U.S. election day of 1860, the day Lincoln was elected President:

Here the journalists who arrived to cover Lincoln's movements this Election Day encountered the candidate "surrounded by an abattis [sic] of disheveled newspapers and in comfortable occupancy of two chairs, on supporting his body, the other his heels …"¹

Don't know why the sic; abattis is a perfectly good word. Apparently it had surge of popularity in the press in the 1860s, and then tailed off over the next half-century.

abattis – a line of defense consisting of a barrier felled trees, stacked one over the other with branches pointed toward the enemy; branches may be sharpened or have barbed wire entwined
[sometimes spelled with a double-b and/or a single-t]

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¹ November 2008 Smithsonian magazine; the [sic] is in the Smithsonian text. If you want to read it, it's in the on-line version of the magazine, apparently due to a website glitch. But it's basically just a series of extracts from the author's recent book (Chapter 1), available here.

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