Thomas Nast was America’s most powerful political cartoonist throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction. A strong supporter of the Republican Party during the 1860s, he backed Ulysses S. Grant during his run for president in 1868. Nast advocated for Black voting rights and he opposed the growing power of the Ku Klux Klan in the South after the Civil War ended.
[From Harp Week:The armed and dangerous Democratic figures in the left-background are (l-r): Wade Hampton holding a torch aloft; Nathan Bedford Forrest, wearing a Fort Pillow medallion; a squatting Robert E. Lee; presidential nominee Horatio Seymour, with demonically horned hair, wearing a Ku Klux Klan breastplate, and carrying a flag that commemorates slavery, the Confederacy (“lost cause”), the Ku Klux Klan, the Civil War draft riots in New York City, and he Reconstruction race riots in Memphis and New Orleans; vice presidential nominee Frank Blair, also wearing a Ku Klux Klan breastplate; Raphael Semmes; John Hoffman; and a stereotypical Irish-American Catholic in the shadow under Hoffman’s arm.]
At the center of the cartoon are the Democratic nominees for president, Horatio Seymour of New York, and Frank Blair. Both of them have breastplates with the letters KKK on them. Seymour is carrying a flag that looks like the early Confederate Flag with a skull and crossbones surmounted with the word “SLAVERY” above it. Underneath the skull and crossbones is written “THE LOST CAUSE REGAINED.” The slogan “The Lost Cause” was in common usage in both the North and South soon after the end of the war. On the left side of the flag are references to the white riots in New Orleans, Memphis, and in New York. There is also a reference to Fort Pillow, where troops under Nathan Bedford Forrest carried out a massacre of Black Union troops in 1864.
Up above the inscribed pillar, is President Andrew Johnson as “Moses.” He is holding in his hands, not the Ten Commandments,” but the Veto. He had used it to try to block civil rights legislation designed to establish Black citizenship and civil rights. Nathan Bedford Forrest was a big supporter of Johnson at the 1868 Democratic Convention.
