Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons

CHAPTER FOUR: Compromise with the South

59 C H A P T E R F O U R Compromise with the South On September 3, 1864, Thomas Nast’s cartoon “Compromise with the South” appeared in Harper’s Weekly. The cartoon was a hammer blow for Lincoln and against peace. In it, a Union soldier, head bowed, reluctantly shakes hands with the Confederacy over the grave of Union men who fell for a worthless cause.1 A vote for the Democrats, Nast implies, is a vote that invalidates all our sacrifices. The weeping Columbia, collapsed at the foot of the grave, only reinforces the impending tragedy. The drawing was so popular that Harper’s printed a second run, and the Republican Party asked for the printing rights for a campaign poster. In all, several hundred thousand copies of the cartoon flooded the reading public. If ever there was a smash hit in nineteenth-century cartooning, this was it. By the time “Compromise with the South” appeared, Nast had been profoundly politicized . His early professional experiences, combined with his familial and local politics, helped push him from illustration into political cartooning. His coming of age professionally and politically during the Civil War only enhanced that development. Nast was political long before 1864. He could hardly escape politics, in fact. Not only did he learn political ideas as a child, not only was New York almost rabidly political during his youth, but his immersion in the illustration department of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News made it impossible for Nast to escape the political culture of the late 1850s. Yet it was “Compromise with the South” that secured Nast’s position as an observer of American politics. After its publication, Nast was no longer one artist among many. With the success of this image—especially its use by the Republican Party—he had become a minor celebrity. Early in the war, Nast worked primarily for the New York Illustrated News, but his drawings of the front appeared in Harper’s Weekly as well. Relatively quickly, Nast transitioned from drawings of the war to sentimental but politically charged illustrations. The content of these drawings, and their importance as the base of Nast’s popularity with the public, helps to 60Compromise with the South underline the continuity of Nast’s political values. Nast’s sentimental illustrations also represented a larger culture of lithography.They reflected both Nast’s fresh approach to cartoon art and his reliance on common concepts and images in political prints. It was the Draft Riots of 1863 that pushed Nast decisively into the realm of party politics, though. More than any other event of the war, the riots solidified Nast’s allegiance to Union, the Republican Party, and emancipation . They aroused in Nast the wicked wit so appealing to readers, a wit based not only on Nast’s ambition and political ideals but also on his outrage and sense of personal peril during the riots. In this context, “Compromise with the South” seems a natural outgrowth of Nast’s Civil War experience as a whole. Its success helped launch the next stage of his career. Celebrity brought with it many pleasures: increased income, acclaim from both the public and the powerful, a greater freedom to draw what he liked, and social access to circles that otherwise would have been closed to him. It also thrust him into the center of the national political struggle, where he remained for twenty years. “Compromise with the South,” Harper’s Weekly, September 3, 1864. Compromise with the South61 Before Harper’s Nast ended the war as Harper’s Weekly’s most famous artist. His first encounter with the war fever that gripped the nation, however, was with the New York Illustrated News. As a staff illustrator, Nast produced drawings to satisfy a public passion for information. Readers wanted to know not only what happened but how it looked. Working for the News, Nast traveled to Washington, D.C., for Lincoln’s inaugural. It was his first extended observation of Abraham Lincoln, a man he would help to reelect in 1864 and to whom he would ascribe a plethora of virtues. Nast met Lincoln when the president-elect visited New York City on February 19, 1861. Lincoln’s reception was not so much effusive as physically abusive. Crowds jostled him, trying so desperately to reach him for a word or handshake that his clothes were torn and his...