Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby was the Stephen Colbert of the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Portraying the character of a northern anti-war and pro-slavery conservative Democrat, the writer behind Nasby, humorist David Ross Locke, was the exact opposite: an abolitionist and Radical Republican who strongly supported the Union war effort and the two men leading it, Lincoln and Grant.
As with a late-night talk show host today, back then, many Americans got their political news from the obnoxious but amusing Nasby, whose massive popularity extended to the White House. As the iconic abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, explains in the forward to The Struggles of Petroleum V. Nasby, Abraham Lincoln collected all of Nasby’s columns, written in the form of letters, as they came out, in a file in his White House office. The cover of my 1888 edition of Nasby’s Struggles sports the following testimonial directly from the source:
For the genius to write like Nasby I would gladly give up my office. — A. Lincoln
Today Nasby is little known. That’s because his brand of political satire is not easily accessible to the modern reader. Like his near-contemporary Mark Twain, Nasby writes in backwoods dialect, a favorite literary device of nineteenth century writers. But as hard as some modern readers find the Missouri regionalisms used by Twain’s Huck Finn, Nasby’s backwoods Ohio argot is even more challenging to the modern ear and eye.
Yet, with patience and a willingness to sound out the occasional word, Nasby’s language, and especially his spelling, are hilarious.
Most of the 700 pages of this book are spelled using the system found in this dispatch dated December 20, 1865 from “Confedrit X Roads (wich is in the Stait uv Kentucky)” discussing the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery:
At last! The deed is done! The tyranikle government which hez sway at Washington hez finally extinguished the last glimerin flicker uv Liberty, by abolishin slavery!…I got the news at the Post Offis, near wich I am at present stayin, at the house uv a venerable old planter, who accepts my improvin conversation and a occasional promise, wich is cheap, ez equivalent for board.
Like Colbert or Archie Bunker, Nasby was an unlovable scoundrel whose political views were execrable and whose personal life was dedicated to his own comfort, anyone else be damned.
At a time when the new Republican Party of Lincoln stood for Union victory in the Civil War and first limiting and then abolishing slavery, Nasby was a Democrat and a party activist because he believed in white supremacy and supported southerners’ right to own slaves. A supporter of Clement Vallandigham, an Ohio congressman so vocally opposed to the Union war effort that Lincoln exiled him to Confederate lines, Nasby was willing to let southerners take all the top offices in Washington if only they would give him a patronage job running the local post office, with a high enough salary to keep him in whiskey.
During the war, Nasby tried to dodge the draft, but when he was conscripted into the Union Army, he quickly found a way to defect to the enemy, serving a hilarious stint with the ragtag Confederate troops of the Louisiana Pelican Guard. That’s just one way Nasby is an unbeatable scoundrel.
There’s another way that Nasby uses language that makes him difficult to read today. If Twain is sometimes criticized for using the N-word in Huckleberry Finn, he’s got nothing on Nasby, who uses that derogatory term 5-10 times per page on average. Obviously, Twain was not writing with racist intent and neither was Nasby. Both authors tried to give a flavor of the style of speech of many white Americans of their day. And of course Locke writing in the persona of Nasby was lampooning racist copperheads for whom the end of slavery meant a fatal challenge to white man’s rule.
Just as when you’re watching Colbert’s show or reading The Onion, when reading Nasby you have to remember that it’s political satire. With Nasby, you’re supposed to recoil at the racism and treasonous sympathies with Confederate rebels so blithely expressed by this Ohio copperhead. And cartoons by Thomas Nast help present Nasby in the least flattering light, as an older and grumpier version of David Ross Locke himself.
But it’s Nasby’s own words that indict him the most, whether it’s expressing his own racial prejudice, praising the prejudices of his fellow Democrats or retelling stories, with more praise, of how local freedmen were insulted, bullied, threatened or attacked by Nasby’s respectable white neighbors. Again, all with praise from Nasby. Which shows that Locke feels the exact opposite: he sympathizes with freedmen and ridicules whites who try to oppress Black families.
If you know enough history to distinguish Nasby’s fiction from historical fact, you can certainly learn a lot about attitudes of white Americans of his day. Reading The Struggles of Petroleum V. Nasby is like reading a newspaper from the era, though funnier and with worse spelling. The experience is like taking a trip back in time to an era where issues long settled today were still in play. An era when Americans still argued about whether slavery should stay or go, whether Black people deserved to vote, and whether Andrew Johnson would be impeached and removed from the presidency or not.
Many of Nasby’s letters come from the immediate post-war period under Johnson’s presidency. And Nasby’s is a world where Johnson, who Nasby sees as a vain, petty and vindictive man, is constantly grumbling about the ingratitude and treachery of Radicals in Congress and thinking up one scheme after another to nullify the verdict of the war, return white southerners to control in Washington, and arrest the rapid fall of his own political reputation.
Perhaps the funniest section of Nasby’s letters are those dedicated to Johnson’s disastrous speaking tour of the north from Washington to New York to Chicago and back, taken to boost support for Democrats before the Congressional elections of fall 1866, known as the “Swing Around the Circle.”
Nasby would have it that he accompanied Johnson on the trip and praised him for giving the same hyperbolic and self-pitying stump speech at every stop (which included the rhetorical question aimed at Johnson’s critics, “If I am Judas Iscariot, then who is the savior?”). When asked why his speeches are all the same by an “unsophisticated” man in Cincinnati, Johnson suggested how he could add variety:
At Cincinnati, I observed the followin order: —
1. I swung around the cirkle; 2. I asked who wuz the savior ef I was Joodis Iscariot? 3. I left the Constitooshn, the thirty-six States, and the flag with thirty-six stars onto it, in their hands.
Now, at Columbus, I shel vary it thusly: —
1. The Constitooshn, flag, and stars. 2. The Joodis Iskariot biznis. 3. Swingin around the cirkle.
At Stoobenville, agin, ez follows: —
1. Joodis Iskariot; 2. Swingin around the cirkle; 3. Constitooshn, flag, and stars.
And so on. It’s susceptible of many changes. I thot uv that when I writ that speech, and divided it up into sections on purpose.
Phrased that way, with that spelling, it’s impossible to miss the absurdity of Johnson’s appeal and easy to see why the elections led to a Republican landslide. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Nasby went on to publish a whole book just about Johnson’s hilariously catastrophic speaking tour, but Americans of later eras tended to largely forget the presidency of Johnson and the era of Presidential Reconstruction when white southerners nearly overturned the outcome of the Civil War through post-war politics. And most of what Americans remember about the war itself today is either propaganda about the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and the nobility of Robert E. Lee or else battlefield tactics, like who flanked who at Antietam or what happened in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.
But Nasby’s letters from during the war show that Americans of his day cared less about battlefield tactics than about the political issue behind the war — slavery and race. And his letters from after the war, leading up to the election of Grant as president, show that Americans of the time were polarized around whether Johnson was the savior of the nation trying to protect the Constitution as it was from abolitionist radicals or a tool of southern whites trying to bring back slavery in all but name and put the North back under the rule of King Cotton.
It’s a perspective that Americans need today to apply the lessons of the Civil War and Reconstruction to our own struggles with racial justice and historical memory. While Struggles and other Nasby titles are available as cheap reprints, antique volumes can be found affordably online and offer a better reading experience.