This John Tenniel and the American Civil War website is a personal project of its author, art historian and visual resources curator Allan T. Kohl of the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, who is solely responsible for its content. The site has been designed in collaboration with Erin McLaughlin, a recent MCAD B.F.A. graduate. Additional technical assistance was provided by Eric Vana. Research assistance for selected individual cartoon commentaries was provided as noted by Eva Hyvarinen, a current member of the MCAD Library staff, and Virginia Hyvarinen, former reference librarian with the Duluth (MN) Public Library.

I've been interested in the Civil War since my grade school days, nearly fifty years ago. Perhaps the fact that my ancestors fought on both sides of the conflict initially piqued my interest (though in later years I would feel far greater affinity for another relative, who went to extraordinary lengths to avoid the Confederate draft). Coincidentally, it was during the 1950s that I first read Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and so became acquainted with Tenniel's wonderful illustrations. For several years after a trip to England during the same decade, my parents subscribed to the venerable British humor magazine Punch, which I would page through mostly to look at that publication's famous cartoons (many of which, although they were visually interesting, I didn't really understand at the time).

Half a century later, these hitherto unrelated strands began to ravel together when I taught a course on “The Art of the Civil War” for the College of Continuing Education at the University of Minnesota. Over the years I had seen several of Tenniel's cartoons reproduced in pictorial histories of the War. My preparations for the course provided the impetus for combing through old bound volumes of Punch dating from 1860 to 1865, looking for other examples. I eventually found more than fifty. Since one aspect of my course dealt with imagery in the popular press of the Civil War era, I used several of the Tenniel cartoons to compare British reactions to wartime events with representations of the same events that had appeared in American publications.

Although many scholars have referenced individual examples of the Tenniel cartoons in articles and monographs, I am not aware of any systematic study of the entire corpus of those dealing with the Civil War, some 54 of which were published over a span of four and a half years. My initial idea was to scan all of these cartoons as large, high resolution digital images, and to make these available through the image collections of several major research universities. Doing this also necessitated my preparing descriptive cataloging records for each cartoon. The process of examining each cartoon in detail led me to further questions: about the meaning of idiomatic language used in the captions; about now-obscure events and topical references; about the sources of Tenniel's imagery, whether derived from "high art" or from contemporary popular culture. This website is my attempt to suggest answers to some of these questions, and in so doing to make the Tenniel cartoons more accessible to each visitor, whatever your level of interest and expertise may be. I hope that you also find them of interest, and that they help to enlarge our shared knowledge of this fascinating period in Anglo-American history.

ATK