Thomas Nast, Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction, and How it Works, Woodcut Engraving

Description

On September 1, 1866, the nationally celebrated editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast published the woodcut engraving Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction, and How it Works in the Harper’s Weekly illustrated newspaper. Just eighteen months after the fall of the Confederacy Nast savaged the Johnson administration for its approach to Reconstruction.

The imagery makes clear Nast’s opinion, an opinion shared by millions of Americans who thought their Unionist cause had prevailed in the war, that Andrew Johnson and his administration were giving away the Union victory and the fruits of emancipation. Nast portrays President Johnson as a scheming Iago taunting Othello, who is represented as a wounded veteran of the United States Colored Troops. Around the principal scene Nast draws cruel vignettes of massacres at Memphis and New Orleans, and of Johnson’s cabinet (including Edwin Stanton, William Seward and Gideon Welles) standing by and watching as a snake labeled “Copperhead” strangles a freedman. The artist concludes the satire with images of Confederates surrendering to General Ben Butler (1862) juxtaposed with Union hero Philip Sheridan surrendering to an unkempt and unrepentant Confederate (1866).

The engraving catches the spirit of the time when frustrations with Johnson’s Reconstruction policies led to Congressional resistance, and then ultimately to impeachment. Nast’s furious artwork illustrates a period when Americans expected revolutionary change to emerge from the unspeakable carnage of the Civil War and fought hard for a regime of Civil Rights. The subsequent history of Reconstruction and its overthrow sometimes blinds us to this period of optimism and expectation.

Very Good ++; with some minor edge soiling and creasing. Covered in a plastic sheet, on foam core. The arerea at lower left is solid, the bubbling on the photo is a result of the plastic sheeting. 

Nast, Thomas. Woodcut Engraving. ANDREW JOHNSON’S RECONSTRUCTION. N.p., N.d. (1866). Harper’s Weekly Sept 1, 1866. 22 1/2″ x 16 1/2″.