Chicago's First Crime King, Irishman Michael Cassius McDonald. (1839-1907)

Though long-forgotten by many, latecomers like Capone, Torrio and Colosimo owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Cassius McDonald, the man who brought together criminals and elected officials, setting the stage for organized crime in Chicago. During a 50-year career in the underworld, journalists, gangsters, mayors, and even one President of the United States took orders from Chicago's original crime boss.

Michael Cassius McDonald arrived in Chicago just before the Civil War. A teenage runaway from Niagra Falls, New York, McDonald knew no one in Chicago. His childhood friend and fellow freight train jumper, Henry Marvin, died en route and was buried by McDonald without fanfare.

Michael Cassius McDonald

In the 1850s, Chicago became the nation's railroad hub, opening the city to a flood of eager young men with big ideas. For years, young men like Marshall Field, who opened a retail emporium in downtown Chicago, and George Pullman, creator of the eponymous sleeping and dining cars that made travel by train comfortable, later carried President Abraham Lincoln's body on a final journey from the White House to Springfield, Illinois, and Aaron Montgomery Ward, the founder of retail catalog sales, and an advocate for keeping Chicago's lakefront "open, clear and free" forever.

But when Mike McDonald rode the rails in the 1850s, passengers sat on hard wooden benches as they stared at an unchanging landscape through sooty windows.  With little to occupy bored passengers after consuming lunches brought from home, passengers eagerly welcomed the sight of boys called "candy butchers" who trudged through the aisles.  In exchange for a few pennies and free transportation to Chicago, runaways and orphans clad in ragged clothing peddled goods for the railroad. Sympathetic passengers, mistakenly believing that the boys received their fair share of profits, bought poor-quality goods from the candy butchers.  And Michael Cassius McDonald was the most successful candy butcher of his time.

An Enterprising Lad

Slight in stature, he peddled books and fruit to kind-hearted ladies. Male passengers, duped by his innocent appearance, took candy home only to discover when opened by a loved one, the boxes were half empty. Eager to increase his profits, McDonald expanded his business to include phony raffle tickets. Chicago crime writer Richard C. Lindberg credits McDonald with inventing the "prize package swindle." Lindberg explains that McDonald guaranteed a cash prize of up to $5 in every box of candy purchased. Most prizes amounted to a few cents, but once hooked by the possibility of a big prize, greedy passengers tried and tried again, leading McDonald to proclaim, "There is a sucker born every minute" long before film star W.C. Field uttered the famous phrase.

Most boys were tired of the grind, working long days for pennies and sleeping in dirty railroad yards a  night. But, now in his late teens, McDonald wasn't like most boys. He expanded his business. He learned to play cards from wealthy passengers, not afraid to gamble tidy sums of money. A keen observer of human behavior, McDonald watched their body language as they bluffed and wagered through intense poker games. S on, he exchanged his ragged clothes for the attire of a card sharp: a crisp suit, polished shoes and an ever-present cigar.  e continued to work days, but at night, he joined floating card games in The Sands, Chicago's vice district, going up against some of the best card sharps in the country.

Until the election of Mayor John Wentworth in 1857, Chicago officials unofficially tolerated The Sands, but within a few weeks of his first term, Mayor Wentworth declared war on The Sands. Literally, overnight, the mayor and his police force destroyed The Sands, burning to the ground or tearing down every shack, brothel and gambling parlor after issuing a 30-minute warning to occupants to get out.

But Mike McDonald was not discouraged. He correctly predicted that gambling, no longer contained in one Chicago neighborhood, would spread throughout the city, making finding gamblers harder for police. In fact, the police force was so inept that Mayor Wentworth fired the entire department until public pressure forced him to reverse his decision.

Discrimination against the Irish and Irish Americans prohibited McDonald from applying for many honest jobs; elected officials enacted legislation banning immigrants from holding city jobs. But McDonald's il gal business was flush with a customer base, including politicians, judges and city officials.

Gaming the System

McDonald operated Chicago's most successful floating faro game, a European card game popularized in America by Wyatt Earp and Mississippi Riverboat gamblers. Played with a unique deck of cards laid out on an elaborately decorated card table with hidden compartments to allow dealers to skim money, players had little chance of winning. Occasionally McDonald instructed his dealers to adjust the game in favor of influential business leaders but quipped, "Never give a sucker an even break" – another phrase later popularized by W. C. Fields. Games often ended in violence, but by this time, local cops could be called upon to remove the angry patron in exchange for a bonus from McDonald's men.

When President Abraham Lincoln called upon Illinois citizens to sign up for duty in the Union Army, McDonald did his best to aid the call to action. Though able-bodied, 22-year-old Mike McDonald did not enlist in The Irish Brigade. Instead, he organized groups of bounty jumpers. These men collected a $300 signing bonus called a bounty and then deserted the army as soon as possible with money in hand and returned to Chicago to enlist under an assumed name. McDonald pocketed 50% in exchange for a promise of immunity from a crime punishable by hanging. Government officials desperate to fill quotas looked the other way as McDonald signed up Chicago's drunken, derelict and destitute men. During the first two years of the Civil War, Illinois supplied more than 130,000 men to the Union army. McDonald's accumulated enough money to purchase a saloon and adjoining gambling parlor in a luxury Chicago hotel.

Perhaps it was ready access to an unlimited supply of alcohol that fueled McDonald's violent temper. On one occasion, he punched and kicked a 60-year-old woman who owned a roadhouse he frequented; he knocked down a man who tried to steal his handkerchief; he pummeled a man in a saloon, and when the poor fellow tried to defend himself against McDonald, the police hauled the man off to jail.

Chicago and Mike McDonald prospered as the nation suffered through the Civil War. Businessmen in tow to negotiate lucrative Union contracts, White southerners displaced by war and Confederate soldiers, and escapees from a prison camp on Chicago's south side provided a steady stream of gamblers at McDonald's gambling hall. Through his wealthy customers, McDonald learned of skyrocketing land values caused by the demand for new factories and housing for workers, and he invested heavily in real estate. By the war's end, McDonald owned several buildings, four gambling clubs and a liquor distributorship.

His notoriety attracted women of a specific type: young and flashy. Isabella or Belle Jewel met Michael McDonald when she danced in the chorus line at a popular theater where John Wilkes Booth performed Shakespeare. Smitten by Bell's beauty, McDonald quickly welcomed her into his circle of friends, introducing her as Mrs. McDonald, though they never married. They dined in the finest restaurants and lived in an exclusive neighborhood. Whether it was physical abuse at McDonald's hand or his habitual drunkenness that drove Belle to leave him after seven years, she did so with a flair for the unexpected. The former chorus girl, no longer the belle of the ball, joined a St. Louis convent, where she remained until she died in 1889.

Michael Cassius McDonald served jail time in 1869. He was arrested for allegedly stealing $30,000 from an assistant cashier of the Chicago Dock Company. The cashier had given the money to McDonald to finance his gambling operations. McDonald was unable to afford bail, and, consequentially, spent three months in prison prior to being acquitted at his trial. He never served prison time again.

The Great Chicago Fire

A few weeks after Belle's sudden departure from Chicago, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed most of Chicago and every personal possession, business and building McDonald owned. Chicago and Michael Cassius McDonald were ruined, but not for long.

Chicago began rebuilding almost immediately after the outgoing mayor honored hundreds of dead citizens by closing saloons for one week.

By the end of the year, McDonald married Mary Ann Noonan Goudy, a stunning 24-year-old divorcee and mother of two. She and her toddlers moved into the house McDonald had shared with Belle Jewel.

Thousands of laborers rushed to Chicago to build new houses for over 90,000 homeless citizens (Chicago Shelter Cottage Kits Built Immediately After the Fire). For months, skilled tradesmen arrived at a busy railway station in the heart of a red-light district where McDonald set up a shabby but conveniently located ga bling parlor. To outsmart competing gambling parlors in the area, McDonald hired well-dressed men to greet passengers as soon as they arrived. Yes, McDonald's men knew where to get a hot meal and, incidentally, an "honest" card game to pass the time while looking for employment.

McDonald's business drew the attention of Chicago's new mayor, Joseph Medill, co-owner of the Chicago Tribune; Mayor Medill tried to shut him down. Medill successfully lobbied the state legislature to increase penalties for owners of gambling parlors. He forced saloon owners to close on Sunday, the one day a week that laborers were free to enjoy a drink or two at their neighborhood tavern. He ordered his police superintendent to raid gambling parlors. When he was lax in carrying out his duties, Medill's newspaper published a list of known gambling parlors and their locations.

With the support of the liquor distributors association and the publisher of a competing newspaper, McDonald publicly opposed the mayor's edict to close saloons on Sunday. For a while, saloons remained open, but owners dimmed the lights, locked the front door and admitted patrons through a side or back door.

Well aware that the police superintendent knew his men took bribes from gambling parlors, including his own, McDonald threatened to expose him. As a compromise, McDonald and others under his protection received advance notice of impending raids. For the benefit of the public, police officers removed gambling equipment they stored for pickup by the owners the following day. On occasion, the police smashed furniture, but only well-worn or broken items chosen by the owner. McDonald posted bail if an employee or gambler was inexplicably arrested in the raids.

Mayor Medill continued to pressure McDonald's, but the gambling king emerged victorious. The police superintendent and his successor were fired. Mayor Medill fled to Europe to seek treatment for unnamed health issues. McDonald successfully fully offered his own candidate to replace Mayor Medill. With a new mayor in office, McDonald flourished. Upon McDonald's request, Mayor Harvey Colvin repealed the law that banned the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Recognizing McDonald's ability to get things done, Chicago's gambling community clambered for McDonald's support – the result, Chicago's original crime syndicate. Flush with payoffs from politicians who paid McDonald hush money in connection with their own shady businesses and funds contributed by small and big-time gamblers, McDonald opened the most notorious gambling house in America.

The Store

In September 1873, the beautifully crafted wooden doors of McDonald's 24/7 department store of gambling, popularly known as "The Store," swung open to reveal the luxurious interior of a multi-story brick building: fine carpets, thick velvet drapes and gleaming mirrors. A cigar store that sold the finest imported cigars and a saloon stocked with the best wines available occupied the ground level. On the second floor, a staff of impeccably dressed men stood behind oak gambling tables, ready to greet well-heeled players. The Palace European Hotel, little more than a fancy rooming house, welcomed out-of-town gamblers on the third floor. No longer happy to occupy the home of her husband's former lover, Mary and the kids lived together on the upper floor with McDonald as an occasional overnight guest.

McDonald extended credit to politicians who walked over from City Hall and U.S. Senator James G. Fair. A frequent visitor from Nevada, Fair made millions from co-ownership of the Comstock Lode, the richest silver mine in the United States, and from a partnership in a California railroad, Fair couldn’t resist paying a visit to The Store when he changed trains in Chicago on his way to work in Washington, D.C. Sir Charles Russell, a member of the British Parliament, played poker at The Store. McDonald treated with generosity wives who complained their husbands gambled away the family rent money, refunding their losses and vowing to ban them from The Store. He contributed to charities. When someone asked McDonald for a contribution of $2 to help defray the cost of burying a fallen police officer, he quipped, “Here’s $10, bury five of them.”

Despite McDonald’s dislike of policemen, he kept some on his payroll. He brandished a pistol at a large political gathering, but officers on duty kept their distance. Police escorted drunken voters to a polling place set up at McDonald’s business, where he offered naturalization papers and voter registration forms on the spot. During a drunken rage, he broke the nose of a stranger who commented on a newspaper article unfavorable to McDonald and his supporters. The man filed criminal charges, but the case never reached the court. McDonald assaulted a newspaperman and threatened to cut off his ear. When arrested for the attempted murder of a rival gambler, a police officer escorted him to jail in a special carriage and recommended to the judge McDonald be released on bail immediately. Of course, he was acquitted of all charges, and that evening, he held a banquet for judges, city officials and police officers.

For a time, members of the Chicago police force disregarded department orders to raid The Store. But occasionally, policemen showed up unannounced. One evening, a group of officers bounded into The Store and up the stairs to the family living quarters with a warrant to arrest McDonald. Mr. McDonald was not home then, but Mrs. McDonald was. She responded by firing two shots at the policemen. Charged with attempted murder, she was led to a penitentiary where she stayed just until her husband hired an expensive lawyer named Alfred Trude and bribed a judge who released Mary before reprimanding the policemen for their unlawful raid of the McDonald family home.

Like her husband, Mary enjoyed keeping company with minor celebrities who performed in Chicago’s many theaters. She quickly fell in love with Billy Arlington, an African-American banjo player who lived with his wife Julia on Chicago’s South Side. Mary showered Arlington with gifts and even brazenly introduced him to her husband at a dinner party. When Billy had to leave Chicago for a performance in San Francisco, Mrs. McDonald followed. By the time they reached Denver, Mary declared her undying love for Billy Arlington in a letter she mailed home to her husband. Undeterred, McDonald followed the couple to San Francisco, where he threatened Billy and Mrs. McDonald with a loaded pistol.

McDonald forgave his wife for her indiscretion. He promised his wife a new home away from The Store and sealed the deal when he moved his family to a limestone mansion on a wide boulevard lined with houses of prominent Chicagoans, including the mayor.

Mary promised to be faithful, and for a while, she was. Through her husband's generous contributions to a local Catholic Church, she met Father Joseph Moysant. While church workers completed the preparation of his living quarters at the church, Mary offered the priest a spare room, and often her own room, in the McDonald's spacious mansion. On one occasion, they took a secret trip out of town. They continued a clandestine affair undetected for two years until they decided to leave Chicago forever.

Like Belle Jewel, Mary left Chicago wearing a nun's habit, but she had no intention of joining a convent. The lovers took a train to New York, where they boarded a ship bound for Paris. This time, it took McDonald two months to track her down. Under the advice of his lawyer, Alfred Trude, the man who defended Mrs. McDonald against the attempted murder of a policeman, McDonald filed for a divorce. Shak n by his wife's latest infidelity, he lamented to a friend, "When you cannot trust your wife and your priest, whom can you trust?"

Though busy operating his gambling parlor, collecting protection money and distributing police bribes, McDonald ran some honest and not-quite-honest enterprises. He bought the Chicago Globe newspaper, rivaling former Mayor Medill’s newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. He commanded hustlers and pickpockets to stay clear of the area around the Columbian Exposition so as not to damage Chicago’s reputation while it hosted millions of fairgoers. At a private meeting in the White House, he persuaded President Chester Arthur to pardon a colleague convicted in a Ponzi scheme. 

He operated a racetrack. He invested in a quarry that sold limestone to city contractors at inflated prices. He hired a crew to paint city hall with a special liquid guaranteed to render the crumbling building waterproof and fireproof, billing the City of Chicago $180,000 for a job estimated at $30,000. The unique liquid turned out to be a worthless mixture of lime, lead and linseed oil.

He built the West Side Lake Street 'L' that connected the Loop, which began service on November 6, 1893. Regular passenger service began between Madison Street and Market Street to California Avenue. Over 50,000 passengers rode on the first day. The line was extended west to Homan Avenue on November 24, 1893, to Hamlin Avenue in January 1894, to 48th Avenue (now Cicero Avenue) in March 1894, and to 52nd Avenue (now Laramie Avenue) in April 1894. When the completed Loop opened on October 3, 1897, the Lake Street Elevated became the first line to utilize the entire quadrangle. So shrewd was Michael McDonald that he bribed city aldermen thousands of dollars to buy their votes—ensuring that one of the train stops was near one of his illegal racetracks on the West Side.

McDonald was a busy man, but still, a man who loved women. At age 56, he married a 21-year-old Jewish actress named Dora Feldman, who he remembered from the times she and his son played together as schoolmates. Like McDonald, Dora was divorced, and like his former wife, the new Mrs. McDonald was attracted to artistic types. For a few years, the couple was happy to host lavish dinner parties in the home McDonald purchased for Dora and to dine late at night in fine restaurants after the theater or opera. But McDonald was getting older and slowing down. While he spent his afternoons napping, Dora sneaked away to meet her teenage lover, Webster Guerin. Guerin couldn’t support himself by selling his paintings, so Dora set him up in a picture-framing business downtown. Whether or not McDonald suspected his wife of carrying on a long-term affair, he continued to love his wife, even to the point of converting to Judaism and not questioning how she spent his money.

When Dora suspected that Webster Guerin was seeing another woman, who, in fact, was his brother’s girlfriend, she became enraged. She threatened to kill the woman. She threatened to kill Guerin. On a cold February morning, Dora burst into her lover’s office and shot him dead in full view of witnesses. Though she admitted to the police she killed her lover, she told her husband that she killed the man because she was blackmailing her. McDonald paid for her defense, a team of prominent lawyers led by Alfred Trude, who defended his first wife against a charge of attempted murder.

The scandal took a toll on McDonald, and he did not live to see his wife acquitted of murder. Michael Cassius McDonald died with his former wife, Mary, at his side, and McDonald had $2 million in assets ($65M today).

Michael Cassius McDonald was interred at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery on August 9, 1907, in Chicago, Illinois.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The Laughing and Literary Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln was the only President who was both a humorist and a literary artist. Lincoln's funny stories not only entertained people; they also helped him make important points. Lincoln was utterly without malice, but he was the most vilified of all our presidents. His sense of humor, however, as well as his deep devotion to democratic ideals, led him to respond to personal attacks with tolerance and magnanimity. And he enshrined his democratic faith in some of the most beautiful English prose ever written. 

Abraham Lincoln was the first humorist to occupy the White House. "He could make a cat laugh!" exclaimed Bill Green. "It was as a humorist that he towered above all other men it was ever my Jot to meet,'" said another friend from Lincoln's youth. H. C. Whitney, a lawyer who rode the circuit with Lincoln in Illinois, was struck by Lincoln's keen sense of the absurd: "He saw the ludicrous in an assemblage of fowls, in a man spading his garden, in a clothesline full of clothes, in a group of boys, in a lot of pigs rooting at a mill door, in a mother duck teaching her brood to swim-in everything and anything." During the Civil War, London's Saturday Review told its readers: "One advantage the Americans have is the possession of a President who is not only the First Magistrate, but the Chief Joker of the Land." By the middle of 1863, several joke books with titles like Old Abe's Jokes, Abe's Jokes, Fresh from Abraham's Bosom, and Old Abe's Jokes. or, Wit at the White House were circulating in the North and spreading Lincoln stories, many of them spurious, far and wide; and there have been collections of Lincoln anecdotes in print ever since.

Humor was unquestionably a psychological necessity for Lincoln, though, being a serious, not a solemn, man, he wouldn't have put it quite that way. He once called laughter "the joyous, beautiful, universal evergreen of life," and he enjoyed droll stories the way some people enjoy detective stories. But both as a lawyer and as a politician, he also found amusing stories enormously helpful in putting across important points he wanted to make. And as president he used his gift as a storyteller to put people at ease, to win them over to his point of view, or simply to get them off the point and out of his office without having to deny their requests in so many words. Humor, he once said, was "an emollient" that "saves me much friction and distress." A group of people who had gone to the White House seeking government jobs reported resignedly afterward that "the President treated us to four anecdotes." But humor was also important for Lincoln during the Civil War as a means of relaxing, getting away from his troubles for a moment, and refreshing his spirit. Once, when a congressman came to see him to complain about something, Lincoln said, "Well, that reminds me of a story." Outraged, the congressman told him he had not come to the White House to hear a joke. "Now, you sit down!" exclaimed Lincoln. "If I couldn't tell these stories, I would die." On another occasion, Ohio's Senator Benjamin Wade called to demand that General Grant, who was not doing very well before Vicksburg at the time, be fired at once. "Senator," said Lincoln, "that reminds me of a story." "Yes, yes," said Wade impatiently, "that is the way it is with you, Sir. all story, story! You are the father of every military blunder that has been made during the war. You are on the road to hell. Sir, with this government, by your obstinacy, and you are not a mile off this minute!" "Senator," said Lincoln gently, "that is just about the distance from here to the Capitol, is it not?"

Lincoln's taste in jokes ran all the way from the lowly pun to the satirical anecdote. Like all lovers of the English language, he took keen pleasure in plays upon words. Once he was looking out of the window of his law office in Springfield, Illinois. and saw a stately matron, wearing a many-plumed hat, picking her way gingerly across the muddy street. Suddenly she slipped and fell. "Reminds me of a duck," said Lincoln. "Why is that?" asked a friend. "Feathers on her head and down on her behind," said Lincoln. On another occasion, he was taking a walk in Washington with his secretary of state, William H. Seward, and they passed a store with the name of the proprietor, T. R. Strong, in bold letters on a sign in front of the store. "T. R. Strong." said Lincoln. "but coffee is stronger." Seward smiled but made no reply. "We don't see how he could reply after so atrocious a thing as that," commented the newspaper which reported the story.

But Lincoln's humor ordinarily rose above the level of puns. He particularly enjoyed teasing solemn people. When a temperance committee called to tell him that Union defeats were "the curse of the Lord" on a drunken army, Lincoln (who was a teetotaler) could not resist saying that it was "rather unfair on the part of the curse, as the other side drank more and worse whiskey than ours did." He treated some Chicago ministers who came to give him advice the same way. When they told him, they had come to deliver "a message to you from our Divine Master" about his slavery policy. Lincoln said it was "odd that the only channel he could send it by was the roundabout route of that awful wicked city of Chicago!" He had some fun, too, with a pompous Austrian count who wanted to obtain a position in the Union army. In making his request, the Austrian harped on the fact that his family was ancient and honorable and that he bore the title of count. With a twinkle in his eye, Lincoln finally patted him on the shoulder and said, "Never mind, you shall be treated with just as much consideration for all that. I will see to it that your bearing a title shan't hurt you." 

Lincoln's humor was not always gentle. Sometimes he used it to point up a blunt truth. Asked once how large the Confederate army was, he said, "About 1,200,000 men," and when his questioner expressed amazement, Lincoln explained: "Well, whenever one of our generals is licked, he says he was outnumbered three or four to one, and we have 400,000 men." He also could not help making wry remarks about General George B. McClellan, whose extreme caution in pushing military campaigns drove Lincoln almost crazy. Once, when a man from a Northern city asked him for a pass to Richmond, Lincoln exclaimed: "My dear sir, if I should give you one, it would do you no good. You may think it very strange, but there are a lot of fellows who either can't read or are prejudiced against every man who takes a pass from me. I have given McClellan and more than 200,000 others. passes to Richmond. and not one of them has gotten there!" A little later, greatly irked by McClellan's inactivity, he wrote: "Dear General, if you do not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a few days." Lincoln gave as good as he got, too. when he felt like it. When McClellan. irritated by one of Lincoln's orders requiring detailed reports to the White House, sent him a telegram saying, "We have just captured six cows. What shall we do with them?" Lincoln answered: "Milk them." 

Sometimes Lincoln's humor had satirical and ironic overtones. When he was in Congress. 1847-1849. he opposed the Mexican War, and in one speech, he said that people who denied that it was a war of aggression reminded him of the Illinois farmer who said, "I ain't greedy 'bout land. I only want what  belongs to me." "Young America," he said in another speech, "is very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided, always, they have land. As to those who have no land and would be glad of help, he considers they can wait a few hundred years longer." He once told of a congressman who had opposed the War of 1g12 and come under heavy attack and who, when asked to oppose the Mexican War. exclaimed: "I opposed one war; that was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence, and famine." And he liked to tell people about the old loafer who said to him, "I feel patriotic," and when asked what he meant, cried, "Why, I feel like I want to kill somebody or steal something!" A Toledo reporter who interviewed Lincoln at the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates decided he was "a master of satire, which was at times as blunt as a meat-ax, and at others as keen as a razor." Once, a senator came to the White House, furious about what he regarded as an unfair distribution of patronage, and he let loose a flood of profanity on Lincoln. When he had finished, Lincoln said calmly, "You are an Episcopalian, aren't you, Senator?" "Yes. sir, I belong to that church." "I thought so," said Lincoln. "You Episcopalians all swear alike. But Stanton [secretary of war] is a Presbyterian. You ought to hear him swear!" Lincoln. who rarely used intemperate language, was frequently criticized for not being a church member, and he was doubtless amused at hearing profanity from the Orthodox. 

Lincoln laughed at himself as well as at other people. When Senator Stephen A. Douglas called him a "two-faced man," Lincoln said: "I leave it to my audience. If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?" He joked about his homely looks again when he spoke to a convention of newspaper editors in Bloomington, Illinois. Pointing out that he was not an editor and therefore felt out of place at the meeting, he said: "I feel like I once did when I met a woman riding on horseback in the woods. As I stopped to let her pass, she also stopped and looked at me intently and said. 'I do believe you are the ugliest man I ever saw.' Said I, 'Madam. you are probably right. but I can't help it."No,' said she, 'you can't help it, but you might stay at home.' "Lincoln also enjoyed telling about the grouchy old Democrat who walked up to him and said. "They say you're a self-made man," and when Lincoln nodded, he snapped, "Well, all I've got to say is that it was a damned bad job." 

Lincoln came to be known as "the National Joker." but he was far more than the Chief Joker of the land. As president he showed himself to be shrewd. serious. selfless. dedicated, strong-willed, resourceful, compassionate, and extraordinarily magnanimous. The burdens he bore during the Civil War were far heavier than those of most American presidents, and he undertook his responsibilities with remarkable patience and determination. Though his critics could not always see it. he remained steadfastly true throughout the war to his basic objectives: restoration of the Union (which he regarded as a magnificent experiment in government of. by. and for the people) and the abolition of slavery (which he regarded as utterly incompatible with democracy). He was anxious to get the very best men. civilian and military. he could find to help him in realizing these objectives, and he did not mind if they personally held him in contempt. When someone told him that his secretary of war. Edwin Stanton. had called him a damned fool. he said lightly. "If Stanton said I was a damned fool. then I must be one. for he is nearly always right and generally says what he means." Stanton came to hold Lincoln in high esteem. But others never did. They found it hard to understand that in pursuing his objectives of preserving the Union and emancipating the slaves- Lincoln had to proceed cautiously to avoid alienating the border slave states (and driving them to secession) and keep from offending Northern public opinion (which was by no means sympathetic to abolitionism at first). He also thought it important to synchronize his policies with progress on the battlefield (which came slowly at first) if he was to avoid making futile and perhaps even counterproductive gestures. 

No president of the United States has been vilified the way Lincoln was during the Civil War. He was attacked on all sides: by abolitionists, Negrophobes, state righters, strict constitutionalists, radicals, conservatives, armchair strategists, and by people who just did not like his looks or who resented his storytelling. From the day of his inauguration to the day of his assassination, the litany of invective was unrelenting. Among other things, Lincoln was called: an ape; a baboon; a buffoon; a low-level obscene clown; a usurper; a traitor; a tyrant; an old monster; the Great Apotheosis of the Great Hog; Fox Populi; a cross between a sand-hill crane and an Andalusian jackass; Abraham Africanus the First; a smutty joker; a third-rate country lawyer; an African gorilla; an abortion; an idiot; Simple Susan; the Abolition orangutan; the incompetent, ignorant, and desperate "Honest Abe"; a border-state eunuch; a narrow-minded bigot; an unprincipled demagogue; a driveling, idiotic, imbecilic creature; a third-rate district politician; a lunatic; a despot; a dangerous character; the ineffable despot; a blunderer; a charlatan; a temporizer; a man who jokes when the nation mourns; a crude, illiterate, bar-room willing; an unblushingly corrupt bully; and a half-witted usurper. One New York newspaper regularly referred to him as "that hideous baboon at the other end of the avenue". It said that "Barnum should buy and exhibit him as a zoological curiosity." The Illinois State Register called him "the craftiest and most dishonest politician that ever disgraced an office in America." "Honest Abe, forsooth!" sneered one editor. "Honest Iago! Benignant Nero! Faithful Iscariot!" Even his hometown newspaper joined the chorus: "How the greatest butchers of antiquity sink into insignificance when their crimes are contrasted with those of Abraham Lincoln!" No wonder Lincoln said, when asked how it felt to be president, "You have heard about the man tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail? A man in the crowd asked how he liked it, and his reply was that if it wasn't for the honor of the thing, he would much rather walk." But Lincoln was not thinking of the abuse heaped on him when he said this. He was thinking of the terrible loss of life on the battlefield and the heartbreakingly slow progress being made toward the achievement of his objectives. He had enjoyed politics immensely before he became president and he had been eager, too, to hold the highest office in the land. But in the White House. he said, instead of glory, he found only "ashes and blood."

Humor lightened the cares of office for Lincoln. So did the theater. He had a special fondness for Shakespeare, and he experienced exquisite pleasure one evening at seeing the veteran actor, James Hackett, perform the role of Falstaff in a Washington theater. He was so delighted with the performance that he wrote a letter of congratulation afterward, and Hackett, flattered by the attention paid him by the president of the United States, turned the letter over to the New York Herald. For the Herald, Lincoln's letter provided another opportunity for ridicule, and the editor reprinted the letter and accompanied it with savage comments. Greatly embarrassed, Hackett wrote Lincoln to apologize. "Give yourself no uneasiness on the subject," Lincoln told him. "I certainly did not expect to see my note in print, yet I have not been much shocked by the comments upon it. They are a fair specimen of what has occurred to me throughout my life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice and have received a great deal of kindness. not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it." For Lincoln, the pleasure of seeing Hackett do Falstaff far outweighed the pain of abuse from the Herald. But even this pleasure was short-lived. A little later, Hackett sought a government job, and when Lincoln was unable to give him one, he turned against the president and joined the ranks of the Lincoln haters. 

Lincoln's Jove of Shakespeare grew out of his Jove of fine writing. As a young man, he read and reread the King James Bible, Ӕsop's Fables, Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, and Robert Burns, and he worked hard to improve his own vocabulary. grammar, and lucidity of expression. By the time he became president. he had developed a distinguished prose style of his own: simple, clear. precise. forceful. rhythmical. poetic, and at times majestic. When Vicksburg surrendered in July 1863, and the Mississippi River was open again, he told the country: "The'Father of Waters' again goes unvexed to the sea." It is hard to imagine any other president writing such a stunning sentence or penning such masterpieces of prose as the Gettysburg Address (which even H. L. Mencken called "genuinely stupendous") and the First and Second Inaugural Addresses. Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson (and, to a lesser degree, John Adams and Theodore Roosevelt) possessed unusual literary skills, but at his best, Lincoln towered above them. He had a deep feeling for the right use of words, and he employed them lovingly both in his story-telling and in his letters and speeches. He was the only president ever to be called a "literary artist." Jacques Barzun, in fact, called him a "literary genius." Jl "Nothing," wrote John Nicolay and John Hay, in their multi-volumed biography of Lincoln (whom they knew. personally) appearing in 1894, "would have more amazed him while he lived than to hear himself called a man of letters; but this age has produced few greater writers." Ralph Waldo Emerson ranked Lincoln with Ӕsop in his lighter moods. Still, when it came to serious moments, he said this of the Civil War President: "The weight and penetration of many passages in his letters, messages, and speeches, hidden now by the very closeness of their application to the moment, are destined to a wide fame. What pregnant definitions, what unerring common sense, what foresight, and on great occasions, what lofty, and more than national, what human tone! His brief speech at Gettysburg will not easily be surpassed by words on any recorded occasion."

At Gettysburg on November 19. 1864. Edward Everett, famed for his oratory, spoke for close to two hours, and Lincoln took up only a few minutes. Afterwards. Everett took Lincoln's hand and said: "My speech will soon be forgotten; yours never will be. How gladly would I exchange my hundred pages for your twenty lines!" 

By Paul F. Boller, Jr.

Edited by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.