Was Lincoln appreciative of interrupting crickets?
July 30, 2011 5:12 PM   Subscribe

I once heard an apocryphal story about Abraham Lincoln being interrupted by crickets and responding with an impromptu appreciation for their chirping. Have you heard this story? Does anyone know of a source for it?

Way back when I was in third grade (1980-81) I attended David Crockett Elementary in a smallish Texas town. For years the school had no mascot other than Crockett himself, but there was a clear need to be able to cheer for someone other that the David Crockett David Crocketts, so a vote was held to select a new mascot. As I remember it, Cougars and Crocodiles were the runaway favorites, but at the pre-vote school assembly, a fifth-grade girl who represented the dark horse Cricket faction delivered a campaign speech which included the following story: President Lincoln was once delivering a speech, but as evening fell and the crickets begin to chirp, he could not be heard over their sound. So he wrapped up early, saying "Nothing that I have prepared could be as inspiring as the song of God's creation that He has provided for us." The story won much of the crowd over, and, as I recall it, the boys' vote was split between the two ferocious predators while the girls largely coalesced behind the Crickets, and we became the Crockett Crickets, complete with an annoying chirpy CrockETT CrickETS cheer at our track events.

I (a dedicated Cougar backer) am still somewhat bitter about that electoral defeat lo these thirty years hence, and have occasionally tried to find a citation for the Lincoln story that dashed our hopes, but to no avail. Have you ever heard that story, or a variation on it? Is it based on a real incident, connected to Lincoln or not? Or did some 10-year-old spin doctor fabricate it completely to bolster her cause? My Google skills, they fail me.

(Side note, but a happy ending: I just checked the school web page and see that they are now the Crockett Cubs. Thank God that a generation came along who never heard that story and that travesty of an election was overturned. They must have wondered what the hell we were thinking.)
posted by Pater Aletheias to Grab Bag (4 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I've read a fair share of biographies and histories of Lincoln, and I can't recall running across that anecdote before. A few years ago I did my undergraduate thesis on Lincoln's campaign speeches from 1854-1861, from his return into politics up through his first inauguration, and I don't remember reading anything similar to what you describe. But it does sound like similar to his sense of humor, though, so I did a little bit of searching anyway.

A few quick JSTOR searches didn't reveal anything, nor did any searches in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. The collected works include speeches, letters, and all kinds of miscellaneous textual sources; I don't think it's 100% complete these days (it was compiled in the 1950s), but it's probably complete enough for your purposes. I searched for various forms of your quote, and didn't get any results. I also did a keyword search in Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, which was one of the first major biographies of Lincoln, by his one-time law partner William Herndon. I didn't get any results for "crickets" in volume one or two.

I doubt your 10-year-old spin-doctor came up with the story herself, but I don't think it's real either.
posted by lilac girl at 5:54 PM on July 30, 2011 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I'm not sure if I should be responding with a vague "me, too" answer, especially after lilac girl's thorough reply, but... I've actually heard of this story! So now I'm very curious...
posted by misozaki at 1:14 AM on July 31, 2011


Best answer: Full text of 2 volume 2000 Lincoln bio here is available for download, but as individual chapters. Might be worth a look.
posted by marxchivist at 6:47 AM on July 31, 2011


Response by poster: Thanks for looking, lilac girl; for pointing me to another resource, marxchivist; and for confirming that I'm not the only one, misozaki. I tried another round of Googling today and checked some sermon illustration sites (because this seems exactly like the kind of story that would get passed around preacher-to-preacher) but nothing turning up yet.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 5:46 PM on July 31, 2011


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