In “Insult with wit,” my paean to the lost art
of invective, I noted that while the mature Lincoln did not stoop to invective.
This was partly fastidiousness, partly because (as Joseph Medill once noted) Lincoln was “not a match
for him [Douglas] on the stump before a mob.”
However, as a younger man Lincoln often resorted to sarcasm and
parody, usually from behind a pseudonym. The best account of this side of the
public Lincoln came from Robert Bray, now the R. Forrest Colwell Professor of American Literature at Illinois Wesleyan
University up Bloomington way. In his article, “’The
Power to Hurt’: Lincoln’s Early Use of Satire and Invective,” which
appeared in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association (Vol. 16, No.
1, Winter, 1995), Bray explores how the master of prose emerged from his
beginnings in a place where both rhetoric and ‘rasslin’ “were forms of ‘deep
play,’ violent, no-holds-barred, and basic to the male social pecking order.”
Bray reveals that while Lincoln might have
scrupled to stoop to invective, he used just about every other low rhetorical
trick against his opponents. Some readers might find Bray’s close attention to
the sociolinguistic subtext heavy going in places, but it’s worth the trip.
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2015.
