when a paymaster in full major’s uniform
was introduced, he said:
“Being here, Mr. Lincoln, I thought I would call and pay my respects.”
“From the complaints made by the soldiers,” responded the President, “I
guess that is all any of you do pay.”
Ward Lamon, when Lincoln had appointed him Marshal of the District
of Columbia, accidentally found himself in a street fight, and, in
restoring peace, he struck one of the belligerents with his fist, a
weapon with which he was notoriously familiar. The blow was a harder
one than Lamon intended, for the fellow was knocked senseless, taken up
unconscious, and lay for some hours on the border of life and death.
Lamon was alarmed, and the next morning reported the affair to the
President.
On another occasion a young soldier had fallen out of ranks when his
regiment passed through Washington, and, getting drunk, failed to join
his regiment when it left the city. To the friend who came to secure a
pardon, Mr. Lincoln said: “Well, I think the boy can do us more good
above ground than under ground,” and he wrote out the pardon.
In all such cases as the above, where the ordinary human weakness
was the motive, Mr. Lincoln’s heart was tender as a woman’s, but to
prove that he could entertain no sympathy for a cool, deliberate,
mercenary crime, he was approached by the Hon. John B. Alley, of
Massachusetts, one day, with a petition for the pardon of a man who had
been convicted of engaging in the slave trade, and sentenced to five
years’ imprisonment and the payment of a fine of one thousand dollars.
His term of imprisonment had expired, but in default of payment of the
fine, he was still held. In answer to the appeal for pardon Mr. Lincoln
said: “You know my weakness is to be, if possible, too easily moved by
appeals for mercy, and if this man were guilty of the foulest murder
that the arm of man could perpetrate, I might forgive him on such an
appeal; but the man who would go to Africa and rob her of her children
and sell them into an interminable bondage with no other motive than
that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the
most depraved murderer that he can never receive pardon at my hands.
No, he may rot in jail before he shall have liberty by any act of mine.”
Upon another occasion the wife of a rebel officer, held as a prisoner
of war, begged for the relief of her husband, and to strengthen her
appeal said that he was a very religious man. In granting the release
of her husband, Mr. Lincoln said: “Tell your husband when you meet him
that I am not much of a judge of religion, but that in my opinion the
religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government
because they think that government does not sufficiently help some men
to eat their bread in the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort
of religion upon which men can get to heaven.”
One day news of a great battle in progress reached Mr. Lincoln, and
his anxiety was so great that he could eat nothing. Soon after he was
seen to take a Bible and retire to his room, and in a few minutes he
was overheard in one of the most earnest prayers for the success of our
arms. Later in the day a Union victory was announced, and Mr. Lincoln,
with a beaming face, exclaimed: “Good news! good news! The victory is
ours, and God is good.”