How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (14 page)

With America falling apart around him, Buchanan got frustrated and turned inward to his cabinet, fussing and nosily interfering with the personal lives of his staffers and their wives. The South was threatening secession and seizing forts, and Buchanan just wanted to gossip and drink and throw parties and dance until his term was up. He couldn’t
wait
to leave the White House.

In a fight, Buchanan is still a wild card, because he’s so
mysterious
. While he never married, he did have one early romance and even got engaged to a woman, Anne Coleman. Their engagement ended suddenly, and then his would-be fiancée left town and died mysteriously; her physician recorded her cause of death as hysteria—though, since there had never been a previous case of “death by hysteria” ever reported, he admitted in his report that he suspected her death
to be a possible suicide, caused by a self-inflicted overdose of opiates. No one knows why they broke up and no one knows why or if she killed herself, or what role Buchanan played in either, but the situation was suspicious enough that Anne’s father forbade Buchanan from attending her funeral.

Buchanan certainly didn’t make anything clearer, though he always maintained that, one day, everything would be explained. In a letter to Coleman’s father after her death, he cryptically said, “It is now no time for explanation, but the time will come when you discover that she, as well as I, have been much abused.” Buchanan similarly stated that he wrote a letter and sealed it in an envelope that would explain the strange circumstances surrounding his broken engagement, Anne’s death, and his subsequent ban from attending Anne’s funeral, but that the letter containing these answers could not be opened until his death. Shortly before he passed away from respiratory failure in 1868, he changed his mind and instructed his niece to burn this and every other letter she could find. We’ll never know what the letter said, why Buchanan’s former fiancée killed herself, or what his big revelation would have been. The only informed conclusion to be drawn from that whole story is that Buchanan was weird, paranoid, and
mysterious as shit
. History remembers Buchanan as one of our worst presidents (and his critics at the time often called the Civil War “Buchanan’s War”), but history should
also
remember Buchanan as a man who left bizarre chains of secret letters and could hear through walls. Because that’s objectively way cooler.

Buchanan could have been a great president but, at the end of the day, he choked. He had a greater intellectual capacity than almost any of the presidents before or after him, he was charming and perceptive, but when the going got tough, he faltered. Use that in your fight. Even though he’s a bigger guy, and even though he was in remarkably good health his entire life (except for his death, where his health was very bad indeed), he still can’t handle pressure. Challenge him in front of a bunch of people and watch him crumble.

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, was a mutant.

I’m not just saying he was tall (though, at 6′4″, he is still our tallest and fourth-beardiest president). I’m saying that physically, he had a disease called Marfan syndrome. People who suffer from Marfan syndrome generally grow taller than your average person and have longer limbs that, typically, are fairly weak. Lincoln refused to accept the “weak” part of his condition and strengthened his arms through years of farmwork (he built his first log cabin when he was
goddamn seven
), because why even
have
bonus arms if you’re not going to make them the strongest and most powerful arms you can? A life full of log-splitting made Lincoln so strong that, by the time he was twenty-two, his skills were already
legendary
. Dennis Hanks, one of the men who lived in Lincoln’s town of New Salem, Illinois, said, “If you heard his fellin’ trees in a clearin’ you would say there was
three men at work by the way the trees fell.” But it wasn’t three men. It was just one giant super-president. Lincoln’s neighbors would see him down by the riverbank using his extra-strength magic arms to lift, according to some townspeople, “a box of stones weighing from one thousand to twelve hundred pounds.”

I’m not saying that there’s an age where someone
should
be strong enough to regularly carry around 1,200-pound boulders (that’s far too much power for one man), but twenty-two still feels aggressively, dangerously young for that amount of strength. If you ever see a twenty-two-year-old carrying a boulder that weighs anything more than 1,000 pounds, you’d better make him president.

Having super-tough Stretch Armstrong arms wasn’t Lincoln’s only superpower. To be clear, I’m not counting his strengths as a communicator as a superpower; I’m saying that Lincoln might have been able to see the future. The year of his first presidential election, Lincoln dreamed he saw two reflections of his face in the mirror. One looked normal and the other was pale, and gaunt, and awful. He consulted with his wife, and they concluded that this meant that he would survive his first but not his second term. And if that wasn’t ominous enough, one week before his assassination, he had a dream that involved waking up in the White House to the sound of crying. He traced the source of the crying to the East Wing, where a number of soldiers stood around a corpse covered with a sheet. He asked, “Who is dead in the White House?” and a soldier responded, “The president. He was killed by an assassin.” If Mr. Fantastic and Professor X had a baby, there would be
tons
of questions, but also it would be Abraham Lincoln.

And now you have to fight him. With a lot of the presidents in this book, it’s hard to tell
exactly
what they’d do in a fight, because many of them don’t have long histories of hand-to-hand combat, so more often than not I’m using their physical stats, mental well-being, and military history (if applicable) to make my best attempt at an educated guess regarding their fighting style.

This is not the case with Abraham Lincoln.

When he moved to New Salem in his early twenties, Lincoln quickly made a name for himself by finding the toughest guy in
town, Jack Armstrong, and challenging him to a fight immediately. Armstrong had Lincoln beat in terms of fight experience and name coolness, but Lincoln, of course, had him beat in two very important categories: 1) mutant powers, and 2) being Abraham Fucking Lincoln.

Using his massive arms, the ones that carried 1,200-pound boulders all over town, Lincoln grabbed Armstrong by the throat, lifted him off his feet, shook him like a child, and then tossed him when he surrendered.
Tossed him
.

Armstrong’s friends jumped in to gang up on Lincoln, who just laughed and laughed. Well, he didn’t
just
laugh. He laughed for a little bit, and then he beat the shit out of all of them.
All of them
. You see, Jack Armstrong and his friends actually
were
a gang, called the Clary’s Grove Boys, and they terrorized the town of New Salem with intimidation and drunken aggression. No one seemed able to stand up to them, so they basically ran the whole place. Lincoln came in, saw this unruly gang of thugs terrorizing the town, and, inside of a week, beat the holy Christ out of every single one of them. He saw what they were doing and said, “Hey, I know I’m brand-new in town, but I’m going to keep shaking your toughest guys until you all go ahead and fear me. The time will come when I will need you to vote for me, so you’d better do it, because—” and then he threw Jack Armstrong into space in lieu of verbal explanation.

By the way, Lincoln made good on that promise I just made up, the one about how people had better vote for him or else. Years after his fight with Armstrong, in his very first campaign speech for public office in New Salem, Lincoln spotted an unruly member of the crowd, and instead of politely asking him to quiet down (like literally any other politician hoping to convince his constituents he was trustworthy and coolheaded), Lincoln left the stage, walked into the audience, and picked the man up and threw him twelve feet. And that man’s name was Who Gives a Shit Did You See How Far Lincoln Threw That Asshole?!

Lincoln wasn’t just a jerk-hurling president with monster arms (though that would be a perfectly adequate legacy, were it the case), he was also a ticking time bomb of ambition. Everyone loves to talk
about how Lincoln was born poor in a log cabin, but he
hated
that part of his life and wanted nothing more than to rise above it as quickly as possible. He wanted to be remembered, he wanted the respect of his fellow man, but, mostly, he wanted
power
. He was obsessed with power and ambition; that’s why Lincoln took his first job in public office (a seat in the state legislature) when he was just twenty-five years old, despite not having a job, a house, any money, or more than one year of formal education. He ran for office with absolutely no prospects, believing perhaps that he would just eat power to stay alive.

Four days into Lincoln’s first session in the legislature, he introduced his first bill. The next day he started writing bills for
other
legislators. Lincoln was a man who was writing laws despite never having taken a law class in his entire life. He also never lost his fury. While still a public servant he would verbally attack Democratic opponents, and when a critic spoke out about Lincoln’s bills, he threatened to give his “proboscis a good wringing,” which is the classiest way to say “I’m going to punch your face” on record.

Lincoln hated slavery on a deeply personal level and was frustrated that, unlike most things he hated, slavery wasn’t the kind of thing he could simply lift up by the throat and shake until it was no longer a threat. Instead, he had to content himself with attacking slavery the legal and political way. He also saw slavery as an opportunity,
as an issue on which he could make his name. He knew he wasn’t going to be a war hero, and he knew he wasn’t rich, so the only way for him to stand out was to take a bold, public stance on a divisive issue, and slavery was just the ticket. He passionately spoke out against slavery and rode the notoriety it gave him to a position as chairman of the state legislature and, when that wasn’t enough, president of the United States and, when
that
wasn’t enough, decided to become one of the
greatest
presidents of the United States. Currently, Lincoln spends all of his time alternately haunting our money and appreciating the many monuments we’ve made in his honor from whatever position of power he no doubt wields in heaven (Vice God?).