Individuals >> Nasby, Petroleum V. ( David Ross Locke ) (1833-1888)

Lecturer, Journalist, Editor.

Known best by his pseudonym of Petroleum V. Nasby, David Ross Locke was born in upstate New York near Binghamton to a family which could boast of Revolutionary War antecedents. His maternal great-grandfather and paternal grandfather had served in the Revolution, and his father served in the War of 1812. After completing his schooling at the tender age of ten, Locke began a seven-year apprenticeship in his lifelong career of journalism at the Cortland Democrat. After this apprenticeship, he became an itinerant printer and went on to found the Plymouth Advertiser in Ohio, the first of several Ohio papers where he worked (J. Estes).

Locke first adopted the pseudonym of Petroleum V. Nasby at the Ohio Jeffersonian on March 21, 1861. Pfaff’s visitor and caricaturist Thomas Nast would later create an accompanying caricature for this sobriquet. Like Artemus Ward, Locke also gave lectures for which he crafted a persona for Nasby, that of a hypocritical country preacher who supports slavery and the Democratic Party. Locke was a staunch abolitionist, a cause which he hoped to aid by depicting the opposition in a poor light through Nasby. The Nasby character made Locke famous, allowing him to assume editorial responsibilities at the Toledo Blade in 1865 and then to work as managing editor of the New York Evening Mail in 1871.

Counting Abraham Lincoln among his admirers, Locke continued to write Nasby letters until the end of his life. On the night of the 1864 election, as Lincoln awaited the returns, the following scene occurred: "Going to the War Department in the evening, Lincoln amused the company by reading some of Petroleum V. Nasby’s amiable nonsense while the returns trickled in" (L. Starr 333). He later used these letters as a forum for his support of the prohibitionists. The Nasby letters were collected as The Nasby Papers (1864). Locke also wrote longer works like The Morals of Abou Ben Adhem (1875) and the political novel The Demagogue (1891). Though he was offered political appointments by both Lincoln and Grant, Locke refused and instead served as an alderman in Toledo, an office he held until his death (J. Estes).

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References & Biographical Resources

Estes, J. A. "David Ross Locke." Dictionary of American Biography. Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006. http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC. [more about this work]

The biography discusses Locke's life and his creation of the "Petroleum V. Nasby" character to support the causes of abolitionism and prohibition.

Leland, Charles Godfrey. Memoirs. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1893. [more about this work]

[pages: 251]

Lukens, Henry Clay. "American Literary Comedians." Harper's New Monthly Magazine. Apr. 1890: 783-797. [more about this work]

[pages: 794]

Odell, George C.D. Annals of the New York Stage: Volume VIII (1865-1870). New York:Columbia University Press, 1936. [more about this work]

Nasby "Harangued" May 24, 1870, on "Wimmin's Rights" a week after Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke at Apollo Hall (669). Nasby also lectured at Town Hall (Queens?) Feb. 9, 1870, on "Stuggle with the Woman Question" (690). [pages: 669,690]

Rawson, A. L. "A Bygone Bohemia." Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly. 1896. 96-107. [more about this work]

There is an illustration in Rawson of Josh Billings, Mark Twain, and Petroleum V. Nasby, where the three men are identified as "Three American humorists, in the Pfaffian Days" (99). [pages: 99]

Seitz, Don Carlos. Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne): A Biography and Bibliography. NY: Harper & Brothers, 1919. [more about this work]

[pages: FWD, 331]

Starr, Louis Morris. Bohemian Brigade; Civil War Newsmen in Action. New York: Knopf, 1954. 367 p. [more about this work]

On the night of the 1864 election, as Lincoln awaited the returns, he read some of Nasby's work aloud (333). [pages: 333]

Twain, Mark. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. [more about this work]

[pages: 211, 213, 217-18, 220, 357-58, 360-61, 505]