From Out of the Top Hat: A Blog from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum

  As Election Day nears, candidates will be out shaking as many hands as possible to indicate to the voters that they are approachable and just ordinary folks.  Baby kissing, once fashionable for candidates, has lost much of its early charm.  The declining appeal probably can be traced to greater awareness of how germs and disease are spread by both hand shaking and kissing.  Barack Obama describes how George W. Bush handled the problem:

   “Obama!” the President said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura.  Laura, you remember Obama.  We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family.  And that wife of yours — that’s one impressive lady.”

   “We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President,” I said, shaking the First Lady’s hand and hoping that I’d wiped any crumbs off my face.  The President turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the President’s hand.

   “Want some? the President asked.  “Good stuff.  Keeps you from getting colds.”

   Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

Lacking both hand sanitizer and a fully developed concept of germs and disease, Lincoln thought of hand shaking as a symbol of trust and friendship.  In formal receiving lines, kid gloves were worn that provided some protection against direct transfer of germs from palm to palm.  But many of Lincoln’s handshake encounters were without gloves, exposing skin to skin.

   Elbridge Atwood, a Springfield resident, wrote to his sister on August 5, 1860, describing an upcoming political rally: “at least all creation are coming and some of the rest of mankind, I pity Old Abe for he will have to stand and shake hands all day.  He is a first rate fellow to shake hands, and every body likes to shake hands with him.”

   Lincoln seems to have had hands of steel, hardened by his frontier experience.  On November 24, 1860, Hannibal Hamlin wrote to his wife, complaining about being in a receiving line with president-elect Lincoln: “They came by thousands.  For two hours and a half it was a continuous shaking of hands.  My hand is sore indeed and I began to doubt if all the bones in it had not been squeezed out.”

   The greatest marathon hand shaking by the President is recorded by the Commissioner of Public Buildings, Benjamin Brown French.  Describing the reception following Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address as “the largest reception I ever saw,” French offered these observations: “From 8 till ¼ past 11 the president shook hands steadily, at the rate of 100 every 4 minutes — with about 5,000 persons!  Over, rather than under, for I counted the 100 several times, and when they came the thickest he was not over 3 minutes, never over 5.  It was a grand ovation of the People to their President, whom they dearly love.”  Lincoln performed another marathon exhibition of hand shaking a month later at the Depot Field Hospital at City Point, Virginia.  Wanting to show his appreciation for the soldiers’ sacrifice for their country, Lincoln shook an estimated 5,000 hands.  Theodore Roosevelt holds the record for shaking hands on the traditional New Year’s Day White House reception.  Approximately 8,513 individuals were greeted by Roosevelt’s hardy hand shake on January 1, 1907.

Volk had Lincoln grasp a broom handle to steady his swollen hand.

   Even Lincoln’s hand grew sore on occasion.  Leonard Wells Volk recalled that while making a plaster casting of Lincoln’s hands “the right hand appeared swollen as compared with the left, on account of excessive hand-shaking the evening before.”  The most famous incident of a sore hand concerns the Emancipation Proclamation.  Lincoln planned to sign the document before the New Year’s reception of dignitaries, but errors in the text required that it be rewritten.  The corrected document was delivered to the Executive Mansion after Lincoln had shaken hundreds of hands.  Lincoln picked up a pen to sign it but stopped because his hand had small tremors after three hours of shaking hands.  When the tremors subsided, he picked up his pen and signed the document, declaring, “I have never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper.”

   Much less frequent than hand shaking, although more appealing to Lincoln, was the opportunity to kiss young ladies on the cheek.  When the president-elect’s train stopped in Westfield, New York, Grace Bedell, the 11-year-old girl who had written to Lincoln to suggest that he grow a beard, was rewarded both by a hand shake and a kiss.  Bedell recalled that Lincoln told her, “You see I let these whiskers grow for you Grace.”

   Benjamin Brown French also documents a marathon kissing session after the Second Inaugural ceremonies.  “In the procession,” wrote French in his diary, “was a sort of triumphal car, splendidly trimmed, ornamented and arranged, in which rode thirty-four young girls.  On our return, the girls all alighted, & I took them in and introduced them to the President.  He asked to be allowed to kiss them all, & he did so.  It was a very interesting scene, & elicited much applause.”  There are no accounts indicating if Lincoln’s whiskers tickled any of the young ladies.

   Among the points of genius in the U.S. Constitution is the system of electing members to the House of Representatives every two years.  This has often proved a check on the power of the party holding the White House or the Senate.  Off-year elections (a phrase not coined till 1906, but ever important) have in the last couple of decades got the reputation of always going against the President’s party.  It’s not quite true, but for Lincoln, it did prove true.  Why?

   In the fall of 1860, Republicans won a majority of House seats, and southern secession quickly raised that majority appreciably.  Lincoln could count upon 108 Republicans as well as a fair number of the 40 northern Democrats who remained.  (Some members still called themselves Whigs, soon an obsolescent term.)  Yet in Illinois, Douglasites remained supreme: Illinois sent 5 Democrats and 4 Republicans to the House.

   In autumn 1862, Lincoln’s emancipation policy was in some places more unpopular than his administration’s poor management of the war; or, depending upon the county surveyed, vice-versa.  Either way, Republicans lost 22 of their 108 House seats, while Democrats gained 28 (independents, etc., accounting for the gap).  The Republican Speaker of the House lost his seat, Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania – a manufacturing state which in 1860 Lincoln had carefully plied and won with protective-tariff promises but which now trended anti-war.  Probably the most anti-war Northern state, New York, elected an anti-war Democrat as governor, and so did Ohio.  In Pennsylvania and Indiana, the Democrats took control of the state legislature.  Two dozen pro-war Democrats in the House did bolster Lincoln’s view that theirs was a national cause, a cause for Union, and not a party affair.  Yet once again, Lincoln heard Illinois shout against his war and his party.  After redistricting based on the 1860 census added 5 House seats, Illinois in 1862 sent 9 Democrats and 5 Republicans.

   A few days later Lincoln wrote to German-American general Carl Schurz, “We have lost the elections. … Three main causes told the whole story. 1. The democrats were left in a majority by our friends going to the war. 2. The democrats observed this & determined to re-instate themselves in power, and 3. Our newspaper’s, by vilifying and disparaging the administration, furnished them all the weapons to do it with. Certainly, the ill-success of the war had much to do with this.”  (Collected Works, 5: 493-494).  Two days later, Interior Secretary Caleb Smith asked to be relieved of office.

   Had Lincoln prepared the field for the off-year elections?  Not in the way we might expect today, for instead of compromising with his opponents in hopes of holding the middle ground, he bowed to his radical wing’s long-term demand, and his own growing feeling, for an emancipation policy.  With the Illinois Democrats so riven that 40 of the 102 counties refused to send delegates to their state convention in September, Lincoln sent Ward Hill Lamon from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, to try to shore up Republican support.  But roughneck Lamon was no silver-tongued winner of skeptics, and they were not even called Republicans in Illinois that year.  The pol’s had changed their name to the Union party – almost 2 years before the national party did.  When the 1862 votes came in, Lincoln’s oldest friend in the state, and 2^nd bunkmate, William Butler, had been defeated in his re-election bid as state treasurer.  Or should we call John T. Stuart his oldest friend, he who lent him law books from at least 1833?  Perhaps – but Stuart ran for Congress as an ‘independent’ from the Springfield district, against Lincoln’s 1860 election co-manager Leonard Swett, and beat him.  Just what is an independent, in that day or this?  Someone who runs against old friends.

   The crown of ‘oldest intimate friend’ in fact belonged to Joshua Speed.  As late as June 1862 Lincoln was responding positively to a petition co-signed by Speed to release a Kentucky man indicted for treason; and in mid-September – crunch-time in electoral terms – to a request by the governor of Kentucky, and Speed, to stop letting the Union military arrest men in that state, turning over the power to the governor himself.  Lincoln needed Kentucky, which is to say, he needed friends there, even pro-slavery men like Speed.  But he needed Republicans elected in Illinois and the rest of the North even more.

   A clearer sign of his lack of political savvy in 1862 is seen in his letter to Schurz, where Lincoln focused on absent soldier-voters and a spiteful press, and overlooked the public’s distrust of what he prized most, emancipation.  (He also overlooked the hit caused by the nation’s first Income Tax, begun that year, and the dubious advent of the greenback.)  Six days after announcing his timeless, vote-losing Proclamation, he had ruefully deflected Vice President Hamlin’s plaudits thus: “the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. … The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.” (CW, 5: 444)  So, weakened politically, he ended his year with the military edict that ended slavery in rebel territory.  Votes mattered less to Lincoln than a long-term goal reached through short-term force, to wit, military plus emancipatory progress.

   Can it also be said that Lincoln let down the team visually?  He did not have a photographic portrait of himself made in all of 1862.  Indeed, the evidence today is that he visited no photographer between September 1861 and April 1863 (except when he posed with General McClellan and others at Antietam in October 1862, in outdoor ‘at work’ shots).  The usual explanation for his absence from a studio is that Willie Lincoln’s death in February 1862 left him downcast and overworried.  The modern pollster might suspect that new images of Lincoln would do nothing for other Republicans running for office that year.

   Vindication came in 1864 with Lincoln’s re-election.  He exerted himself to arrange for soldiers to get home to vote, something he had not pressed in 1862.  Now Illinois Republicans – running on the nationally approved ticket as the National Union Party – sent 12 Union men to the House, against only 2 Democrats, while the national sweep was nearly as strong.  And Lincoln left us post-election proof of how politically attuned he was after all, in his scrupulous notes of state-by-state voting (see image).  Even in a contest that seemed clearly his by early September 1864, he wanted to see how little or how much each state favored him.  The war had been effectively won by Grant and Sherman, with help from black soldiers, so Lincoln could get back to counting votes.

   No less astute a scholar than James G. Randall of the University of Illinois, a Democrat, pointed out to the American Historical Association annual meeting in 1934 that in the long run,  John C. Frémont’s followers had won in 1864.  Frémont briefly ran for the presidency as an abolitionist Radical that year, but dropped out of the race, regretting that Lincoln’s rule was “physically, militarily, and financially a failure.”  It was those radicals who seized the reins in Congress after 15 April 1865 and rode the vanquished South hard.  Randall’s point is sound; but Lincoln’s 1862 pursuit of both war and emancipation led to successes immeasurable on Election Day.

   Today this seems an irrelevant or tactless question to ask about any public official.  Harping on a person’s looks is a sign of small-mindedness.  Politicians trying to take down their opponents in 2010 don’t make fun of their physical appearance.  Voters revile ad hominem or ad feminem nastiness. 

   Nowadays it’s hard to find a politician whom anyone would consider ugly in the first place.  After television conquered the land in the 1950s, good looks become a virtual qualification for office.  Some people in the 1960s thought LBJ looked ugly, and happily voted for him.  Could a politician considered unattractive get elected president today?  Who knows?  He or she might face a tough time getting into politics at all.

   It’s hard for us in the 2000s to figure out why so many people in the 1800s thought Lincoln was ugly.  He doesn’t look so bad in the pictures Brady or Gardner took of him.  But even after the assassination — when you’d think people would have stopped assessing his physical attributes — eulogists and mourners kept right on calling him ugly.  A few people, like William Herndon, his former law partner in Springfield, went out of their way to insist Lincoln wasn’t ugly at all, just “homely.”  But before and after his death, friends and foes alike kept remarking on how unlovely he was.

   Lincoln’s Democratic detractors didn’t just dwell on his unattractiveness; they often found him repulsive.  Colonel Charles Wainwright, scion of the old Hudson River elite, saw the president and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton at the opera in Washington, D.C., in 1862, and he tied Lincoln’s ugliness to his unrefined behavior: 

   “It would be hard work to find the great man in his face or figure,” Wainwright wrote in his diary, “and he is infinitely uglier than any of his pictures.  When the audience rose and cheered on his entry, instead of coming forward and bowing like a gentleman, he sat down, stuck his head out over the edge of the box, and grinned like a great baboon.  I was ashamed to think that such a gawk was President of the United States.”

   (Wainwright didn’t think much of Stanton’s looks either, describing him as “a long-haired, fat, oily, politician-looking man.”)

   Walt Whitman, one of Lincoln’s biggest boosters, agreed with Wainwright about the president’s unprepossessing looks.  But in Whitman’s eyes, Lincoln’s ugliness made him all the more endearing:

   “He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.”

   One reason people across the political spectrum felt so free to call Lincoln ugly was that he happily led the way.  He called himself ugly, a politically deft course to take.  Self-flattery loses votes; self-deprecation wins them.  Politics aside, Lincoln was a big fan of popular humor, which until recently found “fat” jokes and “ugly” jokes hilarious.  He’d likely have fallen over in hysterics if he’d ever gotten to hear any of Rodney Dangerfield’s ‘I was such an ugly baby’ lines (still available online).

   A lot of people fell over listening to Lincoln tell jokes, and one of his favorites, according to painter Francis Carpenter, concerned his looks:

   “In the days when I used to be ‘on the circuit,’” Carpenter reported Lincoln saying, “I was once accosted in the cars by a stranger, who said ‘Excuse me sir, but I have an article in my possession which belongs to you.’  ‘How is that?’ I asked, considerably astonished.  The stranger took a jack-knife from his pocket.  ‘This knife,’ said he, ‘was placed in my hands some years ago, with the injunction that I was to keep it until I found a man uglier than myself.  I have carried it from that time to this.  Allow me now to say, sir, that I think you are fairly entitled to the property.’” 

   Chances are that Carpenter attributed this joke to Lincoln without ever having heard him actually utter it.  A version of it was published in a London jest book in 1826, when Lincoln turned seventeen.  But even if Lincoln never said it, Carpenter knew his readers in 1866 would smile, realizing it fit Lincoln to a T.  They’d heard for a very long time of his delight in cutting up his appearance.

   In effect, then, Lincoln encouraged his friends to make fun of his looks by making fun of them himself.  But there’s another big reason why so many people gladly joined in.  It let them magnify the contrast between his face at rest (ugly) and his face in motion (entrancing).  

   “When in repose,” journalist Donn Piatt recalled after Lincoln’s death, “his face was dull, heavy, and repellent.  It brightened like a lit lantern when animated.  His dull eyes would fairly sparkle with fun, or express as kindly a look as I ever saw, when moved by some matter of human interest.”

   Calling Lincoln ugly, in other words, was part of a tried-and-true, before-and-after formula.  However gloomy he might appear (ugly), he was always one joke away from slapping his knee and lighting up the room (transfigured).  By repeating how awful he looked initially, people were describing something real about his character: his charismatic charm kept erupting out of nowhere, catching them by surprise.

Barnard’s ‘Lincoln the Laborer’ of 1917, barred from London and placed in Manchester, England

   Maybe this is the reason Robert Lincoln, the president’s son, so disliked this early-20^th-century George Grey Barnard statue of his father (the photograph is from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library’s collection).  It froze him in the first half of the before-and-after formula.  Robert knew his father could appear downcast and dour.  But cementing him in a look of that sort — his face locked in a glazed stare, his arms hanging stiffly across his chest — missed his most essential physical qualities: motion and transformation.  Lincoln’s character was too volatile to be captured in such a one-sided pose.  (One leading collector dubbed the Barnard statue the “stomach-ache Lincoln.”)

   Lincoln knew he wasn’t the handsomest man in town, and he rose in most people’s estimation by frankly admitting it.  He laughed off the whole ugliness issue.  But occasionally he got serious about the common insinuation that he didn’t look like a gentleman.  Speaking in Springfield on July 17, 1858, as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, he let the audience know that surfaces didn’t count in judging a person’s true refinement.

   He’d embarked on his campaign against Stephen Douglas, he said, “with the intention of conducting it strictly as a gentleman, in substance at least, if not in the outside polish.  The latter I shall never be, but that which constitutes the inside of a gentleman I hope I understand, and am not less inclined to practice than others. [Cheers.]”