...and suffering.
He was, as one might imagine, an intensely complex man of incredible contrasts.
There is a story of a cabinet meeting at which he showed up and read two chapters of a joke book that particularly impressed him to the cabinet. It was a hard time in the war; and Secretary of War Stanton, who evolved from someone who thought Lincoln a fool into one of his greatest admirers - Stanton had humiliated Lincoln before the war when they served as lawyers on a very involved patent case in which Stanton was the lead attorney - was outraged that they were reading a joke book at a cabinet meeting when men were dying in a horrible war which at the time the Union was losing.
Stanton wrote of that occasion in which he was thinking of storming out of the meeting, and how Lincoln responded to the fact that nobody was laughing at the joke book written by "Artemus Ward."
“I was considering whether I should rise and leave the meeting abruptly, when he (Lincoln) threw his book down, heaved a long sigh, and said:
“ ‘Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.’"
He felt the horror of the war deeply, and the depth is recorded eloquently in the Gettysburg Address and in the Second Inaugural speech.
At one point in the war he remarked, "If there is a place worse than hell, I am in it."
So, as he plainly confessed, he
needed humor.
His stories were backwoods humor mostly, learned on the court circuit, and without his voice - it was said he was an incredible mimic - they may not be as funny written down as they were when he delivered them.
Early in the Civil War, the then unknown Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant captured a Confederate army then lead by a man who had been a very close friend before the war, Simon Buckner. When Buckner asked for surrender terms, Grant replied, "No terms other than unconditional surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works." As a result, Grant shot to fame and for a time became known as "Unconditional Surrender Grant."
Later, Grant accepted the surrender of a second Confederate Army, the army occupying Vicksburg but did give the surrendering army terms, which was that it released all the prisoners of war captured on paroles: Grant, whose success was attributed to his knowledge of logistics as much as his resolve, risk taking, intelligence and raw courage, thought he would lose
time if he transported the captured men to camps in the North.
Lincoln, Grant's biggest fan in the Government, was confronted by critics who complained about the paroles granted by "Unconditional Surrender Grant."
He said that Grant's situation reminded him of "Skyes' Dog:"
"Have you ever heard," said he, "the story of Sykes' dog? Well, I must tell you about him. Sykes had a yellow dog he set a great store by; but there were a lot of small boys about the village and that's always a bad thing for dogs, you know. These boys didn't share Sykes' views and they were not disposed to let the dog have a fair show. Even Sykes had to admit that the dog was getting unpopular; in fact, it was soon seen that there was a prejudice growing up against that dog that threatened to wreck all his future prospects in life. The boys, after meditating how they could get the best of him, finally fixed upon a cartridge with a long fuse, put the cartridge in a piece of meat in the road in front of Sykes' door, and then perched themselves on the fence, a good distance off, with the fuse in their hands. Then they whistled for the dog. When he came out he scented the bait and bolted the meat, cartridge and all. The boys touched off the fuse and in about a second a report came from that dog that sounded like a clap of thunder. Sykes came bouncing out of the house and yelled, ' What's up? Anything busted? ' And looking up, he saw the air filled with pieces of yellow dog. He picked up the biggest piece he could find a portion of the back with the tail still hanging to it and, after turning it around and looking it all over, he said : 'Well, I guess he'll never be of much account again as a dog.' And I guess Pemberton's forces will never be of much account again as an army."
Source: Charles French, Abraham Lincoln, copyright 1891
Lincoln's stories, which sometimes, even often, annoyed men like Stanton, almost always had a point.
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