Part 2

The Polish insurrection, then in progress, furnishes the motive of this cartoon, which serves to recall the good will shown by Russia for the Union, when it stood without other friends among the nations. How substantial was this good will furnishes the cue to a chapter in our history which yet remains to be written. A part of this chapter the writer once had from the lips of the late Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania. Just before General Cameron went to Russia as American Minister in the early part of 1862 he was charged with a secret commission. He was directed, upon the presentation of his letters to the Russian Chancellor in St. Petersburg, to say that President Lincoln asked that the Minister might have a personal and confidential interview with the Czar. If this was accorded he should say to the Czar that the President was troubled about the possibility of interference by England or France in behalf of the Confederacy, and that if the friendship of Russia was such as to justify the monarch in conveying, confidentially, any intimation of his feelings and attitude in such a contingency, the President would be grateful. The interview was accorded, the message was delivered and the answer was cordial, and in about these words: "The friendship of Russia for the United States has long continued, and is such as to justify the President's request. The reply of Russia is ready. You will convey to Mr. Lincoln my personal regards, and say that the danger of interference by any European nation is exceedingly remote; but in that improbable contingency, or upon the appearance of real danger of it, the friendship of Russia for the United States will be made known in a decisive manner, which no other nation will be able to mistake."

This message was duly reported to the President. How the Czar kept his promise came out in an interview which he granted in 1879 to Wharton Barker, for many years Russian financial agent in America. He said to Barker: "In the autumn of 1862 France and England proposed to Russia in formal (but not in official) way, the joint recognition by European nations of the independence of the Confederate States. My immediate answer was:'I will not cooperate in such action, and I will not acquiesce; but, on the contrary, I shall accept recognition of the independence of the Confederate States as a _casus belli_ for Russia, and that the governments of France and England may understand that this is no idle threat, I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York.' Sealed orders were given to both admirals. My fleets arrived at the American ports, there was no recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by England and France, the American rebellion was put down and the great American republic continues. All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia. I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American republic, with advanced industrial development, was broken up and England left in control of most branches of modern industrial development."

It was England's warm resentment of Russia's attitude that prompted the cartoon under consideration. Even more pronounced in its mocking cynicism was _Punch's_ cartoon for November 7, 1863. The tacit alliance between Russia and the United States still grated upon English sensibilities, and the artist provoked the multitude to laughter by depicting the President as Mephistopheles saluting the Russian bear. Hard things in plenty were said of Lincoln, both at home and abroad, but this is the only instance in which he was portrayed in Satan's livery. British malice could go no further than this.

|Plate Number Twenty-five--This cartoon, "Drawing Things to a Head," published in _Harper's Weekly_, on November 28, 1863, shows how the friendship of Russia was regarded in the loyal States. Lincoln, ensconced in a snug apothecary shop, watched from the opposite side of the street by John Bull and Napoleon, is made to say to Secretary Seward, who is presented as an errand boy with a basket of Russian salve on his arm: "Mild applications of Russian salve for our friends over the way, and heavy doses and plenty of it for our Southern patient."

|Plate Number Twenty-six--This cartoon, "This Reminds Me of a Little Joke," published in _Harper's Weekly_, on September 17, 1864, recalls the extraordinary Presidential campaign of that year. There was, during the opening months of 1864, a determined and more or less noisy opposition to the renomination of Lincoln. This came from two sources--the radical abolitionists, who chafed at what they called the President's half-hearted policy in regard to slavery, and another element, which, while supporting the Union, believed that slavery should be let alone; but it shrank into insignificance as time went on, and when the Republican Convention met at Baltimore on June 7, Lincoln was renominated on the first ballot. The Democratic National Convention was held twelve weeks later in Chicago. A few days before it met President Lincoln said to a friend: "They must nominate a peace Democrat on a war platform, or a war Democrat on a peace platform." The convention chose the second of these alternatives. It adopted a platform which declared the war a failure and demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities, and it nominated for President the best known of all the war Democrats, General George B. McClellan. The latter's chances of election, whatever they may have been, disappeared within a fortnight of his nomination. The course of the war during the summer had been studded thickly with bloody and seemingly indecisive battles. Both in the East and the West the opposing armies were grinding in almost continuous struggle. But Sherman's capture of Atlanta and Farra-gut's entrance into Mobile harbor, proved to the people of the North that the end was in sight, and when the President called for five hundred thousand more men they came forward rapidly, a large and valuable percentage of them being volunteers who had served their time under previous enlistments. Long before election day it was evident that no prospect remained of Democratic success. When the polls were closed and the votes counted, Lincoln's enormous popular majority of more than 400,000 fairly buried the McClellan electoral tickets. Kentucky and Delaware, with New Jersey, testified their disgust with Emancipation, but they were of small account in an electoral college of 233 votes, wherein 212 were solidly against them.

|Plate Number Twenty-seven--This cartoon, "The American Brothers; or, How Will They Get Out of It," was published in _Punch_ on November 5, 1864. It has, in the light of after events, a touch of humor not intended by the artist. When it was drawn, the belief was generally prevalent in England that Lincoln's defeat at the coming election was a foregone conclusion. Thus, this cartoon pictures Lincoln and Davis bound to adjacent benches by ropes, significantly labelled "Debts," but it was still wet from the press when Lincoln, as we have just seen, was re-elected by the largest majority in the electoral college ever given to a candidate.

|Plate Number Twenty-eight--This cartoon, "Long Abraham Lincoln a Little Longer," published in _Harper's Weekly_, on November 26, 1864, tells its own story and bears witness to the joyful relief with which the people of the North greeted the re-election of Lincoln. Very like the foregoing in spirit and treatment (and for that reason not reproduced in this place) is a cartoon published in _Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper_ on December 3, 1864. It bears title, "Jeff Davis' November Nightmare," and places the President, with legs drawn up, on the bed of the Confederate leader. "Is that you still there, Long Abe?" asks the suddenly awakened man. "Yes, and I am going to be four years longer," is the reply.

|Plate Number Twenty-nine--This cartoon, "The Federal Phoenix," was published in _Punch_, on December 3, 1864. Its character is explained in its title, and it shows one of those fabled birds, on which the artist has placed the head of Lincoln, rising from a pyre, the fuel for which is furnished by commerce, credit, the Constitution, a free press, habeas corpus and State rights. How it impressed the public for whom it was intended can only be conjectured, but to the eyes of an American, a generation after the death of the man whom it thus held up to condemnation, it seems as brutal in motive as it is misleading in fact.

|Plate Number Thirty--This-cartoon, "The Threatening Notice," published in _Punch_, on February 26, 1865, represents Lincoln remonstrating with the American eagle in the dress of Uncle Sam over the Senate's proposed abrogation of Canadian treaties. "Now, Uncle Sam," the President is reported as saying, "you're in a darned hurry to serve this notice on John Bull. Now, it's my duty as your attorney, to tell you that you may drive him to go over to that cuss, Davis." But John Bull was not to be driven "over to that cuss, Davis." Two months later the war was ended, and Lincoln dead. _Punch_ has caricatured him for the last time.

|Plate Number Thirty-one--This cartoon, "From Our Special War Correspondent," was published in _Harper's Weekly_, on April 15, 1865. Lincoln, who had lately made his last visit to the front, was represented, with a drumhead for a table, writing from City Point, Virginia: "All seems well with us." These words, in the light of after events, are not without a touch of pathos. When the journal in which they appeared reached its readers, Booth's bullet had done its work and Lincoln had become the gentlest memory in our history.

|Plate Number Thirty-two--This cartoon, "Britannia Sympathizes with Columbia," published in _Punch_, on May 6,1865, testifies to the world-wide grief which attended the death of the great war President, and shows how strong had become his hold upon all men who love brave deeds and honest lives. Britons had not hesitated to criticise and upbraid him living, but dead they were quick to recognize him as the noblest, knightliest figure of an age rich above all things else in the number and grandeur of its great men.

It has been impossible to trace the authorship of most of the cartoons herewith reproduced from _Harper s Weekly_ and _Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper_, but three of them, at least, are known to be from the pencil of the elder Frank Bellew, an English artist who came to this country to embark with John Brougham in the publication of a short-lived weekly, called the _Lantern_, later helping to found half a dozen other periodicals. Bellew had cleverness and versatility, and a rich vein of humor, as the drawings "Sinbad Lincoln and the Old Man of the Sea," "Lincoln's Last Warning" and "Long Abraham a Little Longer" bear witness, but he failed to achieve complete success in his work, and left no impress upon the political thought of his time.

The designer of a majority of the cartoons reproduced from _Vanity Fair_, which, between 1859 and 1863, ran a checkered but lively existence, was the late Henry Louis Stephens, a man of fertile and incisive wit, with unusual ability to enforce a pictorial moral by simple yet telling methods. For a brief period Mr. Stephens's attitude toward Lincoln seems to have been touched by the not always good-natured suspicion with which the public regards a new and comparatively untried man; but no sooner had Sumter been fired upon than the artist and his journal became ardent and unswerving in their support of the Union, and so continued until the end. Stephens's drawings, though somewhat crude and faulty in method, are, nevertheless, notable for their originality and force. He lacked, however, either the inclination or the opportunity to continue in the field for which he had shown so marked an aptitude, and long before his death, in 1883, fallen into obscurity.

All of the cartoons reproduced from London _Punch_ are from the pencil of Sir John Tenniel, who, in 1901, concluded half a century of brilliant service on that journal. Tenniel was already an artist of repute when he joined the staff of _Punch_ in 1851, and for many years preceding his self-sought retirement he was recognized as incomparably the greatest caricaturist of his time--his pencil a force to be taken into account by sagacious statesmen in every forecast of the drift of public opinion. His range is not a wide one, yet within its clearly defined limits he is nearly always powerful. Although his methods are usually simple, through them he secures signal breadth and strength, while now and then he gives an impression of power such as one fancies an Angelo might have given had he amused himself by drawings reflecting upon the politics of his time. If there was any doubt in official minds respecting the necessity of sending an army to the rescue of Khartoum, it vanished when Tenniel drew his picture of General Gordon standing behind an earthwork and looking across the desert for a glimpse of the expected redcoats. That touched the heart of England, and was more potent than the fiercest denunciation from the Opposition bench of the Gladstone ministry's inaction in the Soudan.

Tenniel is first of all a satirist, but he has seldom been either unjust or unfair in his work. His longest and most memorable departure from fairness was when, in common with the ruling class of England generally, he misinterpreted our Civil War and caricatured the chief actor therein with astonishing perversity. Still, he was not more frequently or more deeply in the wrong than some of our own politicians, who could not plead his excuse of distance from the scene, and, to his credit, be it said, when once convinced of his error he made prompt and generous amends therefor. Nothing could have been more fitting nor finer in its way than his design, already referred to, which showed Britannia laying a wreath on the bier of the martyred President and which was accompanied by these appreciative lines from the pen of Tom Taylor:

|You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier,

_You_, who with mocking pencil wont to trace,

Brood for the self-complacent British sneer,

His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,

His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkept, bristling hair,

His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease,

His lack of all we prize as debonair,

Of power or will to shine, of art to please.

You, whose smart pen backed up the pencil's laugh,

Judging each step as though the way were plain;

Reckless, so it could point its paragraph,

Of chief's perplexity, or people's pain.

Beside this corpse that bears for winding sheet

The stars and stripes he lived to rear anew;

Between the mourners at his head and feet,

Say, scurril jester, is there room for _you?_

Yes, he has lived to shame me for my sneer,

To lame my pencil and confute my pen--

To make me own this hind of princes peer,

This rail-splitter, a true-born king of men.

My shallow judgment I have learned to rue,

Noting how to occasion's height he rose;

How his quaint wit made home-truth seem more true,

How, iron-like, his temper grew by blows.

How humble yet how hopeful he could be;

How in good fortune and in ill the same;

Nor bitter in success nor boastful he,

Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame.

He went about his work, such work as few

Ever had laid on head and heart and hand,

As one who knows where there's a task to do,

Man's honest will must Heaven's good grace command;

Who trusts the strength will with the burden grow,

That God makes instruments to work His will,

If but that will we can arrive to know,

Nor tamper with the weights of good and ill.

So he went forth to battle on the side

That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's,

As in his peasant boyhood he had plied

His warfare with rude Nature's thwarting mights;

The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil,

The iron-bark that turns the lumberer's ax,

The rapid that o'erbears the boatman's toil,

The prairie, hiding the mazed wanderer's tracks,

The ambushed Indian and the prowling bear--

Such were the deeds that helped his youth to train:

Rough culture, but such trees large fruit may bear,

If but their stocks be of right girth and grain.

So he grew up, a destined work to do,

And lived to do it; four long-suffering years'

Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through,

And then he heard the hisses changed to cheers,

The taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise,

And took both with the same unwavering mood;

Till, as he came on light, from darkling days,

And seemed to touch the goal from where he stood,

A felon hand, between the goal and him,

Reached from behind his back, a trigger prest,

And those perplexed and patient eyes were dim,

Those gaunt, long-laboring limbs were laid to rest!

The words of mercy were upon his lips,

Forgiveness in his heart and on his pen,

When his vile murderer brought swift eclipse

To thoughts of peace on earth, good will to men.

The Old World and the New, from sea to sea,

Utter one voice of sympathy and shame!

Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high,

Sad life, cut short, just as its triumph came.

A deed accurst! Strokes have been struck before

By the assassin's hand, whereof men doubt

If more of honor or disgrace they bore;

But thy foul crime, like Cain's, stands darkly out.

Vile hand, that brandest murder on a strife,

Whate'er its grounds, stoutly and nobly driven;

And with the martyr's crown crownest a life,

With much to praise, little to be forgiven.

End of Project Gutenberg's Lincoln in Caricature, by Rufus Rockwell Wilson