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Andrew Johnson
Thomas Nast was undoubtedly the most effective partisan illustrator of the post-Civil War era. Nast, a northerner, heartily endorsed the Radical Republican call for tight federal control of reconstruction in the South. When President Andrew Johnson, who supported states' rights, opposed this policy, Nast launched a cartoon attack that easily ranked among his most merciless. He hounded his subject with vicious abandon, transforming him by turns into a conniving Iago, a blood spilling Roman emperor, and the scowling "King Andy I."
Nast drew this cartoon in 1873 while allegedly on a lecture circuit. The donkey, with his ears wreathed in an emperor's garland, was probably meant to belittle the Democrat's charge of "Caesarism" inspired by current Republican talk of a third term for President Ulysses S. Grant.
Thomas Nast, 1873 |