Virginia Pausing.
We should not naturally have looked for caricature in Richmond in April, 1861, while the convention was sitting that passed the ordinance of secession. But the reader will perceive on this page that the pencil lent its aid to those who were putting the native state of Washington and Jefferson on the wrong side of the great controversy. This specimen appeared on the morning of the decisive day, and was brought away by a lady who then left Richmond for her home in New York. The rats are arranged so as to show the order in which the States seceded: South Carolina first, Mississippi second, Alabama and Florida on the same day, and Virginia still held by the negotiations with Mr. Lincoln. This picture may stand as the contribution of the Confederacy to the satiric art of the world.
Few readers need to be informed that it was the war which developed and brought to light the caricaturist of the United States, Thomas Nast. When the war began he was a boyish-looking youth of eighteen, who had already been employed as a draughtsman upon the illustrated press of New York and London for two years. He had ridden in Garibaldi's train during the campaign of 1860 which freed Sicily and Naples, and sent sketches of the leading events home to New York and to the London Illustrated News. But it was the secession war that changed him from a roving lad, with a swift pencil for sale, into a patriot artist, burning with the enthusiasm of the time. Harper's Weekly, circulating in every town, army, camp, fort, and ship, placed the whole country within his reach, and he gave forth from time to time those powerful emblematic pictures that roused the citizen and cheered the soldier. In these early works, produced amidst the harrowing anxieties of the war, the serious element was of necessity dominant, and it was this quality that gave them so much influence. They were as much the expression of heart-felt conviction as Mr. Curtis's most impassioned editorials, or Mr. Lincoln's Gettysburg speech. This I know, because I sat by his side many a time while he was drawing them, and was with him often at those electric moments when the idea of a picture was conceived. It was not till the war was over, and President Andrew Johnson began to "swing round the circle," that Mr. Nast's pictures became caricatures. But they were none the less the utterance of conviction. Whether he is wrong or right in the view presented of a subject, his pictures are always as much the product of his mind as they are of his hand.
Concerning the justice of many of his political caricatures there must be, of course, two opinions; but happily his greatest achievement is one which the honest portion of the people all approve. Caricature, since the earliest known period of its existence, far back in the dawn of Egyptian history, has accomplished nothing else equal to the series of about forty-five pictures contributed by Thomas Nast to Harper's Weekly for the explosion of the Tammany Ring. These are the utmost that satiric art has done in that kind. The fertility of invention displayed by the artist, week after week, for months at a time, was so extraordinary that people concluded, as a matter of course, the ideas were furnished him by others. On the contrary, he can not draw from the suggestions of other minds. His more celebrated pictures have been drawn in quiet country places, several miles from the city in which they were published.
The presence in New York of seventy or eighty thousand voters, born and reared in Europe, and left by European systems of government and religion totally ignorant of all that the citizens of a free state are most concerned to know, gave a chance here to the political thief such as has seldom existed, except within the circle of a court and aristocracy. The stealing, which was begun forty years before in the old corporation tea-room, had at last become a system, which was worked by a few coarse, cunning men with such effect as to endanger the solvency of the city. They stole more like kings and emperors than like common thieves, and the annual festival given by them at the Academy of Music called to mind the reckless profusion of Louis XIV. when he entertained the French nobles at Versailles at the expense of the laborious and economical people of France. Their chief was almost as ignorant and vulgar, though not as mean and pig-like, as George IV. of England. In many particulars they resembled the gang of low conspirators who seized the supreme power in France in 1851, and in the course of twenty years brought that powerful and illustrious nation so near ruin that it is even now a matter of doubt whether it exists by strength or by sufferance.
TWEEDLEDEE AND SWEEDLEDUM.
(A New Christmas Pantomime at Tammany Hall.)
Clown (to Pantaloon). "Let's blind them with this, and then take some more."