The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers

Robert Henry Newell (December 13, 1836 - July 1901) was a 19th-century American humorist. During the U.S. Civil War, Newell wrote a series of satirical articles using the pseudonym Orpheus C. Kerr, commenting on the war and contemporary society. His articles appeared weekly in the New York Sunday Mercury, where he was the literary editor until 1862, and were published in a series of books. Among other newspapers he worked at, from 1869 to 1874 he wrote for the New York World....
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Robert Henry Newell (December 13, 1836 - July 1901) was a 19th-century American humorist.
During the U.S. Civil War, Newell wrote a series of satirical articles using the pseudonym Orpheus C. Kerr, commenting on the war and contemporary society. His articles appeared weekly in the New York Sunday Mercury, where he was the literary editor until 1862, and were published in a series of books. Among other newspapers he worked at, from 1869 to 1874 he wrote for the New York World. From approximately 1862 to 1865, he was married to famous actress Adah Isaacs Menken.

Excerpt...

The more I see of our Honest Abe, my boy,--the more closely I analyze the occasional acts by which he individualizes himself as a unit distinct from the decimals of his cabinet,--the deeper grows my faith in his sterling wisdom. Standing a head and shoulders above the other men in power, he is the object at which the capricious lightnings of the storm first strike; and were he a man of wax, instead of the grand old rock he is, there would be nothing left of him but a shapeless and inert mass of pliable material by this time. There are deep traces of the storm upon his countenance, my boy; but they are the sculpture of the tempest on a natural block of granite, graduating the features of young simplicity into the sterner lineaments of the mature sublime, and shaping one of those strong and earnest faces which God sets, as indelible seals, upon the ages marked for immortality. Abused and misrepresented by his political foes, alternately cajoled and reproached by his other foes,--his political friends,--he still pursues the honest tenor of the obvious Right, and smiles at calumny. His good-nature, my boy, is a lamp that never goes out, but burns, with a steady light, in the temples of his mortality through all the dark hours of his time: