Drawing on the Civil War

Benjamin FRANKLIN is credited with publishing the first political cartoon in the future United States: the famous image of a fragmented serpent whose body parts bear the initials of the colonies over the motto “Join, or Die.” It appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754.

A century later, advances in printing technology, the appearance of weekly magazines and a growing audience educated in the public school system created new outlets for topical cartoons. The success of Punch in 1841 and the Illustrated London News the next year in Britain led to the establishment of their American counterparts: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1855, and Harper’s Weekly and the first Vanity Fair in 1857.

By the time the Civil War broke out, American political cartooning was entering a golden age, as J.G. Lewin and P.J. Huff show in the new book, “Lines of Contention.” Rather than a history of the political cartoons of the era, however, the book is an illustrated overview of popular attitudes about the Civil War. “From our perspective, nearly 150 years after the fact, we like to think we are aware of the issues and how they were eventually resolved,” they write in the introduction. “But if we approach these cartoons without preconceived beliefs, we can begin to understand the mind-set, the confusion, and the resolve of the people who lived through these traumatic events.”

One of the most difficult preconceived beliefs to abandon is of Abraham Lincoln as a revered, even sacrosanct figure. Modern readers may be shocked by the hostile treatment the president received in the press during his lifetime. In 1864, Thomas W. Strong depicted Democratic presidential candidate George B. McClellan as Hamlet and Lincoln as Yorick’s skull; a Currier & Ives cartoon, “Abraham’s Dream,” shows the goddess Columbia chasing him from the White House the same year. In Punch, Sir John Tenniel drew Lincoln as a polecat treed by Britain (over the illegal seizure of Confederate envoys aboard the British ship the Trent in 1861) and as the attorney for the dissatisfied “Mrs. North” during the 1864 reelection campaign. The pro-Confederacy cartoonist V. Blada (the pseudonym used by Baltimore-based Aldabert J. Volck) showed Lincoln writing the Emancipation Proclamation surrounded by instruments of the devil, and as a harem dancer with African features -- a reference to the false rumor that Lincoln “had black blood in his veins.”

The cartoons about less well-known politicians are also interesting, if less arresting. Caricaturists had a field day with President James Buchanan’s doughy features and recalcitrant cowlick. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant fared only slightly better. A broadside printed in Philadelphia in 1861 so exaggerates Jefferson Davis’ mustache that when the portrait is turned upside down, it resembles a donkey’s head.

Although the depictions of African Americans appear racist and insulting today, many of the artists were ridiculing Southern attitudes. In a Harper’s Weekly cartoon from December 1864, a poor Southerner tells a slave, “Here! you mean, inferior, degraded Chattel, jest kitch holt of one them ‘ere muskits, and conquer my freedom for me!” Two months earlier, the same paper ran a cartoon of a plantation owner telling a Confederate soldier that he can’t send his slave into battle because “he cost me Twelve Hundred Dollars, and he might get shot.”

The real weakness of “Lines of Contention” is its lack of information about the cartoonists. Lewin and Huff list the publication and date of each cartoon but rarely identify the artist. Often, the only way to figure out who drew what is to check the mini-biographies in the back of the book.

The importance of two of the cartoonists make this lack of attention to detail all the more regrettable. Although millions of reader know and love Tenniel’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books, few realize he also was the political cartoonist for Punch from 1850 to 1901. Thomas Nast’s fame rests on the cartoons that helped to smash Boss Tweed’s ring in New York City after the Civil War, but his first cartoon for the New York Illustrated News (March 9, 1861) contrasted Northern and Southern reactions to Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address.

Nast also did the April 15, 1864, drawing for Harper’s Weekly, which the authors correctly call the collection’s “most poignant cartoon.” It depicts a thoughtful Lincoln writing the dispatch he sent back to Washington from Gen. Grant’s headquarters in City Point, Va.: “All seems well with us.” The night before it was published, Lincoln went to Ford’s Theatre to see “Our American Cousin.”

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Charles Solomon is the author of many books, including “Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation” and “The Disney That Never Was.”