Through his political illustrations, Thomas Nast became a powerful spin doctor who influenced public opinion and made presidents.
When Ulysses S. Grant was asked to name the one American civilian who had the most impact on the course of the Civil War, he replied: “I think, Thomas Nast. He did as much as any one to preserve the Union and bring the war to an end.”
That quote, which appears in a 1904 biography of Nast by Albert Bigelow Paine, may be apocryphal. Nevertheless, it starkly illustrates the often-overlooked role that the nation’s pioneering political cartoonist had during the Civil War, when he produced scores of passionately pro-Union illustrations for Harper’s Weekly.
Nast, well-known for his role in bringing down corrupt New York City Democratic kingpin William “Boss” Tweed in the early 1870s, made his mark in American journalism during the Civil War as a rabid Republican partisan. He solidified his reputation during Reconstruction when his political cartoons relentlessly agitated for full rights for freed slaves and skewered Democrats North and South—including the ardent opponent of Freedmen’s rights, President Andrew Johnson.
Grant also gave the German-born artist a good deal of the credit for his presidential election victory over his Democratic opponent, New York Governor Horatio Seymour, in 1868.
How did an illustrator and cartoonist come to have so much power during the Civil War and Reconstruction? Part of the answer has to do with the fact that Nast’s message was conveyed through a brand-new medium, the mass circulated illustrated news weekly magazine. He published more than 2,200 illustrations, cartoons and caricatures for Harper’s from 1862 to 1886. His “cartoons and sketches attracted the attention of the entire country,” Nast’s New York Times obituary noted.
The Civil War occurred when the United States had the world’s largest per capita newspaper circulation. New York City alone had dozens of newspapers and illustrated news weeklies, most prominent among them Nast’s employer, Harper’s, along with Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and New York Illustrated News. The Confederacy also had a good number of newspapers and news weeklies, including the widely circulated Southern Illustrated News.
At a time when photography and photographic reproduction were in their infancy—and cameras were too cumbersome to capture battle scenes—a group of accomplished artists produced thousands of sketches that provided war images for civilians.
That group included famed artist Winslow Homer and the great sketch artist Alfred Waud. But Thomas Nast was by far its foremost practitioner. Nast, who came to this country in 1846 at age 6, went to work for Harper’s Weekly in the summer of 1862 at the age of 22. He began by sending sketches from the battlefields and later branched out to produce illustrations with a message.
Nast’s work “conveyed both the pathos and the meaning of the war to a large middle-class Northern audience and struck a chord with them that words—other than those of Abraham Lincoln—were not better able to do,” said Morton Keller, author of The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast.
“Thomas Nast was very good at drawing from life and bringing alive the action and images of battle and the aftermath of battle,” added Christine Jochem, who heads the North Jersey History Center in Morristown, N.J., where Nast lived.
One of Nast’s most passionate causes, freeing the slaves, was the subject of many of his wartime illustrations—most notably “Emancipation,” a two-page woodcut engraving that appeared in Harper’s January 24, 1863, issue in the wake of Lincoln’s January 1 Emancipation Proclamation (above).
Nast often expressed his rabid Radical Republicanism, never more powerfully than in “Compromise With the South,” another two-page centerfold illustration, which appeared in the September 3, 1864, Harper’s (P. 56). Nast drew it in reaction to the “Peace at Any Price” platform adopted at that summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which nominated former Union General George McClellan as the party’s presidential candidate.
Nast drew the illustration— which brought him widespread fame and soon became one of his most widely seen works—at a time when Lincoln’s popularity was at its nadir and war weariness in the North was at its height. “The supporters of the war and the Lincoln Administration bought all the copies of the paper they could obtain,” The New York Times noted, “and even went so far as to purchase the plate, from which were struck thousands of copies. The good the cartoon accomplished was held to be incalculable.”
Part of that good was giving a powerful and much-needed boost to Lincoln’s sagging political fortunes, as well as to the stagnant Union war effort.
“Thomas Nast has been our best recruiting sergeant,” J. Henry Harper later quoted Lincoln as saying. “His emblematic cartoons have never failed to arouse enthusiasm and patriotism, and have always seemed to come just when these articles were getting scarce.”
Nast’s powerful political voice continued after the war. His causes included civil rights for African Americans in the South, vitriolic opposition to Andrew Johnson and Southerners who worked against Reconstruction, and unwavering support for Grant.
It was during this time that Nast developed his pioneering political cartoon style, in which he distorted and exaggerated the physical traits of his subjects— sometimes even depicting them as animals. In doing so, Nast all but invented the political cartoon.
Along the way, he created three images that remain part of the national culture into the 21st century: the symbol of the Democratic Party, the donkey, which he first drew in the cartoon “Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion” published in the January 15, 1870, issue of Harper’s Weekly; the Republican Party symbol, the elephant, which he put in the cartoon “The Third Term Panic” in Harper’s on November 7,1874;and the later-to-be-finger-pointing symbol of the USA, Uncle Sam.
“Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” which appeared in the November 20, 1869, Harper’s Weekly, encapsulated Nast’s hopes for Reconstruction. The illustration depicts a virtual rainbow coalition of guests—African Americans, Asians, Native Americans and various Europeans—sitting around a large table while an Uncle Sam figure (not the Stars and Stripes-attired version that came later) carves a turkey. Portraits of Lincoln, Jefferson and Grant grace the dining room.
“Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” showed Nast at his kindest and gentlest. But this also was the era in which he created his sharpest-edged cartoons—cartoons that exhibited his single-minded devotion to exposing what he saw as the evils of American society, including the machinations of Boss Tweed and his Democratic Party cronies in New York City.
In 1868 Nast started his cartoon campaign against Boss Tweed and his corrupt Tammany Hall political machine, which had been bilking New York City of tens of millions of dollars since 1865.The first salvo was “A Respectable Screen Covers a Multitude of Thieves,” a small cartoon that appeared on the back page of the October 10 Harper’s Weekly. It showed New York Mayor John T. Hoffman with a self-satisfied look on his face, standing in front of a screen. Behind the screen, a group of men grab fistfuls of money from a box Nast labeled “City Treasury.” A sign hanging over their heads reads, “Thou shall steal as much as thou canst. The Ring.”
For the next three years Nast hammered at Tweed in his Harper’s cartoons, depicting him as an obese, scowling, heavy-bearded thug, sometimes with a moneybag in place of his head, sometimes wearing a striped prisoner’s uniform. In “The Tammany Tiger Looms: What Are You Going to Do About It?” in the November 11, 1871, Harper’s, Nast used a rapacious tiger representing the Tweed crowd killing three toga-clad women on the floor of a Roman Coliseum–like stadium.
The New York Times and New York State Assemblyman (and future governor and Democratic presidential candidate) Samuel J. Tilden joined in the anti-Tweed campaign. But Nast’s cartoons proved to be the most effective weapon. Tweed, who unsuccessfully tried to bribe Nast, reportedly once ordered his men to “Stop them damn pictures. I don’t care what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures.” In November 1871, Tweed and his minions were voted out of office. In 1873 he was tried and convicted of forgery and larceny. He eventually died in debtor’s prison.
Thomas Nast’s crucial role in bringing down Boss Tweed marked a watershed in political cartooning in the United States.
Following the fall of Tweed, Nast’s artistic career waxed and waned for the next 30 years. He spat out a series of vicious cartoons in 1872 that attacked Democratic and Liberal Republican presidential nominee Horace Greeley, whom Grant soundly defeated. Nast supplemented his Harper’s work by producing scores of illustrations for books. In 1873 Nast went on a popular seven-month illustrated lecture tour in which he billed himself as “The Prince of Caricaturists” and the “Destroyer of Tammany Hall.”
He left Harper’s after a disagreement with management in 1886, and later started his own short-lived weekly newspaper, Nast’s Weekly, which went out of business in 1893. Thomas Nast turned to painting historical subjects for the next several years.
In 1902 Secretary of State John Hay, who had been Lincoln’s personal secretary, learned that Nast was in dire financial straits. Hay arranged for Nast to become U.S. Consul General in Ecuador. Thomas Nast died of yellow fever on December 7, 1902, five months after his arrival in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
“We may not be conscious of it, but all editorial cartoonists are his children,” said Scott Stantis, cartoonist for the Birmingham News and USA Today. Added Signe Wilkinson, the Pulitzer Prize– winning Philadelphia Daily News editorial cartoonist, “I didn’t get into the profession because of Thomas Nast, but the profession is here because of Thomas Nast.”
Marc Leepson has previously contributed an article on Confederate General John B. Gordon to America’s Civil War. He writes from Loudoun County, Va.
Originally published in the January 2009 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.
