Existing comment:
"Worship in the North" by Adalbert Volck.
In this drawing, Volck demonstrated an amazing grasp of the figures and events that led up to the war in his complex and detailed "Worship of the North." He shows a white man being sacrificed on an altar built of the "errant" principles of the North. Looking on at this sacrifice are a cast of nearly all the major players in the controversies that led up to secession and the subsequent course of the war. Henry Ward Beecher holds the sacrificial knife, while Charles Sumner holds a torch to shed light. Horace Greeley holds a censer for the incense filled with snakes. John Brown looks on, armed with a pike. Harriet Beecher Stowe kneels on a copy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." John Fremont is in pioneer garb. General Henry Halleck raises the broken slave shackles, and Benjamin Butler kneels with a knapsack of stolen money at the foot of the altar which is adorned with carved busts of Lincoln as a serpent. Volck's depiction was meant to persuade Southerners that there was no room for compromise or contrition given this villainous cast of characters. |