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The "Great and Good Lincoln":
"With malice towards none, with charity for all... let us drive on... to bind up the nation's wounds... to do all which may achieve and cherish a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
-- Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
Thomas Nast was one of the first who had the vision of a country reconciled even before the end of the war. He had already depicted Lincoln inviting the secessionist states to a brotherly Christmas dinner in late 1864. But the reality after the war was quite different.
The "total war" which had been waged on the South at the end of the Civil War had left the Southern infrastructure and its agrarian economy in ruins. Although it was the official policy that rebuilding the South would help to reintegrate the former enemy states into the Union, the South lacked any capital of its own to invest, and the North was reluctant to channel a major portion of federal funds to the South for public works.
Volck remained unwavering in his views about the Civil War and his animosity toward the Union. He defended his Civil War sketches and, in a 1905 letter to the Library of Congress, stated that they "represent events as truthfully as my close connection with the South enabled me to get at them." Volck added that he did, however, have remorse about one thing. "I feel the greatest regret ever to have aimed ridicule at that great and good Lincoln."
During the war, many atrocities and cruelties were committed on both sides. After the war, however, Confederates were by and large treated well. Some, including Thomas Nast, thought that the Confederate leaders of the rebellion were treated too well, as his caricature of the "luxurious treatment" for former Confederate President Jefferson Davis illustrates.
This exhibition was made possible by the German Embassy, Washington DC. |