ABSTRACT
The Civil War cost many of the northern humorists their ability to at tack inconsistencies in the national ethos as Doesticks had done in Pluri-bus-tah. Physically, many of them were removed from the scene, of course. Joseph C. Neal had died in 1847 at the age of forty. George H. Derby (John Phoenix), associated with the West but born in Ded ham, Massachusetts, in 1823, was dead in 1861, leaving behind only Phoenixiana (1856) and The Squibob Papers (1865). Artemus Ward, just beginning to ripen into a historical visionary, died in 1867 at the age of thirty-four. Charles Graham Halpine (Miles O’Reilly) died shortly after the war, and Doesticks, having lost two wives in the early 1860s in childbed and having been wounded as a noncombatant re porter in war action, seems to have become addicted to opium and alcohol, which he used in an attempt to kill his pain. Mark Twain re corded his admiration for the graceless, petrified power of the alco holic Nasby’s “Cussed be Canaan” lecture four years after the war. It was, he said, composed of “bull’s-eye hits, with the slave power and its Northern apologists for target, and his success was due to his matter, not his manner; for his delivery was destitute of art.” But Nasby wrote to Twain in July, 1869, that “that lemon, our African brother, juicy as he was in his day, has been squeezed dry. Why howl about his wrongs after said wrongs have been redressed?”29 B. P. Shillaber’s health had been in decline since the 1850s, although the creator of Mrs. Parting ton worked goutily on at his editing tasks into the 1890s. Cozzens died at his desk one evening in 1869, aged fifty-one.
