1863

"Rowdy" Notions of Emancipation. Punch, Volume 45, August 8, 1863, p. 57

The North's institution of a military draft in 1863 (the Confederacy had begun conscription the previous year) was widely resented by the working class poor, nowhere more so than in the immigrant neighborhoods of New York. After July 11, when the first names were drawn in a draft lottery, hostile crowds quickly formed. Gaining strength from the restive Irish slums of lower Manhattan, the mobs looted stores and vandalized the homes of the wealthy before venting their anger on African Americans, whom they regarded as having caused the war. The Colored Orphans Asylum was put to the torch, elderly black men and women were savagely beaten, and several younger black men were stoned to death or hanged from lampposts. The rioting was finally quelled when Union Army units were withdrawn from their refitting after Gettysburg and sent to pacify the streets of America's largest city.

Here a distracted Lincoln, turning aside towards the left (the sinister direction), seems frozen in indecision, ignoring the desperate pleas of an African American freedman in the clutches of the mob. These lower class New York rioters are given the stereotypic features of Irish thugs -- long dirty hair, unkempt side whiskers, pug noses and prognathous jaws -- but some of them also wear the characteristic clothing usually associated with Brother Jonathan: vertically striped trousers, star-spangled shirt, woven straw hat. Perhaps Tenniel is suggesting that violence is endemic to the American character.

This cartoon's composition alludes to well-known paintings by Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David on the historic theme of the Rape of the Sabine Women, from which Tenniel quotes elements such as the open-stance foreground figure torn between contending forces, and the helpless victim sprawled in the street below. He adds a flaring torch borne aloft by an incendiary to recall the widespread arson that accompanied the rioting, and a Brueghelesque gallows on the distant horizon to represent the lynching of blacks, a reference expanded on by the cartoon's subcaption: