Lincoln's Hat

Many have forgotten how unpopular Abraham Lincoln was in his time. He had to sneak into Washington for his first inauguration to avoid a reported assassination plot. He was opposed for his second term during the Civil War by one of his key generals. His resort to humorous parables at stressful moments exasperated his followers and detractors alike. Claims circulated that his lineage was partially Black and that he fed his pets at the dinner table with a gold fork. He was a lightning...
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Many have forgotten how unpopular Abraham Lincoln was in his time. He had to sneak into Washington for his first inauguration to avoid a reported assassination plot. He was opposed for his second term during the Civil War by one of his key generals. His resort to humorous parables at stressful moments exasperated his followers and detractors alike. Claims circulated that his lineage was partially Black and that he fed his pets at the dinner table with a gold fork. He was a lightning rod for haters of every stripe, who didn't hesitate to circulate outrageous fictions about him.



The story of Lincoln's Hat could have been one such fiction. Had his enemies known the contents of the congratulatory letter the sixteenth president received from the International Workingmen's Association of Europe upon his reelection, they easily could have conflated it with his support for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to paint him as a "socialist," and the Civil War as his "war between the classes." The congratulatory letter is a historical fact, and all the new civil rights legislation was the partisan work of radicals, albeit the radical Republicans of the day. Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, didn't enforce the Constitutional Amendments, nor for that matter did anyone else for the next seventy-five years. Ironically, had the Amendments been enforced, a strident movement like the Tea Party of today might have arisen back then among the Democrats, when the country was even more divided than it is now.