"Old Abe" in Political Caricature: Revisiting the Drawn Lincoln

Abstract

The subject of Abraham Lincoln's legacy tends to put us in a solemn mood. After all, Lincoln led the country through a brutal civil war that killed more than half a million Americans. Five days after the war ended, an assassin took Lincoln's life. Yet Lincoln, through it all, was able to maintain a sense of proportion, in part, due to his wit. For decades, the sixteenth president's homespun humor has been a highly prized staple of Lincoln lore. Of course, Lincoln was also the target of comic pictorial satire. Unfortunately the scholarship on Lincoln political caricature, at least in the periodical genre, did not keep pace with the output of several significant artists, such as Thomas Nast, William Newman, H.L. Stephens, and Frank Bellew. In 1968, for instance, historians Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan maintained that “the successful meshing of magazine publishing and political cartoons would not occur...