Whom did Lincoln admire?

[David Lockmiller]

(03-27-2019 02:20 AM)Steve Wrote:  David, I think you're missing the context of the anecdote:

https://books.google.com/books?id=b4UpAA...&q&f=false

Lincoln was making fun of the book's character, Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby.

Steve, I ask you to consider the following two paragraphs from Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals at pages 661-62.

Both Republicans and Democrats considered the state elections in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana on October 11 harbingers of the presidential election in November. Not only would the results reveal public sentiment, but the party that gained the governor's offices in those states would have "a grand central rallying point" for its partisans. That evening, Lincoln made his customary visit to the telegraph office in the War Department to read the dispatches as they came over the wire. Stanton was there, as was his assistant secretary, Charles Dana, and Thomas Eckert, chief of the telegraph office. Early reports from Cincinnati and Philadelphia looked hopeful, but reliable figures were unbearably slow in coming.

To defuse the tension, Dana recalled, Lincoln took from his pocket "a thin yellow-covered pamphlet" containing the latest writings of the humorist Petroleum V. Nasby. "He would read a page or a story, pause to consider a new election telegram, and then open the book again and go ahead with a new passage." John Hay, who had accompanied Lincoln, found the selections "immensely amusing" and mistakenly thought Stanton felt the same way. During a break in the readings, however, the solemn war secretary signaled Dana to follow him into the adjoining room. "I shall never forget," Dana later recalled, "the fire of indignation at what seemed to him to be mere nonsense." Stanton found it incomprehensible that "when the safety of the Republic was thus at issue, when the control of an empire was to be determined by a few figures brought in by the telegraph, the leader, the man most deeply concerned, not merely for himself but for his country, could turn aside to read such balderdash and to laugh at such frivolous jests." Stanton never would understand the indispensable role that laughter played in sustaining Lincoln's spirits in difficult times.