When the news of the secession of South Carolina reached England, in January, 1861, John Tenniel contributed a cartoon to the jester's pages entitled: "Divorce a Vinculo" with the explanatory subtitle "Mrs. Carolina asserts her rights to 'larrup' her nigger." Mrs. Carolina was represented as a vulgar virago holding a cat-o-nine tails in her right hand, and shaking her clenched left fist in the face of a serenely defiant youth, clad in a star-spangled shirt, to whom a little brat of a nigger appealed with clasped hands.
In the same number the following poem breathed a similar anti-secession sentiment.
SECESSION AND SLAVERY
Secede, ye Southern States, secede,
No better plan could be,
If you of niggers would be freed,
To set your niggers free.
Runaway slaves by federal law
At present you reclaim;
So from the Union straight withdraw
And play the Free Soil game.
What, when you've once the knot untied,
Will bind the Northern men?
And who'll resign to your cow-hide
The fugitives again?
Absquatulate, then, slick as grease,
And break up unity,
Or take your president in peace
And eat your humble pie.
But if your stomachs proud disdain
That salutary meal
And you, in passion worse than vain,
Must rend the commonweal,
Then all mankind will jest and scoff
At people in the case
Of him that hastily cut off
His nose to spite his face.
Later, Punch applauded that portion of Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural, which dealt with the question of secession.
THE COMMINUTED STATES