LINCOLN IN CARICATURE
By Rufus Rockwell Wilson
Author Of "Washington: The Capital City"
Illustrated With Thirty-two Plates
Printed For Private Distribution
1903
LINCOLN IN CARICATURE
INCOLN in caricature is a phase of the career of the great war President that has thus far lacked adequate treatment. Yet he was the most bitterly assailed and savagely cartooned public man of his time, and one has only to search the newspapers and periodicals of that period to find striking confirmation of this fact. The attitude of Great Britain toward the Union and its President was then one of cynical and scarcely veiled hostility, and nowhere were the sentiments of the English government and of the English masses more faithfully reflected than in the cartoons which appeared in London Punch between 1861 and 1865, many of which had Lincoln for their central figure. He was also frequently cartooned in Vanity Fair the American counterpart of Punch; in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, and in Harper's Weekly. Indeed, nowhere were the changing sentiments of the people of the North, their likes and dislikes, their alternates hopes and fears, their hasty, often unjust judgments of men and measures, more vividly reflected than in the cartoons dealing with Lincoln which appeared in the last named journal during the epoch-making days of his Presidency. Thus the thirty-two plates from these sources here brought together have a value and interest already important and sure to increase with the passage of time, for they reflect with unconscious vividness, and as nothing else can do, the life and color of an historic era, and how his fellows regarded the grandest figure of that era. It is with their value as human documents in mind that they have been rescued from their half-forgotten hiding places, and assembled in chronological sequence, with such comment as may be necessary to make their purpose and meaning clear to older men, whose memory may have grown dim, as well as to the new generation that has come upon the stage in the eight and thirty years that have elapsed since the close of the Civil War.
Original Size
Plate Number One—This cartoon, "Lincoln à la Blondin," which appeared in Harper's Weekly, on August 25, 1860, seems to have been suggested by Blondin's crossing of Niagara on a tight rope with a man on his back—an event then fresh