It's Boston Corbett Day! Named for USA's greatest eunuch

(775 words)

You won’t see it anywhere in the news today. There will be no stirring memorials. Congress won’t pause to honor the actions of the man who should be by unanimous consent be acclaimed as  America’s greatest eunuch.

All hail, Boston Corbett, the man who killed the man who killed President Lincoln! It happened 151 years ago this very morning.

Really, can you even name a single other great American eunuch?

I can’t.

I guess we’re all stumped.

And so are the eunuchs, but in a much more literal way.

A eunuch is a man who undergoes deliberate removal of his testicles for any number of offbeat cultural reasons. Throughout history, eunuchs have served royals as courtiers, harem servants and trusted guardians of virginal princesses

Some have even willingly become eunuchs so they could serenade a discerning king with a treble voice of unmatched loveliness.

It sounds extreme, but I’m surprised no one’s tried it yet on American Idol. I guess in these days of instant fame, making a real sacrifice for the sake of art is no longer fashionable.

Of course, Corbett makes each of those motivations seem like pikers by comparison.

Born Thomas P. Corbett in London in 1832, he eventually moved to Boston, where he picked up a nickname with slightly more dash than if he’d have moved to say, Passadumkeag, Maine.

In 1858, at the age of 26, is when things got interesting. Fired with the religious passions, he grew his hair long in an attempt to imitate Jesus.

Then he did Jesus one better. Two better, to be precise.

The history books say he was so consumed with lust for Boston prostitutes he resorted to dire remedies. So one night he took a pair of rusty scissors, dropped his trousers and -- snip! snip! -- cut off his troublesome testicles.

That’s taking safe sex practices to a whole other realm.

The he sat down and had a nice dinner and attended a Methodist prayer meeting before finally staggering off for medical attention.

Amazing. For literary purposes it would be great fun to discover that the entree was meatballs, but the menu is lost to history.

The man is testament to the fact that it doesn’t take real balls to be a real man.

In April 1861, he enlisted as a private in the New York Militia, was honorably discharged after his three-month commitment, then re-enlisted to fight again. He was taken prisoner in 1863 and was captive for five months in the notorious Andersonville prison before being freed in a common prisoner exchange. He would later testify for the prosecution in the death penalty trial of doomed prison commandant Capt. Henry Wirz.

After again re-enlisting, it was Corbett on this day in 1865 at the Garrett tobacco barn near Port Royal, Virginia, who against orders shot the bullet that struck John Wilkes Booth in the back of neck, about one inch from where the dastardly Booth slew Lincoln on April 14.

“Providence directed me,” he said when asked why he’d disobeyed orders.

Then, like today, you can get away with a lot if you can convince believers that God whispered in your ear, “Pssst, hey, buddy . . .”

Corbett’s post-war life became increasingly erratic, perhaps, because of exposure to mercury when he worked as a hatter in New York and Boston. Because of his fame, he was appointed doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives, where he pulled a pistol on some men who he’d caught yawning about the morning prayer.

He was sent to an insane asylum, escaped and lived for a while in a hole that www.allaboutbikes.com today lists as the No. 1 scenic attraction in Kansas.

It may be a big state, but I’ll drive hundreds of miles out of the way if I can avoid a state where the most scenic site is Corbett’s hole.

He is believed to have died along with more than 400 others in the Great Hinkley Fire that consumed hundreds of acres of Minnesota forest where he’d built a cabin and was living when the fire spread on September 1, 1894.

His story is the reason I never fail to engage airplane seat mates about their lives.

I’m sure he shared many stagecoach rides with men and women too engaged in their 19th century iPad equivalents to hear the stories of this fascinating eunuch who killed the man who killed the president.

So, to honor America’s greatest eunuch, I suggest we all cut the work day short.

Please don’t feel the drastic need to cut off anything more significant.

And just to be safe, stay clear of the prostitutes in Boston. 

Related

Tom Brady & the Boston Corbetts

Change Patriots name to Boston Corbetts

“Civil Wargasm” for Gettysburg re-enactors

Of humdingers and sockdolagers

I wonder if Abraham Lincoln died confused.

The thought occurred to me this weekend as I was reading aloud what happened in Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, just moments before J.W. Booth’s bullet hit bone.

I’m probably the only father on earth who can call his 11-year-old daughter a “sockdologizing old man-trap” and know she’ll understand what sounds to modern ears like nonsense.

Those were the last words to ever enter the conscious ears of the great Lincoln.

And I can’t believe that trivia’s evaded me until now. I don’t remember reading the words in all the Civil War/Lincoln assassination books I’ve read over the years until I read Jay Winik’s outstanding book, “April 1865: The Month That Saved America.”

Or maybe I dismissed them as gibberish after failing to find “sockdologizing” in any of my dictionaries.

Either way, two things have happened in the meantime: One, I have subscriber access to the world’s humdinger dictionary: The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) which, by the way, defines “humdinger” as a remarkable or outstanding person or thing.

The dictionary defines more than 600,000 words, many of them long since dropped from common usage. By comparison, my sturdy and still useful American Heritage Dictionary includes 155,000 entries, and studies show the average American uses and understands about 10,000 words.

So if I want to know what the heck “sockdologizing” means I know exactly where to look.

But what would cause me to do so?

That’s where my sockdologizing daughter comes in.

She’s nuts about the Lincoln assassination. It is one of two historical topics that rivet her young imagination.

The other is Titanic. And in her mind she can’t think about one without the other since I told her both happened on the exact same day. Lincoln was shot on April 14 and died the next day; Titanic struck the iceberg on April 14, -- anniversary alert! -- 1912, and she sunk the following day.

So last night we’re poring over the details of Lincoln’s final moments when I discover another historical coincidence: the third last word Lincoln ever heard was exactly what doomed the unsinkable ship.

Titanic was sunk by a sockdolager!

The OED says “sockdolager” is a heavy or knock-down blow.

The word was a key line in the play “Our American Cousin,” which the Lincolns chose to attend so they could decompress following the Confederacy’s announced surrender.

And you have to wonder how history would be different if they’d have opted to just stay in and order a pizza.

Was Lincoln aware of the word’s meaning? How many participants in the high-brow Sunday talk shows would know how to respond if someone tossed sockdolager into the conversation?

The scoundrel Booth deliberately timed pulling the trigger to the sockdologizing line hoping the laugh getter, one of the night’s biggest, would muffle the blast.

We all know what happened after that. Lincoln died, Booth escaped only to be shot by Boston Corbett, America’s greatest eunuch.

But what happened to sockdologizing?

OED differs from other dictionaries in that it sleuths out word birthdays, the exact year when a word’s usage becomes widespread enough to earn inclusion.

For sockdolager, the year was 1830.

The last year its usage was cited -- and this is key -- was 1892.

How did this historically significant word drop so swiftly out of sight?

You’d think SportsCenter would find sensible reasons to use it at least once a show, sporting events being full of momentous sockdologizers.

Yet in a day when literacy was rare and news dissemination limited, this fancifully formed word -- much like flabbergast or ballyhoo -- stood up, marched straight into history and faded as quickly as the echo of a gunshot.

This should not stand. The anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination is fewer than four years away.

We need to muster a movement to increase sockdolager usage so the in-the-know crowd -- readers of this blog -- will nod sagely whenever we hear sockdolager and then get that little smarty-pants jolt of satisfaction when we inform listeners about sockdolager’s historic significance.

Oh, I can tell Josie’s going to be obnoxious about this.

I wonder where she gets that.

Alas, I tried to think of a really great sockdolager with which to conclude this post. I could not.

So the story that mentions 16 sockdolagers, probably more than in any other story written in the past 150 years, ends without one.