Existing comment:
Worship of the North
Adalbert Volck began his Sketches from the Civil War with this comprehensive indictment of the Union cause, titled Worship of the North. Gathered around an altar built of bricks labeled "Puritanism," "Witchburning," "Negro Worship," and "Free Love" are a host of villains responsible for the crusade against the South. As a devil-like Lincoln presides to the right of the altar, abolitionist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher directs his knife toward the white victim being sacrificed to a black idol. While New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley swings incense in the left corner and, behind him, Republican senator Charles Sumner holds a torch to guide Beecher's knife, a crowd of other northern luminaries looks solemnly and prayerfully on. Underscoring the Confederacy's commonly held conviction that the North was making war on the South as much for profit as for slave liberation, overfed representatives of "The Holy Cause of the Contractors" stand barely visible in the far right background.
Etching, 1863 |