From Rail-Splitter to Icon: Lincoln's Image in Illustrated Periodicals, 1860-1865 (review)

In this volume, Gary L. Bunker has performed a labor of love: he has collected a scad of prints of Abraham Lincoln from the period 1860–65—some published in the Union, some in the Confederacy, and some in Great Britain—and assembled a generous helping of them into a handsome volume, complete with commentary. As Bunker notes, the American illustrated magazine, patterned on English predecessors, was a new outlet for popular art in the 1850s. Because it only reached maturity as a medium for the dissemination of political cartoons in the 1860s, he says, Lincoln was the first U.S. president to feel the full brunt of cartoonists' attention. What a marvelous record they left.

As the book's title hints, From Rail-Splitter to Icon is organized chronologically, in the main, to demonstrate the trajectory of change in cartoonists' approach to Lincoln. However, the book's real subject is the extant body of cartoons itself. In our time, when photography has long since driven elaborate drawings and etchings out of the news magazines, we may be forgiven for assuming that political cartoons in nineteenth-century America must have resembled the fare found in the comics sections of contemporary newspapers or today's sketchy political cartooning. However, the material in Bunker's text has far more in common with the classic works of eighteenth-century British artists such as Hogarth than with Herblock. The famous works of Thomas Nast were not atypical; his contemporaries, such as Frank Bellew and William Newman, also often demonstrated both artistry and ingenuity.

After his introduction, Bunker devotes his first chapter to an essay summarizing the book's argument; he then divides the remainder of his text into chapters on the topics of "The Comic Press and Lincoln's Rise to the Presidency," "From Springfield to the Battlefield," "The Vagaries of War," "The Evolution of Emancipation," "The Strain of Conflict," "The Comic News, Lincoln, and the Civil War," "The Drive to Deprive Lincoln of a Second Term," "The Olive Branch or the Sword?" and "Enduring to the End." The chapter on the Comic News, an English periodical extremely critical of Lincoln, is particularly illuminating as it demonstrates that the English comic press was almost universally hostile to Lincoln and the Union war effort. One can get the gist of the other chapters from their titles—among which "The Drive to Deprive Lincoln of a Second Term," with its implications concerning the incumbent's claim on the office, is indicative of Bunker's general approach to the subject.

Bunker is at pains to show that John Frémont, George McClellan, Salmon Chase, and anyone else who had the temerity to criticize Lincoln, from whichever perspective and on whatever score, was simply wrong-headed (when not "mendacious"). Bunker's love of his subject explains the devotion that went into assembling his material, but at times it interferes with his performance of the historian's task. In the end, however, Bunker shows that even the sixteenth president's most vociferous critics conceded that he had been a man of enormous unappreciated merit.

The author's Whiggish approach is not the book's sole flaw. A representative passage illustrates From Rail-Splitter to Icon's main shortcoming:

Under the general heading "The Theory of Coercion," two cartoons in Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun cast Lincoln into the uncomfortable role of the presidential enforcer. In both images he balances precariously on the point [sic] of bayonets. In the cartoon on the left side of the page, Gen. John E. Wool lifts Lincoln with his bayonet into the lofty presidential chair while Lincoln carries his reliable axe. "General Wool.—'Now, Uncle Abe, I'll give you a shove, and keep you there when I get you there.' Uncle Abe.—Thank you, General—it is a great comfort to me to hear you say so.' The other cartoon depicts...