Political Cartoons

1754–1865

The first American political cartoon was drawn by Benjamin Franklin and published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754. It depicted a snake divided into eight segments, each labeled as a colony or region of British North America, above the motto JOIN OR DIE. It was meant to persuade the colonies to approve the Albany Plan of Union, a plan for mutual defense against the French in Canada and their Indian allies. Because of its illustrious author and clear message, the cartoon was used again in 1765, during the Stamp Act Crisis, and in 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution.

Franklin's cartoon was crudely drawn and unsubtle in its message. In 1770, the silversmith and patriot Paul Revere made an engraving that was technically more advanced, but inaccurate in its details and blatantly propagandistic in its intent. It depicted British troops firing on unarmed civilians during the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. Revere made it seem like a massacre indeed. As one authority puts it, ”The Revere engraving, although masquerading as a realistic picture of the event, was really a political cartoon meant as propaganda for the anti-British element” (Hess and Kaplan, 55). In a final irony, the engraving was actually the work of another artist, Henry Pelham; Revere stole it, without attribution and with some details changed to make the British look more culpable than they really were.

Because newsprint was expensive and engraving techniques laborious, only a few other warrelated cartoons were printed prior to the 1850s. None were as influential as the Franklin and Revere engravings. During the crisis leading up to the Civil War, however, and during the war years, a number of powerful cartoons were printed. A typical engraving from 1861—printed by Currier & Ives, the purveyors of scenic Americana—showed the secession-bound leaders of the southern states, mounted on donkeys (and in the case of South Carolina's leader, on a pig), galloping toward the edge of a cliff. A proConfederate 1863 cartoon by Adalbert J. Volck showed Pres. Abraham Lincoln and northern politicians bloodily sacrificing the nation's youth on the altar of ”Negro Worship.” America's most influential political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, began his career during the Civil War. His best cartoon, possibly the best drawn during the war, was titled ”Compromise with the South,” and printed in Harper's Weekly in 1864. In it a weeping Columbia (the female symbol of America) and a Union veteran, one-legged, on crutches, with his head bowed in shame, confront a smiling, arrogant, whip-carrying southern officer across the grave of ”Union Heroes who died in a Useless War.” It is an attack on the Democratic Party, whose presidential nominee in 1864, Gen. George McClellan, was suspected by many of favoring a dishonorable peace with the Confederacy.

...