David Ross Locke was born on September 20, 1833 at Vestal, Broome County, near Binghamton, New York, United States, the son of Nathaniel Reed and Hester (Ross) Locke. His grandfather, John, had been a minute man in the Revolution; his father, a soldier in the War of 1812; while his mother, daughter of Dr. William Ross, was a granddaughter of Joshua Mersereau, who in various capacities saw service during the Revolution.
David received limited schooling.
Locke started to work at the age of 12. He went directly into newspaper work, from which he was never afterwards dissociated. After a fourteen-mile walk he presented himself at the office of the Cortland Democrat and made overtures for a job. He was a little too short to have full command of a typecase at the time, but was, nevertheless, apprenticed for a period of seven years. The Democrat was a vigorous political organ. Locke was connected with it until he reached the age of seventeen, when he became an itinerant printer and was employed successively in a number of cities of the North and South.
In 1852 he formed a partnership with a young man by the name of James G. Robinson. Together they founded at Plymouth, Richland County, Ohio, the Plymouth Advertiser. Though the newspaper prospered after a fashion, Locke left it and, seeking better opportunities, was located afterwards in various Ohio towns. He was editor of the Jeffersonian at Findlay when he wrote the first letter signed with the name of Petroleum V. Nasby. It bore the date of March 21, 1861. Locke had followed his father in his opposition to slavery, and his travels through the South had served to deepen the conviction that it was an evil for which the best remedy was extermination. His newspaper experience had sharpened his conviction to a cutting edge. The device to which he resorted in his newspaper attacks was a common and popular one. His creation, Petroleum V. Nasby, for whom Thomas Nast later created a pictorial embodiment, was an overdrawn but effective caricature of the Copperhead. Locke made Nasby in the image of an illiterate, hypocritical, cowardly, loafing, lying, dissolute country preacher, whose orthographical atrocities were fashioned after the style of his predecessor, Artemus Ward. Nasby sponsors slavery and the Democratic party, and thus condemns them; he is not only foolish but corrupt, the necessary inference being that the Copperheads and the Democrats were as foolish in their opinions and as corrupt in their practices; and his "advenchers" were always so invented as to make the Democratic or Southern side of an argument appear ludicrously inept. The letters were marked by a rich humor, aggressive maliciousness, skilful caricature, sustained resourcefulness, and a merciless insistence. They brought Locke fame and a fortune.
In 1865 he took editorial charge of the Toledo Blade and in a few years owned a controlling interest in it. In 1871 he went to New York as managing editor of the Evening Mail, but later returned to Ohio. He continued the Nasby letters in the Blade almost until the time of his death, the last one appearing December 26, 1887. Under his editorship the paper attained immense popularity. Abraham Lincoln was one of Locke's most unreserved admirers, and on more than one occasion he was known to hold up business of state in order to read his visitors a few of the Nasby letters. Lincoln, and later Grant, offered Locke political opportunities, but he declined them all. The only office he ever aspired to was that of alderman from the third ward in Toledo, and it was with considerable difficulty that he secured his election to this post. He held the office when he died in 1888.
Beginning with The Nasby Papers (1864), numerous collections of the letters appeared in book form. Locke wrote other published works, including The Morals of Abou Ben Adhem (1875) and The Demagogue (1891), a political novel, and he was a popular lecturer, but the letters alone constitute the fame which he achieved and which died with him. He was the most powerful political satirist of his day and country.
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Locke was an ardent Unionist and foe of slavery. During his later years he espoused the cause of prohibition and carried on a campaign against the liquor traffic under the flaunting banner line, "Pulverize the Rum Power. "
Quotations:
"Wat posterity will say, I don't know; neither do I care, . . It's this generashen I'm going for. "
“The air was so cold — so cold that the rain which was falling had changed its mind after leaving the clouds where it was born, and struck the earth in little pellets, just light enough to be carried on the wind, and just heavy enough to cut and bruise like bird-shot. ”
“As far as love is concerned, one man is as good as another a year after a woman marries him. The best husband is the one who can keep you best. "
The light was sufficient for him. He was in deeper darkness than that made by the absence of the sun. ”
"A politician's record is like a tin kettle to a dog's tale - it's a noisy appendage, wich makes the dog conspicuous and invites everybody to shy a brick at him. "
Locke was married to Martha H. Bodine, who bore him three sons.
