Benjamin FRANKLIN is credited with publishing the first political cartoon in the future United States: the famous image of a fragmented serpent whose body parts bear the initials of the colonies over the motto "Join, or Die." It appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754.
A century later, advances in printing technology, the appearance of weekly magazines and a growing audience educated in the public school system created new outlets for topical cartoons. The success of Punch in 1841 and the Illustrated London News the next year in Britain led to the establishment of their American counterparts: Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in 1855, and Harper's Weekly and the first Vanity Fair in 1857.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, November 21, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 64 words Type of Material: Correction
Lincoln cartoon: A review in Saturday's Calendar section about a new book on Civil War-era cartoons gave the year of publication for a cartoon about President Lincoln as 1864. Thomas Nast's drawing -- of Lincoln at the Union Army's headquarters writing a dispatch that said, "All seems well with us" -- appeared April 15, 1865, the day after Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre.
By the time the Civil War broke out, American political cartooning was entering a golden age, as J.G. Lewin and P.J. Huff show in the new book, "Lines of Contention." Rather than a history of the political cartoons of the era, however, the book is an illustrated overview of popular attitudes about the Civil War. "From our perspective, nearly 150 years after the fact, we like to think we are aware of the issues and how they were eventually resolved," they write in the introduction. "But if we approach these cartoons without preconceived beliefs, we can begin to understand the mind-set, the confusion, and the resolve of the people who lived through these traumatic events."
One of the most difficult preconceived beliefs to abandon is of Abraham Lincoln as a revered, even sacrosanct figure. Modern readers may be shocked by the hostile treatment the president received in the press during his lifetime. In 1864, Thomas W. Strong depicted Democratic presidential candidate George B. McClellan as Hamlet and Lincoln as Yorick's skull; a Currier & Ives cartoon, "Abraham's Dream," shows the goddess Columbia chasing him from the White House the same year. In Punch, Sir John Tenniel drew Lincoln as a polecat treed by Britain (over the illegal seizure of Confederate envoys aboard the British ship the Trent in 1861) and as the attorney for the dissatisfied "Mrs. North" during the 1864 reelection campaign. The pro-Confederacy cartoonist V. Blada (the pseudonym used by Baltimore-based Aldabert J. Volck) showed Lincoln writing the Emancipation Proclamation surrounded by instruments of the devil, and as a harem dancer with African features -- a reference to the false rumor that Lincoln "had black blood in his veins."
