1863

Brutus and Caesar. Punch, Volume 45, August 15, 1863, p. 69

Lincoln as Brutus is confronted by a stern black spectre in this parody of Act IV, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. In the play, the ghost of the slain Caesar warns Brutus "thou shalt see me at Philippi," the impending battle in which the murderer will meet his fate. Here, Lincoln is haunted not only for failing to liberate the southern slaves, but also for his seeming inability to protect Northern free blacks from mob violence [cf. August 8, 1863].

The Ghost has interrupted Lincoln in his nocturnal reading from a volume inscribed "Joe Miller" on its cover. Miller was a famed eighteenth century English comedian; after his death in 1738, his family published a collection of his humorous stories that is now regarded as being the earliest English joke book. The book appeared in many editions; in time, the term "a Joe Miller" came to be applied to any stale, worn-out joke. Tenniel, along with many among the British elite, evidently felt that Lincoln's penchant for telling humorous stories was inappropriately low class for the leader of a great nation.

The cartoon's caption dialogue attempts to recreate phonetically both Lincoln's Midwestern drawl and what passed at the time for black dialect (though most whites were more familiar with the comically exaggerated "Negro speechifying" used by performers in the blackface minstrel shows than with actual black conversational usage). Instead of a Roman youth with a lyre, the musician in this cartoon is an "Ethiopian Serenader with a banjo," referring to a typical minstrel show performer. In Julius Caesar, the musician Lucius is a favorite servant of Brutus, who addresses him as "boy." Ironically, nineteenth century American whites commonly used the term "boy" as a demeaning way to address black adult males.