Looking Up Lincoln's Inaugural Dress

Okay, friends: I've spent nearly a month searching for that reported Vanity Fair cartoon of  President-elect Abraham Lincoln borrowing wife Mary Todd's dress as a disguise. And I am hereby officially throwing in the towel.

Our story so far: during Lincoln's pre-inauguration train trip from Springfield, Illinois to Washington, D.C., his security detail headed by Allan Pinkerton reported learning of an assassination plot planned for his stop in Baltimore. 

This is supposed to be a Graphical History Tour, so let's let the cartoonists tell the story:

The Flight of Abraham," cartoonist unknown, in Harper's Weekly, March 9, 1861

It is helpful to understand that the United States didn't have so much a railroad system as it had a lot of disparate railroads that didn't necessarily connect to each other, or even use the same width rails. To get across the country, Lincoln had to get off one train at its station, and get a ride to a station elsewhere in town to get on the next train. One should also keep in mind that the Secret Service didn't yet exist; Pinkerton's agents, then as now, were a private firm.

But don’t ask me to explain that last panel. I got nothing about attacks of Ager or shadows or Lincoln turning into an Edward Sorel sketch.

"The New President of the United States: From a Fugitive Sketch" in Vanity Fair, March 9, 1861

The above cartoon probably represents Lincoln's actual disguise more closely than any other that I was able to find. 

Instead of the long military cloak, however, cartoonists liked to seize upon the tam-o-shanter to draw Lincoln in full Scottish garb.

"The MacLincoln Harrisburg Highland Fling," cartoonist unknown, in Vanity Fair, March 9, 1861 

The episode was first reported in the New York Times — a paper aligned with the Republican cause — and was a public relations disaster for the incoming president.

"What would the nation think of its President stealing into its capital like a thief in the night?" Lincoln had rightly asked as the operation began. The answer, as the covert trip was illuminated in the press, was, "He is a coward."

One newspaper, Baltimore's Sun, declared: "We do not believe the Presidency can ever be more degraded by any of his successors than it has by him, even before his inauguration." Editorial writers and cartoonists of the time had a field day with the rumors that Lincoln had worn a Scotch cap and long cloak as a disguise. The harangues and caricatures stung Lincoln, and he resolved to never again shy away from threats to his life, no matter how real or imminent they may be.

"Prof. Lincoln in His Great Feat of Balancing" by Henry L. Stephens in Vanity Fair, March 23, 1861 

Could this cartoon of Lincoln wearing a kilt have been mistaken by whomever first reported that elusive Lincoln-in-a-Dress cartoon? I cannot be certain. 

The on-line archives of Vanity Fair are likely sourced from bound volumes of the magazine that were sold to libraries and collectors at the time. The Vanity Fair volumes do not include the front cover of any issue, so I can't rule out the possibility that the Lincoln-in-a-Dress cartoon appeared there.

Or on some missing page. That four-panel cartoon at the top of this post originally appeared on page 160 of a volume of Harper's Weekly issues; pages 159 and 160 happen to be missing from the archive at the University of Michigan Library's website.

"Passage Through Baltimore" by Adalbert Volck in Confederate War Sketches, Baltimore MD, 1863

Mockery of President Lincoln over this escapade disappeared from pro-Union publications in the North once Civil War hostilities broke out in April, 1861, but was kept alive by such cartoonists as rebel sympathizer Adalbert Volck. Volck was a German immigrant and dentist in Baltimore who published a series of cartoon pamphlets for distribution in the Confederate states. Three volumes are known to have existed, but only one survived the war.

"Proposed Meeting of Ex-Presidents" by Henry L. Stephens in Vanity Fair, May 11, 1861

Well, I wanted to find you a cartoon of a 19th-Century president in a dress, and here's a Vanity Fair cartoon by H.L. Stephens of every living ex-president at the time. As far as I can tell, misgendering them added nothing to the point Stephens was trying to make, blaming them for decisions leading up to the Civil War.

Including the consistently anti-slavery Martin Van Buren might have been a little unfair. In 1848, the presidential nominees of the Democratic and Whig parties both favored extending slavery into some western territories seeking statehood. Anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats met in Buffalo, New York, joining the abolitionist Liberty Party to form the Free Soil Party, and Van Buren accepted their nomination as the Free Soil candidate for president.

Van Buren didn't get much support from Whig party exiles; the 10% of the vote he received in November came at the expense of Democratic candidate Lewis Cass and helped throw the election to slaveholder Zachary Taylor. Although many from the Free Soil Party later helped found the Republican Party, Van Buren rejoined the Democrats, supporting Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Stephen Douglas in 1852, 1856, and 1860.

But to find a cartoon of Abraham Lincoln in a dress, I had to close the book on Vanity Fair and turn instead to the work of 20-year-old Thomas Nast in New York Illustrated News. It wasn't about Lincoln's Baltimore disguise per se, but it was published the same day as the first three cartoons in today's blog post.

With apologies for not being able to get that eagle into focus, here it is:

"President Lincoln's Inaugural" by Thomas Nast in New York Illustrated News, March 9, 1861

Could this have been the elusive cartoon I was looking for all along?

What's in a Name?

 Tariffic!

Q Toon: Trans Exit Hotline

We watch a lot of Ovation TV in our house, to the point where there are some program episodes we can identify within the first five seconds. My better half says he knows which commercials are going to be shown during which commercial break.

A commercial that seems to be replacing the one for buying gold offers a "hotline" to get people out of solar collector contracts, pretty much like those firms offering help getting out of timeshares. I didn't even know dissatisfaction with solar energy was a thing; when I tried googling for news about it, all that came up was a report that quoted only talk radio hosts.

So anyway, that was the inspiration for this week's Q Syndicate cartoon. Donald Commodus Trump made the weird boast in panel #1 during a campaign appearance over the weekend for Lindsey Graham's sister, Darline, in South Carolina. I've quoted him verbatim, except for adding the word transgender from earlier in his diatribe.

You can tell it's the way he talks, because I wouldn't have come up with that "Nobody ever heard about it" sentence myself. It's superfluous and doesn't quite make sense; it's just Trump again boasting his strange belief that his stable genius brain discerns all sorts of things no other human being is capable of ever having conceived before.

Now, I will concede that gender reassignment surgery isn't for everybody, so it is possible that a handful of people who thought it would solve all their problems come to realize that it didn't. It's up to them and their health care professionals to decide whether to pause, halt, or reverse their transition; no responsible physician would consult with the Absolutely Corrupt President of the United States for his Rx.

There is a reason, however, that nobody ever heard about the hospitals kowtowing to Trump's order to perform reverse transgender surgery — which, for the sake of brevity, I will hereinafter call "snart surgery." (Surely nobody has ever heard about it.)

Top snart surgery would be based on traditional breast augmentation/reduction procedures; I imagine that bottom snart surgery isn't absolutely impossible, either. I doubt, however, that it would be 100% effective, and I'm absolutely certain that even if Trump were able to order snart surgery done on you, neither he nor his Republican Congress are ever gonna foot the bill. 

This Week's Sneak Peek

There's a part in this week's cartoon for a shady medical person; I ruled out RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz because the cartoon didn't need to be about them specifically. I thought of The Simpsons' Dr. Nick, but I used him once before. No reason to keep using someone else's character.

Another possibility was to give the character the head of a duck — you know, because he's a quack, get it? Get it? Get it?

I settled for giving him vaguely duckbill lips.

I Shall Return

Every so often, the statistics report for this blog informs me of a big spike in visits to my 16-year-old post of R.C. Bowman cartoons about U.S. occupation of the Philippines in 1900. I've always guessed that some professor has that post on the syllabus. 

So, just in case some student clicks on the "Philippines" label in search of some extra credit, I like to keep my eyes open for more cartoons about the archipelago's American colonial period.

"The Little Dog with the Big Voice" by William Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, August 15, 1926

It just so happens that the Philippines were on American drawing boards in August of 1926.

President Calvin Coolidge sent a special commission headed by Colonel Carmi Thompson to the Philippines in late July to report back on conditions there 28 years after the U.S. took the islands at the end of the Spanish-American War.

Philippines Senator Sergio Osmena announced that Coolidge had promised him, "We are going to withdraw from the Philippines, but don't intend to leave you with limited resources. We desire to first assist you in promoting economic development sufficient for your self-support."

"He's Reached the Dangerous Age" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, August 6, 1926

Philippine desire for independence was nothing new. In "Ding" Darling's view, Americans were inattentive and indifferent to matters in the nation' far-off colony.

By the way, I'm not quite sure why Ding drew "Ordinary Citizen" and "Public Opinion" as two separate persons, or what relation they are to each other, since Uncle Sam is alarmed over "where our young son is." A throuple, perchance?

"High Time Somebody Was Watching" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, August 12, 1926

This cartoon makes a little more sense, even if 28 years is an awful long time to be struggling to get a fish in your boat.

Both cartoons cast (no pun intended) Governor General Leonard Wood, 66, as the person responsible for keeping the Philippines in line. The retired Major General was appointed Governor-General of the Philippines by Warren Harding, having been Governor of the southern, majority-Muslim Moro province during Teddy Roosevelt's administration.

"Rubberneck" by Robert E. Brady in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 2, 1926

Not everyone was as disinterested in the Philippines as Ding's Public Opinion appeared to be. U.S. rubber manufacturer Harvey Firestone was convinced that the Philippines were an ideal location to grow rubber trees for the American market, a commodity then almost exclusively contained to British colonies. Firestone urged the Coolidge administration to pressure the Philippine legislature to loosen property ownership laws to allow it to buy up land to grow rubber, perhaps as a prerequisite to independence.

One serious proposal would have had the U.S. annex Mindanao and other southern islands and grant independence to the rest of the Philippines.

"Guess Who'll Be the First Victim" by Jesse T. Cargill for Central Press Assn. ca. August 20, 1926

The Chicago Daily News was skeptical. "The United States, it is safe to say, will not grant independence for the sake of rubber, no matter how many native and American cliques favor such a dicker. The question of reasonable revision of land laws should be decided on its merits. Native interests should be protected, and exploitation of the islands by combines indifferent to principle or good faith should be barred."

"Another Channel Aspirant" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, August 10, 1926

McCutcheon's cartoon riffs on Gertrude Ederle's just-completed swim across the English Channel, and focuses on concerns that if the U.S. granted independence to the Philippines, the archipelago would soon be taken over by some other world power, such as Japan. There is a paternalistic attitude in many of the American cartoons on the Philippine issue, going back to the Spanish-American War and forward to independence in 1946.

"But I Want to Cross By Myself" by Robert Day in Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1926

"The tyrant is a new role for Uncle Sam to play," opined the Los Angeles Times, "one in which neither our cartoonists nor other people on this continent ever have dreamed of seeing him. But in the childlike mind of the excited Filipino, who clamors for independence as a small boy impatiently demands a huge piece of pie, regardless of whether or not it is likely to agree with him, our Government is as despotic as any of ancient Rome. 

"It seems impossible for any of these purblind people to appreciate the anomalous position they present to the world — the strange spectacle of 10,000,000 trying to get out of the United States, while at the same time more than 10,000,000 Europeans are anxious to get in, but must be denied admission."

"The Interested Party Seems to Be Interested" by Wm. Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, August 21, 1926

"It is not yet demonstrated that the routine resolutions of the Philippine legislature [demanding independence] express the majority opinion," averred the Oakland Tribune. "It is yet to be proved that the Filipinos have 'sufficient political maturity for independence.'"

Indeed, there were leaders of the Moslem minority who preferred governance by the far-off Americans to the prospect of rule by the local Catholic majority, leading the Fort Worth Telegram to conclude: "The United States should not grant independence until the Filipinos have gone through a long period of education and are a united people instead of an artificial union of  intensely hostile elements."

"The Ever-Shortening Fuse" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. August 25, 1926

As crises go, the Crisis in Philippine Affairs didn't capture Public Opinion's very long. Nor did whatever promises President Coolidge might have given Senator Osmena.

Q Toon: W-hoops

Perhaps if I had followed basketball more closely, I would remember who Royce White and Enes Kantor were; they retired from the NBA a couple years ago. 

Apparently, life outside of the limelight has been lonely for them, because they have decided to enlist in the Republican Culture War against transgender athletes by claiming to be transgender themselves as a ruse to qualify for the WNBA draft. Royce's pretense of being transgender has extended only as far as donning a blonde wig for a podcast; Kantor hasn't even committed to that much.

It can't be for the money. WNBA players, even the league's stars, make considerably less than their NBA counterparts. That's why they end up taking summer jobs overseas at the risk of becoming an international hostage, as happened to Brittney Griner.

White's and Kantor's purported reason for their ploy is that they are protesting that WNBA rules lack a definition of what a woman is and isn't. Never mind that there are no transgender women in the WNBA today, nor has any transgender woman beside these two fakers declared any intention of entering the WNBA draft. 

The sole exception has been Layshia Clarendon, a non-binary/trans woman who played on seven WNBA teams from 2013 to 2024. As I said, I don't follow basketball all that closely, but I think if there were any transgender basketballer coming up through the college system or making international waves in Croatia, I think I would have heard about it.

On the outside chance that White and Kantor are sincere in their concern for the integrity of women's basketball, trans athlete Karleigh Webb has suggested four approaches for the WNBA to "shut down the circus," as she puts it:

1. Ignore the two and refuse to draft them, then tough out the ginned-up outrage from right-wing agitators.
2. Require trans athletes to prove they have been on feminizing hormone replacement therapy for at least one year before becoming eligible to play.
3. Await the findings, expected next year, from the gender eligibility committee of FIBA, the international basketball governing association.
4. "Once the WNBA Finals end, owners, coaches and the players’ union, along with researchers and trans athletes well-versed in these policies, should come together and build an evidence-driven, basketball-specific eligibility policy. The objective shouldn’t be to balance inclusion against fairness, as though one must necessarily come at the expense of the other. The objective should be to align inclusion, competitive integrity, fairness and safety."

The ringleaders of the circus aren't likely to be assuaged by any of these suggestions. They have a vested interest in keeping the circus up and running. 

But you have to start somewhere.

fin

Honest Abe's Sneak Peek

"Prof. Lincoln in His Great Feat of Balancing" by Bobbett-Hooper SC in Vanity Fair, New York, March 23, 1861

I've found a couple sources on line for the 1860's iteration of Vanity Fair, but although the magazine's cartoonists got a fair amount of mileage out of depicting Abraham Lincoln in a tam-o-shanter and kilt, I have not yet come across that reported cartoon of him borrowing Mary Todd Lincoln's dress as a disguise.

I'll keep you apprised of my search; in the meantime, and speaking of disguises, here's a snippet from this week's upcoming cartoon: