The American Civil War Museum

[Susan Higginbotham]

Andrew Ferguson has this to say about the chair story:

"Yet no eyewitness account mentions Davis's chair, or Lincoln's sitting in it. The detail was first recorded by someone who wasn't there: the humorist David Locke, who wrote a satirical version of Lincoln's visit in the voice of his character Petroleum V. Nasby. The chronicles of Nasby were published in Republican newspapers throughout the North. They were also, as it happens, Abraham Lincoln's favorite reading. In Locke's columns Nasby is a Southern sympathizer and all-purpose figure of fun; Locke's audience took Nasby's every pronouncement ironically, as a mockery of the rebels.

"After newspapers boomed word of the president's visit to Richmond, Locke wrote an account in which his character was appalled by the news. "Lincoln rides into Richmond!" Nasby sputtered in illiterate outrage. "A Illinois rail-splitter, a buffoon, a ape, a goriller, a smutty-joker, sets himself down in President Davis's cheer!"

"Though the fact was often repeated in subsequent accounts, this is the only contemporaneous mention of Lincoln's sitting in Davis's chair. It was a fancy detail, a bit of comic invention, meant to mock the Lincoln haters. That it's now used by them to buttress their case for Lincoln's arrogance proves that the joke is still on them--but not only on them."

The complete piece is here:

https://www.weeklystandard.com/andrew-fe...nd-part-ii

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Terry Alford writes, "Lincoln's Richmond tour provoked Booth. For some reason, he believed the president threw a leg ostentatiously over the arm of Davis's chair and fouled his office by spitting tobacco juice, neither true."