Sinbad Lincoln and the Old Man of the Sea

Good Morning! Today’s Friday Funny is Frank Leslie’s “Sinbad Lincoln and the Old Man of the Sea.”

A clear critique of Gideon Welles, the Union Secretary of the Navy, this 1862 cartoon suggests that the naval department was weighing down Lincoln’s administration and that the Federal navy was sorely lacking; along the horizon the CSS Virginia and the CSS Alabama sit unchallenged by the Federal fleet. The illustration also makes reference to the famed Arabian Nights, casting President Abraham Lincoln as Sinbad the Sailor.

Image Credit: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 3, 1862.

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Lincoln’s Imagined West

In the midst of World War II, T.S. Eliot finished a series of poems that were collected in 1943 as Four Quartets. A prominent theme in the last poem, “Little Gidding,” is time and the place of humanity in history. In the penultimate stanza Eliot attests that “to make an end is to make a beginning.