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“A nickel-plated son of a bitch.” That was how David R. Locke, an Ohio newspaperman and the most daring comedian of the Civil War, described his alter-ego: Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby. Locke’s persona made him the most influential humorist of the era.

His jokes seemed to be in everybody’s mouth, and he became so popular in England that readers there assumed all Americans spoke in Nasby’s tattered dialect. But while other humorists were genial, Dave Locke was ferociously political. Beginning in early 1862, he aggressively lampooned dimwitted reactionaries who, in Nasby’s words, pined for “the Union ez it uzd to was, and the Constitooshn ez I’d like to hev it.”

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Throughout the conflict, Locke wielded his hilarious character like a sword, skewering Northern apologists for the Confederacy, secession and racism. According to Mark Twain, Locke’s drinking buddy, Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby “promoted liberal causes by seeming to oppose them.” The progressive Locke created Nasby to mock all the worst stereotypes of “Copperheads” – pro-slavery, pro-secession Democrats in the North. In Nasby, Locke caricatured a scheming, pompous, barely literate pawn of the Confederacy, who quenched his thirst with “terbacker joose from J. Davis’ spittoon, dilooted with whisky.”

During the Civil War, Nasby “letters” were published serially in newspapers from London to San Francisco. But Dave Locke developed a wild reputation well before the conflict catapulted him to international acclaim, having begun his career printing, editing, and writing for newspapers at the age of 12. He stood out, even in that infamous and ink-smudged guild.

In some ways, Locke wasn’t much different from Nasby. Everyone who knew Dave Locke commented on his immense size (Twain compared him to an awkward ox),his atrocious hygiene and his constant drinking. Fellow editors mocked his “abominably nasty” clothing, which looked “like a secondhand store after a cyclone.” Co-workers recalled seeing him absentmindedly wash with a dirty rag while laying out an edition of the morning paper. And though he publicly preached temperance, Locke was better known for his ability to “put down the evil he was lecturing against,” as one observer put it. When a friend claimed that he had never met a man drunker than Locke, the inebriated comedian replied, “Get somebody to introduce you to me in an hour.”

Despite his shambling appearance, Locke had an electric wit, which he switched on as the Union war effort faltered. He edited a small Republican paper in an overwhelmingly Democratic pocket of Ohio, and turned his press against local Copperheads. When neighbors harassed Union troops, Locke lambasted them as “traitorous secessionist slime.”

The last straw came at the funeral of a young soldier, killed in action, when the minister bemoaned “another victim of this God-damned abolition war.” Incensed, provoked, and a little drunk, Locke invented Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, not to do battle with the distant Confederacy, but to satirize its allies closer to home.

Locke used Nasby to highlight the base meanness behind blustering political rhetoric. In his first published “letter,” Nasby’s small town angrily seceded from Ohio. Their list of overblown complaints censured the state for never appointing townspeople “to any offis wher theft wuz possible,” and not building Ohio’s penitentiary nearby, even though “we do more towards fillin it than any other town in the State.” Nasby swore: “Armed with justice, and shot-guns, we bid tyrants defiance.”

Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby tried to undermine the Union war effort at every turn. He continuously rooted against Northern armies, worried that a big Confederate defeat might “lessen Dimekratik magoritis” in Southern elections. To avoid the draft, Nasby performed a “rigid eggsaminashen uv my fizzlekle man,” and concluded that he should be exempted because of his baldness, varicose veins and “khronic diarrearr.”

Dave Locke deployed Nasby with shocking audacity, joking about truly devastating Union defeats. Nasby, for instance, hated Gen. George B. McClellan, though both were Democrats. Nasby indicted the general for failing to accidentally lose even more Union troops during his disastrous campaigns, leaving too many supposedly abolitionist soldiers “to live and vote agin us.”

Locke’s satire most aggressively targeted racism. A rare 19th-century believer in racial equality, Locke used Nasby to parody those Northerners who saw the Union’s war effort as a threat to white supremacy. But rather than make a heartfelt argument for the basic equality of all mankind, Locke attacked the essential stupidity of those who claimed superiority.

In letter after letter, Locke parodied the deluded belief in white supremacy. Nasby was proudly bigoted because “it is soothing to a ginooine, constooshnel, Suthern-rites Dimekrat to be constantly told that ther is a race uv men meaner than he.” Though he could barely “rede and rite,” Nasby worried that emancipation might mean that “our kentry will be no fit place for men uv educhashen and refinement,” like himself. Ultimately, Nasby fretted that freed slaves would begin “tyranizin over us, even as we tyrannize over them.”

Locke even defended interracial marriage, at the time reviled by almost all Americans. The Democratic Party accused Republicans of wanting to marry white women to freed slaves, a concern Nasby shared. He joined a rally by white women against miscegenation, but concluded that the hideous protesters he met had nothing to worry about; no freed slave would have any interest in them. Nasby did make an exception for sex between married masters and slaves, so long as “yoo temper it with adultery.”

No one loved Nasby more than Abraham Lincoln. The president, widely known for his sense of humor, carried a collection of Locke’s letters in his pocket and read his favorite bits to visitors. The two became friends, and Lincoln offered to “swap places” with Dave Locke, if only the wild writer could teach him to be so funny.

Locke provided more than laughter to the commander in chief. He ridiculed the hypocrisy of Lincoln’s domestic enemies and offered support to the embattled president’s expanding vision. Even at the end of the conflict, Locke’s jokes still buoyed Lincoln. Nasby’s book was the last he read – aloud, over dinner – before heading out to Ford’s theater on April 15, 1865.

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Even his friend’s assassination could not stifle Dave Locke’s furious wit. He published a Nasby letter just days after Lincoln’s murder, ripping into Democrats who threatened the president in life but now suddenly feigned sadness. His character – mean, drunk and selfish as ever – felt terrible anguish, not at the assassination, but at its timing. Had it happened in 1862, he moaned, “it wood hev bin uv sum yoose to us.”But after the Union’s victory, “the tragedy cum at the wrong time!”

Through his risky satire, the slovenly, drunken Locke probably had more influence on the direction of American history than any other humorist. Mark Twain certainly felt so, writing of those first Nasby letters: “for suddenness, Nasby’s fame was an explosion; for universality it was atmospheric.”

Nasby was also darker than other comedians, even during a period of exceptionally abrasive humor. Years later, an interviewer accused Locke of having gone too far during the war years. Locke shot back, “If I wrote strong during war times it was only because I must.” He angrily reminded the interviewer of the dragging lists of casualties and the Copperheads’ snide criticism. “Write strong?” snapped Locke, “we lived a year each day from ’61 to ’65.”

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Sources: David Ross Locke, “Nasby: Divers Views, Opinion and Prophecies of Petroleum V. Nasby”; James C. Austin, “Petroleum V. Nasby”; John M. Harrison, “The Man Who Made Nasby: David Ross Locke”; Mark Twain, “The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ”Vol. 1, Harriet Elinor Smith, ed.; Marcus Mills Pomeroy, “Reminiscences and Recollections of ‘Brick’ Pomeroy.”

Jon Grinspan is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Virginia.