Historians are still puzzling over the discovery of an official White House portrait of President Roger Darcy Amboy, who appears to have held our nation’s highest office somewhere between Van Buren and Buchanan. Obscured by drapes for over a century, the painting was discovered by an Amboy descendant who had come to urethane the baseboards.

“I am frankly embarrassed,” confessed presidential historian T. Fawning Strathalmond. “He was there all along. We just naturally assumed he was Polk.”

Little is known as yet about our mystery President. Though there is not a shred of evidence to support it, Roger Darcy Amboy was probably born in the late 1700s in or around Succassuna, New Jersey. The earliest documentation, carbon-dated to about November, 1803, shows an Amboy in Bayonne receiving “seven decapods of barm fortnightly” from the Huckabuck party bigwig, Boss Nib, who would later moneybag Amboy’s possible rise to power.

A champion of the bronze standard, Boss Nib broke with the Huckabucks to form his own party, whose members called themselves the Niblickers. There not being sufficient Niblickers to fill a slate, Nib had to dig deep into the ranks of his candlery workers, selecting Amboy (an apprentice dip) to run for the Delaware lieutenant-governorship.

Delaware proved steep going. Amboy couldn’t find it until well into the campaign, had no political knowhow, and possessed, as one wag put it, “all the stature of a pullet.” But Amboy had pluck, and effectively spoke out wherever he went against whatever was handy. One of his speeches, delivered to an assembly of retired parsnippers, was brought to the attention of Daniel Webster, who described it in his diary as “a hodgepodge of mawkish upchuck.”

Amboy failed in his Delaware quest, despite his sole opponent’s demise in the arms of a common beaverbright hours before the election. Still, he had made something of a name for himself, and Boss Nib recognized his young dip’s lambent promise. Outfitting him with teeth, lifts, and a distinctive corn-silk toupee, Nib set Amboy on the road to national prominence. In an era when politicians boasted of their frontier upbringing, Amboy claimed to have been born in a stump and raised by squirrels. Acorns, fern cuttings, and little wooly worms were handed out at his rallies, and Nib blitzed the media with portraits of a bushy Amboy darting from tree to tree as hounds labeled “monarchist,” “papist,” “tariffist,” and “pederast” chased along the ground below.

In the next election, Amboy was nominated Niblick candidate for President, and in that time of rough-and-tumble politics he proved a master. He delighted crowds by speculating as to the ancestry and the cohabitive preferences of his opponent, aging frontier general Mars Dispepys, whom Amboy referred to as “Old Offwhite” and “a variety of fey tumblebug.” The general, for his part, threatened to cannonade Amboy’s pipkin should he persist in these defamations, but before he could carry out his threat, the old warrior was incapacitated by