A Useless War?

 

"Compromise with the South" Cartoon Interpretation

The Stars and Stripes hanging upside down as a sign of distress...while the Stars and Bars is frayed, but flies triumphantly upright.  The background portrays a Northern city and home on fire, a dead Union soldier, and an African-American Union soldier with his family returned to chains.  The foreground portrays a Union soldier amputee, with his head bowed and hat in his hand. He shakes a Confederate soldier’s hand (resembling Jefferson Davis) clearly defeated.  "Davis" stands proud and rests his foot on a Union grave while breaking a Union sword.  A weeping Lady Columbia sadly kneels beside the soldier at the foot of a grave...The tombstone reads,

 

“In Memory of the Union Heroes...in a Useless War.”

 

This Thomas Nast cartoon (September 3, 1864) was intended to criticize Northern politicians, newspaper editors, and families who were calling for an end to the Civil War.  They were calling for a cease fire, a negotiated compromise, and a return to the "United States"...the war, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the attempt to advance civil rights was a failure.  Nast's message is very clear: compromise with the South would be a Confederate victory.

 

 

 

I would suggest that Nast's cartoon is also a poignant foreshadowing of the ultimate Southern victories of the Reconstruction Era... "White Rule" returned to the South (Democrat/ KKK mob rule) and a reinvention of "slavery without chains" (sharecropping/ debt peonage/ lynching, etc.). 

 

Had the Civil War really been fought in vain?!?

 

Yankee and Rebel soldiers celebrate "The Noble Cause"
Gettysburg July 1913

"How stands the case with the recently emancipated millions of colored people in our own country? What is their condition today?...By law, by the constitution of the United States, slavery has no existence in our country. The legal form has been abolished. By the law and the constitution, the Negro is a man and a citizen, and has all the rights and liberties guaranteed to any other variety of the human family, residing in the United States....Yet, the old master class was not deprived of the power of life and death, which was the soul of the relation of master and slave. They could not, of course, sell their former slaves, but they retained the power to starve them to death, and wherever this power is held there is the power of slavery. He who can say to his fellow- man, "You shall serve me or starve," is a master and his subject is a slave..."

 

                                                       -Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1892 or 2013?)