HUMOR, POLITICAL

Humor and politics, when combined, can be a powerful force. During a war, this intersection can serve several purposes: it can offer relief from serious and disturbing events; boost morale and patriotism in the civilian population; and ridicule the inhumanity, hypocrisy, vanity, stupidity, and other foibles that may be involved in the war. The war with Mexico and the Civil War provided an impetus for humor, and much of the comedy accurately mirrored the sentiments of the people.

the mexican war

Using a combination of caricature and captions, many of the Mexican War's political cartoons unsparingly ridiculed the enemy. A lithograph caricatured Mexican commander Santa Anna, accentuating his oversized head as he glared at the American forces. Another celebrated American optimism and hauteur by showing a man stepping across the Rio Grande River and with an enormous pair of scissors—one blade representing the regular army under General Zachary Taylor and the other blade the volunteers—preparing to cut a figure representing Mexico in two.

Humor was more rarely used to oppose American involvement in the Mexican War, but what there was of it generally shared the North's contention that the South was using the war as an opportunity to expand slavery. James Russell Lowell, who opposed the war for this reason, wrote The Biglow Papers, First Series (1846–1848), using versified letters in Yankee dialect from a New England farmer as his chief satiric weapon.

the civil war: northern humor

The political humor of the Civil War era was extensive and increased the demand for cartoon illustrations. The illustrated weeklies that emerged in the 1850s and early 1860s, including Harper's Weekly, the New York Illustrated News, and Southern Punch, produced numerous cartoons soon after the war began. German-born Thomas Nast, the principal cartoonist of the era who was a loyal Republican and ardent champion of the Union, launched his career as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly in 1862, producing about sixty drawings during the course of the war. Nast's satiric illustrations, which savagely attacked the Confederacy and helped advance the Union cause, prompted Lincoln to praise him as the North's "best recruiting sergeant" (Vinson, p. 5). Nast's typical wartime drawings—such as "The War in the Border States," a portrait of a mother and her children grieving over a Union soldier husband-father killed by a Confederate sniper—derided the South and were more often bitter and searing than amusing. One of Nast's more satiric pieces, "Aid and Comfort to the Enemy," caricatured Confederate leaders, the beneficiaries of an irresponsible Northern press that often revealed too much about the Union army's war plans, thereby alerting the enemy's troops and giving the South an advantage.

In 1864, Nast temporarily shifted his attention to promoting President Lincoln's reelection by attacking Lincoln's political enemies, principally the promoters of the Copperhead peace movement. In "How Copperheads Obtain Their Votes," Nast depicted two Copperheads in a graveyard at night copying the name of a dead Union soldier onto a Democratic ballot. His cartoons helped Lincoln's reelection campaign in 1864 and promoted

Grant's first bid for the presidency in 1868 as well as his reelection in 1872. Regarding Grant as the savior of the Union and as absolutely honest, Nast portrayed him in one cartoon as a bulldog guarding the public treasury.

Although Nast was the Union's major political humorist, other cartoonists contributed to the North's propaganda effort. A Currier and Ives lithograph disparaged the South's efforts to recruit troops, showing a recruitment office where disreputable men were being forced into the army. Notable in this drawing were a shabbily clad man being coerced to volunteer at bayonet point and a drunkard sitting against a wall while a dog urinated on him. Popular literary comedian David Ross Locke used the lecture circuit and newspaper columns to berate the Confederacy. Locke wrote his self-deprecating columns as Petroleum V. Nasby, a Confederate sympathizer living in the North. They took the form of letters characterized by misspellings, mispronunciations, and mangled grammar, starkly exposing Nasby's bigotry, cowardice, and opposition to freeing slaves.

the civil war: southern humor

The war caused ink and paper shortages in the South, and many engravers and lithographers were forced into producing currency, stamps, and other documents, but the Confederacy still used humor to promote its war effort, although much of it was inferior to Union humor. Adalbert J. Volke, a German-born Baltimore dentist, captured the sentiments and bolstered the morale of the Southerners, particularly in his mocking caricatures of Lincoln as a jester-puppeteer who managed the war poorly and in his depiction of Northern draft dodgers buying the services of substitutes. The engravings featured in the South's leading humor magazine Southern Punch not only mocked Lincoln as the Prince of Darkness abducting the Goddess of Liberty and General Grant as the "the master of ceremonies and and author of the dance of death" for a gala ball in Richmond (Piacentino, p. 258) but also disparaged Richmond extortionists and speculators who bought up scarce supplies of flour, sugar, clothing, and other basic necessities and resold them at exorbitant prices.

On the literary front, Charles Henry Smith, known as Bill Arp, the "mouthpiece of the southerner people" (Parker, p. 67), wrote dialect letters, many accurately reflecting the sentiments of Southerners on topics ranging from draft evaders, the behavior of Union combatants, and Lincoln—or as Arp called him, Abe Linkhorn.

after the civil war

The Civil War disrupted society not only during the conflict but for years to come. The greed and corruption of politicians and new industrial leaders were, to a degree, a measure of the long-term social effects of the war. Nast waged his greatest assault against the greed and corruption of New York City's William Marcy "Boss" Tweed and Tammany Hall in this period, significantly enhancing his fame as a cartoonist. One of Nast's most famous and frequently reprinted cartoons graphically depicted a tiger destroying innocent, defenseless women representing the republic, and another showed Tweed and members of his ring standing in a circle, each pointing an accusing finger at the man standing next to him. Although Tweed admitted he did not care what the newspapers said about him because his constituents could not read, Nast's drawings contributed to his political demise.

Ephemeral and topical, negative and acerbic, hostile and satiric, intended to sway public opinion and to influence government actions, nineteenth-century American political humor, particularly the editorial cartoon, emerged as a formidable force during the turbulent years of the Civil War and the political instability of its aftermath. Of the cartoonists of the period, Thomas Nast—champion of the Union, maker of presidents, and despoiler of Boss Tweed—became the most effective purveyor of American political sentiment. Political humor had firmly established itself in American popular culture and political life.

bibliography

Anderson, George McCullough, ed. The Work of Adalbert Johann Volck, 1828–1912. Baltimore, MD: Privately printed by George McCullough Anderson, 1970.

Inge, M. Thomas and Dennis Hall, eds. The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.

Nevins, Allan, and Frank Weitenkampf. A Century of Political Cartoons: Caricature in the United States from 1800 to 1900. New York: Octagon, 1975.

Parker, David B. Alias Bill Arp: Charles Henry Smith and the South's "Goodly Heritage." Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

Piacentino, Edward J. "Confederate Disciples of Momus." In Studies in American Humor 4, no. 4 New Series (1985–1986): 249–261.

Reilly, Bernard F., Jr. American Political Prints, 1776–1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Library of Congress. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1991.

Smith, Kristin M. The Lines Are Drawn: Political Cartoons of the Civil War. Athens, GA: Hill Street, 1999.

Vinson, J. Chad. Thomas Nast: Political Cartoonist. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967.

Edward Piacentino

See also:Newspapers and Magazines.