Itâs a familiar story. On October 18, 1860, the Hon. Abraham Lincoln of Springfield, Illinoisâ"Republican nominee for President of the United Statesâ"received a letter from eleven-year-old Grace Bedell, of Westfield, New York. Though a confirmed Lincoln supporter herself, Bedell worried that others, including one or more of her brothers, might need convincing. As a remedy, she suggested the candidate grow facial hair. â[I]f you let your whiskers grow,â Bedell told Lincoln, âI will try and get [my brothers] to vote for you.â Sweetening the proposition, Bedell added that âall the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.â A bold child, Bedell closed by asking Lincoln to âanswer this letter right off.â
And so he did. Replying the following day, Lincoln thanked Bedell for her letter but questioned her advice. Having ânever worn anyâ whiskers, Lincoln wondered, âdo you not think people would call it a silly affect[at]ion if I were to begin it now?â Although Bedell did not respond, the future president resolved the question to his own satisfaction, commencing his life as a bewhiskered statesman in early November, shortly after sitting for his last clean-shaven portrait. By the fifteenth of that month, Lincolnâs facial hair was long enough to elicit comments. His friends, according to New York Herald writer Henry Villard, teased him for âputting on [h]airs.â Later than month, when Lincoln sat for Chicago photographer Samuel G. Alschuler, he wore the beginnings of a respectable goatee. And by February 1861, when Lincoln departed Illinois for the capital, he wore what modern Americans would call a âwreath beard.â
It was an extraordinary transformation. For the first and only time in American history, a president-elect dramatically changed his personal appearance between his election and inauguration. In the process, he rendered the vital visual paraphernalia of democratic politicsâ"the prints, campaign pamphlets, and cartes de visite that cemented ties between politicians and the electorateâ"irrelevant. Why would Lincoln take such a potentially-alienating risk? What did facial hair do for Abraham Lincoln that being clean-shaven did not?
Lincolnâs army of biographers have offered a number of explanations. David Herbert Donald, for instance, suggested that Lincolnâs beard lent the president-elect âa more authoritative and elderly ⦠visage.â William C. Harris speculated that it was intended âto give his face a more dignified and mature look befitting a national leader.â And Harold Holzerâ"the most prolific authority on Lincolnâs beardâ"claimed that the president-elect grew his facial hair in an effort to discard his âimage as frontier railsplitter,â thus transforming âHonest Abe into Father Abraham.â Lincolnâs beard, in other words, lent him patriarchal gravitas. In the face of widespread doubt about his ability to manage the secession crisis, the president-elect at least âlooked up to the job.â
There are only two problems with this argument. First, Lincoln didnât have a beard. He had whiskersâ"an enormously important distinction in mid-nineteenth century America. And second, Lincolnâs whiskers didnât signify maturity, statesmanship, or gravitas, but rather urbanity: civilized, metropolitan grace. They were more Beau Brummell than John Brown, intended and interpreted as a rebuttal to claims of rustic rudeness, rather than those of dithering impotence.
This is not to suggest that Lincolnâs whiskers were wholly without patriarchal connotations. Facial hair was in a state of symbolic flux at the outset of the Civil Warâ"a state of affairs the savvy sixteenth president likely understood and exploited. But in the months between November 1860 and March 1861, Lincolnâs whiskers were seenâ"first and foremostâ"as an effort at fashionable urbanity.
Imagine yourself in Lincolnâs enormous shoes. You are a tall, gangly man with lantern cheeks, elephantine ears, and asymmetrical lipsâ"an ugly drink of water, even by the standards of an unsightly era in menâs appearance.
It is December 1860. You have just been elected President of the United States. Politicians in South Carolina are openly threatening to leave the Union. There are dire rumblings throughout the Deep South. In your worst nightmares, you imagine Missouri and Kentuckyâ"even Maryland and Delawareâ"severing their ties to the government in Washington. Disunion, civil war, bloodshed on land and seaâ"these are suddenly real and present dangers.
And the worst part? Nothing in your experienceâ"not your time in the Illinois state legislature, your unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate, your single term in the U.S. House of Representatives, even your log cabin childhood or your career as a frontier lawyerâ"nothing has prepared you for the job youâre about to assume.
So what are you going to do? Are you going to follow the stern example of President Andrew Jackson, who, during an earlier moment of secessionist panic, reportedly threatened to hang the first rebel he could get his hands on from the first tree he could find?
No. You are going to grow whiskers. And to further inspire awe in your opponents, you are going to tell everyone that you did so on the advice of an eleven-year-old girl.
This is the argument that some of the finest, most-careful of Lincolnâs many biographers have made about his whiskers. And, strange as it is, their argument rings true because it corresponds with our image of Lincoln as the Alpha and Omega of American civic religion: a marble man of strength and wisdom.
But in the months before his inauguration, Lincoln was anything but Abrahamicâ"let alone Christ-like. An untested rube who won a mere forty-percent of the popular vote in the 1860 election, Lincoln was widely believed to lack the experience and authority that the secession crisis demanded. Why, then, was he at such pains to emphasize Grace Bedellâs role in his changed appearance? Why did he make a point of stopping in Bedellâs tiny hometown of Westfield, New Yorkâ"explaining to the assembled crowd that âit was partly on her advice that he ⦠let his whiskers growâ? Why, in full view of some of the countryâs leading journalists, would he step down from his Washington-bound train and greet his correspondent with a much-publicized kiss?
As political theater, the incident was inspired. It demonstrated Lincolnâs attentiveness to correspondence, his concern for the disenfranchised, and his fatherly tendernessâ"all esteemed virtues in the nineteenth-century United States. But while the Bedell story may have provided a laudably paternal explanation for Lincolnâs decision to grow a beard, the choice hardly resounded with patriarchal authority. Little about the incident suggested Abrahamic fortitude. Among a number of commentators, in fact, the Bedell story actually served to undermine his gravitas. A New York Herald writer, for instance, characterized Bedellâs letter as âfoolishâ and denounced Lincolnâs behavior as âbeneath the dignity of the office to which he has been elected.â Contrasting Lincoln with Confederate president Jefferson Davis, the Herald writer found the former wanting. Unlike Lincoln, Davis had traveled from Mississippi to Alabama without having âtold any stories, cracked any jokes, [or] asked the advice of the young women about his whiskers.â
He was not without alternative explanations for his changed appearance. In October 1860, a group of die-hard Republicans wrote to their candidate in a state of distress. After carefully considering the daguerreotype images of Lincoln they wore on their lapels, they arrived at âthe candid determinationâ that he would be âimproved in appearance, provided you would cultivate whiskers.â Earnest supplicants, the âTrue Republicans,â as they called themselves, testified to Lincolnâs power in a way that Bedellâs precocious familiarity did not. If Lincoln had wanted to portray himself as a master of men, this surely would have offered a more flattering explanation for his decision. But instead he singled out Bedell. Clearly, then, Lincolnâs whiskersâ"and the story he told about themâ"were intended to communicate something other than Abrahamic authority.
What Lincolnâs facial hair was meant to convey becomes clearer when we consider the language that the president-elect and his contemporaries used to describe it. While we moderns presume to call Lincolnâs facial hair a beardâ"âthe most famous beard in the history of the world,â according to The New York Timesâ Adam Goodheartâ"Civil War-era Americans would have recognized the president-electâs facial hair for what it was: a fine set of whiskers. In fact, a thorough search of a leading digital newspaper database reveals that between November 1860 and March 1861, only two of dozens of commentators used the word âbeardâ to describe Lincolnâs appearance.
This was not coincidental. The words âbeardâ and âwhiskersâ connoted distinctive styles in mid-nineteenth century Americaâ"and contemporaries used the words differently than we do. The word âwhiskersâ typically referred not only to bushy cheek growthsâ"to massive sideburns and muttonchops, as it does in the presentâ"but to what we would call a âwreath beardâ as well: to facial hair configurations that met beneath the jaw. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, described one fellow writer as having â[t]hick whiskers meeting under the chin,â and another whose âhair and whiskers are dark, the latter meeting voluminously beneath the chin.â One might even use the word whisker to refer to what we would call a moustache. Writer Edward L. Carey, for instance, referred to a character with a âwhisker on [his] upper lipâ in a story entitled âThe Young Artist.â
âBeards,â on the other hand, were more unruly affairs. In an article in the American Phrenological Journal entitled âWearing the Beard,â for instance, the anonymous F.W.E. instructed beard-wearers that, contrary to the practice of bewhiskered men, âThou shalt not cut it off at all, but let it grow. Let it grow, all of it, as long as it will.â What often distinguished beards from whiskers, then, was neither facial real-estate nor the length of oneâs hairâ"one might wear a short, untamed beard-in-the-making or a long, carefully-sculpted set of whiskersâ"but rather oneâs relationship to the work of menâs grooming. Hairy men who continued to visit the barber, trim their mustaches, or wax their locks wore whiskers; men who let their facial hair grow unrestrained sported beards.
A survey of these words in the pages of Godeyâs Ladyâs Bookâ"antebellum Americaâs best-selling periodicalâ"indicates why the distinction mattered. While whiskers appeared on the faces of European noblemen, professional military men, and dashing young dandies, beards were most closely associated with Biblical patriarchs, unkempt gold prospectors, and messianic radicals.
Prince Albert sported the formerâ"a style that signified a refined and restrained ideal of male comportment. John Brown, by contrast, wore the latter, harkening back to a militant, even Biblical, vision of manhood. Thus, it was the beard, and not whiskers, that connoted the kinds of Abrahamic virtues that Lincoln biographers have discerned in the presidentâs facial hairâ"the fearsome strength and gravitas he was so apparently lacking.
What, then, did contemporaries make of Lincolnâs whiskers? Even the most complimentary assessments of his new appearance did little to boost his patriarchal profile. âOld Abe,â wrote an enthusiastic correspondent for the Lexington, Illinois Globe, âis commencing to raise a beautiful pair of whiskers, and looks younger than usual.â The Democratic Albany Argus, claimed that â[t]he country does not want wisdom or courage in its Executive, but beauty. ⦠Lincoln knows it, and he is up to the crisis!â And the New York Heraldâs Henry Villard repeated the joke that âAbe is putting on [h]airs.ââ
Admittedly, the last two comments originated with Lincolnâs political opponentsâ"men with good reason to mock the president-electâs appearance. But even his most enthusiastic supporters tended to describe his whiskers in terms that diminished rather than augmented his stature. One writer, for instance, suggested that Lincolnâs facial hair gave him âa more sober and serene outlook ⦠like a serious farmer with crops to look after, or a church sexton in charge of grave affairs.â It was no doubt earnest praise but hardly an august comparison for a man about to assume the presidency, let alone the mantle of Biblical patriarchy.
Rather, Lincolnâs whiskers were meant to signify urbanity and refinement. Adopting a fashionable style of groomingâ"the wreath of whiskers that had been a fixture of menâs fashion for decadesâ"Lincoln offered a visual counterpoint to persistent barbs about his rough manners, rural upbringing, and rustic sense of humor. Holzer, then, was at least partly right about the meaning of Lincolnâs whiskers. He was, in fact, shedding the campaign image of the frontier railsplitter. But instead of adopting the look of a firm patriarch (or even a stern sexton), he was cultivating the appearance of a man of the world: a person of humble origins but hard-earned cultural capital.
He had good reason to do so. Since assuming the national stage, Lincoln had been dogged by doubts about his social graces. An article from the Columbus, Ohio Crisis, for instance, lampooned his ignorance of classical languages, while informing polite readers that Lincoln had only recently âabstained from facetiously designating hotel napkins as towels.â And one contemporary, recalling an encounter between the former Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft and Lincoln noted a âmost strikingâ contrast between the two: âthe one courtly and precise in his every word and gesture, with the air of a trans-Atlantic statesman; the other bluff and awkward, his every utterance an apology for his ignorance of metropolitan manners and customs.â Eager to dispel these aspersionsâ"especially in light of unfavorable comparisons between himself and the stately Jefferson Davisâ"Lincoln grew fashionable whiskers, not a patriarchal beard.
What does this story tell us about Old Abe Lincoln? Besides the obviousâ"that the âmost famous beard in American historyâ was not a beard at allâ"it reveals something about the nature of power in Civil War-era America. Taking command of a sinking ship of state and confronted with dire questions about his fitness for office, Abraham Lincoln chose a set of symbols that emphasized urbanity over more obvious emblems of authority. Calling on an old set of ideas about gentility and power, the president-elect claimed, in effect, that the right to rule hinged as much on politeness as on patriarchal strength or the imprimatur of the people. Itâs a strange story, to be sure. But it reminds us of the extraordinary currency of symbols like these: that faced with national dissolution and civil war, Lincoln sought the urbane sophistication required for his job in, of all places, his hair.
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