Civil War Humor

Chapter One: HUMOR AND THE CIVIL WAR PRESIDENTS

[ 17 ] ChapterOne HUMOR AND THE CIVIL WAR PRESIDENTS Prologue:DefiningtheEnemy,CavaliersandYankees The most fundamental purpose of humor in any war is to define the enemy, to put him in his comic, satiric place and thus make him and the cause he stands for laughable. With this war, that had to be done rather quickly because despite a long history of differences, real and even more strongly felt, the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861 abruptly and dramatically altered the way they would be dealt with: even felt differences had to be made more real. Bluntly put, the ultimate purpose of the rhetoric of any war generally is to justify killing people, a principle all the more troublesome in this conflict because those “people” were in so many cases and so immediately, and often literally, “family.” That war of words could take the form of highly original vituperation brought on for the occasion, as in the following stanzas from the antiUnion song sheet “Mayor Brown” (William Brown, of Baltimore): Then you puss-gut bolly-woppers, Mischief-makers through the town, You’ll be put in mahogany garments, That is, when your [sic] done up brown. Oh! You fat enchanted maggots, Hypocrites of the Hicks degree, [Maryland governor Thomas H. Hicks] [ 18 ] HumoR ANd tHe CIvIl WAR PResIdeNts White-washed faces, bunch of faggots, Lincoln hounds of misery. This is early in the war, published shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter, and over the following years, a canonical vocabulary of ridicule and vituperation in the war of words would evolve. The first two paragraphs from “The Situation. As Viewed from Two Stumps” in Yankee Notions (March 1865) is a tour-de-force in that regard. First Voice (from the Northern stump).—The men of the South are men of Belial, full of iniquity, hard of heart, and without bowels. Yes, they belong to the congregation of the ungodly, and meditate evil against Yankeedom, from the rising of the sun even to the going down of the same—from the first “eye-opener” before breakfast, to the last nip of hot brandy punch. Second Voice (from the Southern stump).—The men of the North are the scum and offscourings of creation; abolitionists and woolyheads ; miscegenationists and nigger-worshippers; growers of onions and pedlars of wooden nutmegs; a nation of hucksters and cheats, of sniffling hypocrites and psalm-singing cowards. Their souls are no bigger than mustard seeds. Verily they are an abomination in our sight, and a stench in our nostrils! . . . First Voice: Lo, the rebels are a ragged and seedy generation; their breeches are tattered; their toes stick out through their old boots. There is wailing and sadness among the chivalry. The day of their calamity has come upon them, and their cotton is a vain thing. No longer they flourish their bowie-knives and rattle their revolvers; no longer they burn with strong drink and brag and swear at horse-races and enjoying themselves in free fights around their court-houses. Second Voice: Listen, all ye cowardly Yankees, and give ear to the truth! Four years you have fought to subjugate us; your fleets cover the sea and your armies fill the land; and still you imagine a vain thing. Have ye not learned that the Chivalry of the land of the Palm can never be conquered by cobblers of shoes, menders of eight-day clocks, and venders of rat-traps—by a nation that defile their hands with base labor, and peddle tin-ware an wooden milk-pails—that sing psalms through their noses and keep Thanksgiving! HumoR ANd tHe CIvIl WAR PResIdeNts [ 19 ] This appeared in a New York humor magazine, and the “Northern stump” has both the first and the last word, but the Southern argument is no less unrelenting in the catalogue of invective so excessive that, appearing late in the war, it becomes a comically absurd apotheosis of the war of words. A more generally applicable vocabulary prevailed that more effectively conceptualized the foe in the public discourse and the popular mindset. This takes its simplest, most immediate form in the terms commonly used to identify enemy soldiers. In the Civil War, Northerners were denounced as “invaders” and “vandals,” Southerners as “traitors” and “rebels.” Other terms spoke more descriptively to the historic cultural issues of the conflict. Southerners, for example, used “mudsills” (the bottom-most timber or “sill” of a building) to...