CHAPTER XVII
NEGLECTED OPPORTUNITIES
Down to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the history of American political caricature is a history of lost opportunities. Revolution and war have always been the great harvest times of the cartoonist. Gillray and Rowlandson owe their fame to the Napoleonic wars; Philipon and Daumier, to the overthrow of Louis Philippe; Leech and Tenniel reached their zenith in the days of the Crimean War and the Sepoy Mutiny. It is not the election cartoon, or the tariff cartoon, or the cartoon of local politics, it is the war cartoon that is most widely hailed and longest remembered. Yet of all the wars in which the United States has been engaged, not one has given birth to a great satiric genius, and none but the latest, our recent war with Spain, has received comprehensive treatment in the form of caricature. It is not strange that the Revolutionary War and that of 1812 failed to inspire any worthier efforts than William Charles's crude imitations of Gillray. The mechanical processes of printing and engraving, the methods of distribution, the standards of public taste, were all still too primitive. The Mexican War was commemorated in a number of the popular lithographs of the day; but it was not a prolonged struggle, nor one calculated to stir the public mind profoundly. With the Civil War the case was radically different. Here was a struggle which threatened not only national honor, but national existence—a struggle which prolonged itself grimly, month after month, and was borne home to a great majority of American families with the force of personal tragedy, arraying friend against friend, and father against son, and offering no brighter hope for the future than the vista of a steadily lengthening death-roll. There was never a time in the history of the nation when the public mind, from one end of the country to the other, was in such a state of tension; never, since the days of Napoleon, had there been such an opportunity for a real master of satiric art. It seems amazing, as one looks back over the pictorial records of these four years, that the magnitude of the events did not galvanize into activity some unknown genius of the pencil, and found then and there a new school of American caricature commensurate with the fever-heat of public sentiment. The existing school of caricature seems to have been absurdly inadequate. The prevailing types were a sort of fashion-plate lithograph—groups of public men in mildly humorous situations, their features fixed in the solemn repose of the daguerreotypes upon which they were probably modeled; or else the conventional election steeplechase, in which the contestants, with long, balloon-like loops trailing from their mouths, suggest an absurd semblance to the cowboys of a Wild West show, all engaged in a vain attempt to lasso and pull in their own idle words. Many of the cartoons actually issued at the outbreak of the Civil War impress one with a sense of indecorum, of ill-timed levity. What was wanted was not the ineptitude of feeble humor, but the rancor and venom of a Gillray, the stinging irony of a Daumier, the grim dignity of a Tenniel. And it was not forthcoming. The one living American who might have produced work of a high order was Thomas Nast; but although Nast's pencil was dedicated to the cause of the Union from the beginning to the end, in the series of powerful emblematic pictures that appeared in Harper's Weekly, his work as a caricaturist did not begin until the close of the war.
Rough and Ready Locomotive against the Field.
From the collection of the New York Historical Society.
It is interesting to conjecture what the great masters of caricature would have made of such an opportunity. The issues of the war were so clear-cut, their ethical significance so momentous, that an American Gillray, a Unionist Gillray, would have found material for a series of cartoons of eloquent and grewsome power. It is easy to imagine what form they would have taken: an Uncle Sam, writhing in agony, his limbs shackled with the chains of slavery, his lips gagged with the Fugitive Slave Law, slowly being sawn asunder, while Abolition and Secession guide the opposite ends of the saw, or else the American Eagle being worried and torn limb from limb by Southern bloodhounds and stung by copperheads, while the British Lion and the rest of the European menagerie look on, wistfully licking their chops and with difficulty restraining themselves from participating in the feast. Such a cartoonist would have found a mine of suggestion in "Uncle Tom's Cabin"; he would have crowded his plates with Legrees and Topsies, Uncle Toms and Sambos and Quimbos, fearful and wonderful to look upon, brutal, distorted, and unforgettable.
What's Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the Gander.