jazzeum
Four Star General
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2005
- Messages
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I am taking this out of the regular Disunion Thread because this is a great article about Lincon's use of stories and how it served his purposes as President.
Perhaps one of the better known ones is when a delegation came to see him and in response to a discussion about the pressure from abolititionists for the President to take action against slavery -- and at this point in 1862 the pressure was growing (Lincoln had just proposed compensated emancipation) -- he told the following (in Lincoln dialect so as to capture his diction):
This was a brilliant example of answering a question by a different method and getting his listeners to laugh.
As the author of the piece notes, "the president’s storytelling and joke-making served multiple purposes. No doubt the verbal skills, honed while riding circuit as a Western lawyer, helped make him popular with judges and juries alike. His ability to tell a funny story and laugh heartily must have raised his spirits and help offset the other extreme of his temperament, a melancholy that often left him saddened and depressed. If his physical appearance was gawky, even off-putting, his joke-telling drew people to him and made him likable. Lincoln shrewdly used stories and parables in more complex ways as well. They would disarm opponents, or offer an easily digestible truism that seemed to support whatever position he might be taking."
However, not everyone loved his story telling but Lincoln used it as a safety valve, not just because he liked it, but because it gave him relief from the terrible burden he was under; pictures of him in 1860 and just three years later show the toll.
David Davis, an Illinois judge and the floor manager for Lincoln’s successful nomination at the Republican convention in 1860 and later a US Supreme Court justice, wrote to the president’s close friend Leonard Swett, “It is a good thing he is fond of anecdotes and telling them for it relieves his spirits very much.” One of Lincoln’s secretaries William O. Stoddard reported, “Mr. Lincoln says that he must laugh sometimes, or he would surely die.”
It just goes to show that humor can serve many purposes.
Perhaps one of the better known ones is when a delegation came to see him and in response to a discussion about the pressure from abolititionists for the President to take action against slavery -- and at this point in 1862 the pressure was growing (Lincoln had just proposed compensated emancipation) -- he told the following (in Lincoln dialect so as to capture his diction):
Wa-al that reminds me of a party of Methodist parsons that was travelling in Illinois when I was a boy, and had a branch to cross that was pretty bad — ugly to cross, ye know, because the waters was up. And they got considerin’ and discussin’ how they should git across it, and they talked about it for two hours, and one on ’em thought they had ought to cross one way when they got there, and another another way, and they got quarrellin’ about it, till at last an old brother put in, and he says, says he, ‘Brethren, this here talk ain’t no use. I never cross a river until I come to it.’
This was a brilliant example of answering a question by a different method and getting his listeners to laugh.
As the author of the piece notes, "the president’s storytelling and joke-making served multiple purposes. No doubt the verbal skills, honed while riding circuit as a Western lawyer, helped make him popular with judges and juries alike. His ability to tell a funny story and laugh heartily must have raised his spirits and help offset the other extreme of his temperament, a melancholy that often left him saddened and depressed. If his physical appearance was gawky, even off-putting, his joke-telling drew people to him and made him likable. Lincoln shrewdly used stories and parables in more complex ways as well. They would disarm opponents, or offer an easily digestible truism that seemed to support whatever position he might be taking."
However, not everyone loved his story telling but Lincoln used it as a safety valve, not just because he liked it, but because it gave him relief from the terrible burden he was under; pictures of him in 1860 and just three years later show the toll.
David Davis, an Illinois judge and the floor manager for Lincoln’s successful nomination at the Republican convention in 1860 and later a US Supreme Court justice, wrote to the president’s close friend Leonard Swett, “It is a good thing he is fond of anecdotes and telling them for it relieves his spirits very much.” One of Lincoln’s secretaries William O. Stoddard reported, “Mr. Lincoln says that he must laugh sometimes, or he would surely die.”
It just goes to show that humor can serve many purposes.
