Abraham Lincoln Autograph Manuscript – His Famous "Bass-Ackwards" Story (ca. 1845–1850)

Lincoln's frontier humor drew on the tall-tale tradition of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. This manuscript strings together spoonerisms, transposed word-openings for comic effect, in the style later associated with Rev. William Archibald Spooner of Oxford.

"He said he was riding bass-ackwards on a jass-ack, through a patton-cotch, on a pair of baddle-sags, stuffed full of binger-gred, when the animal steered at a scump, and the lirrup-steather broke, and throwed him in the forner of the kence and broke his pishing-fole. He said he would not have minded it much, but he fell right in a great tow-curd; in fact, he said it give him a right smart sick of fitness, he had the molera-corbus pretty bad. He said, about bray dake he come to himself, ran home, seized up a stick of wood and split the axe to make a light, rushed into the house, and found the door sick abed, and his wife standing open. But thank goodness she is getting right hat and farty again."

According to C. F. Gunther of Chicago, relayed to Lincoln biographer Jesse W. Weik, Lincoln wrote this for a bailiff of the Springfield courts. First published by Emanuel Hertz in The Hidden Lincoln (1938). It passed through the Illinois State Historical Library (traded for a first edition of the Book of Mormon), Charles Hamilton Galleries, the Eberstadt collection, a 1994 Christie's sale, collector Louise Taper, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Foundation, before selling again at Freeman's/Hindman in May 2025. Exhibited at the Huntington Library (1993-94) and the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum (2001-02).

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Autograph Manuscript, "Bass-Ackwards" story, ca. 1845-1850, Springfield, IL. 1 p., 7 x 8.5 in. Inventory #28226.

Condition: silked; creasing from folds; small losses along folds affecting a few letters; small marginal loss in upper right corner not affecting text; scattered spotting.