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  On February 6, 1875, Harper's Weekly featured a cartoon about
Student Reconstruction.
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  Artist: Thomas Nast

On this Day in
History his Harper's Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast is a counterattack on
Resources on the press criticisms of the Reconstruction policies of President Ulysses S.
Web Grant.  The Grant administration (1869-1877) had the difficult task of
NYC School enforcing the Reconstruction legislation of the Republican Congress in the face
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of an often hostile white population in the South and an increasingly
Facts About the
disinterested one in the North. 
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As the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union, the states'
   biracial Republican governments, established during Reconstruction, were
replaced by white-only Democratic governments.  By 1874, only four 
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Southern states--Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina--
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retained Republican governments.  While corruption existed in both parties, 
paramilitary groups associated with the Democratic party (e.g., the Ku Klux
Klan) used intimidation and violence to prevent black and white Republicans
from voting in the South.

The onset of an economic depression, the white public's impatience with

Reconstruction, Congressional scandals, and talk of a third-term for President
Grant, all combined to give the Democratic party a decisive victory in the
1874 elections.  Democrats regained control of the U.S. House of 
Representatives for the first time since before the Civil War, along with
several Northern state governments.  In the South, the Republican party 
virtually collapsed, electing only 17 of the region's 106 congressmen.

In December 1874, President Grant's annual message to Congress argued

forcefully that federal intervention against political violence was necessary to
allow the 15th Amendment (barring racial discrimination in voting rights) and
Reconstruction legislation to work.  The inset cartoons on the upper-right and
upper-left depict reaction to Grant's message, which was called "another
outrage."  Grant is a courageous, though dismayed, lion who (on the left) 
drops his presidential-message knife of truth into the slimy, poisonous tangle
of copperhead snakes ("copperhead" was a nickname for Confederate
sympathizers); while (on the right) he stuffs his presidential message and "The
Truth/Facts" into the mouths of the Democratic donkeys.

The central cartoon refers to the volatile political situation in Louisiana, where
both political parties were claiming victory after a campaign and election rife
with corruption.  Republicans asserted that they had rightfully elected William 
Pitt Kellogg as governor and retained control of both houses of the state
legislature, but Democrats said that they had successfully gained both states
chambers and the governorship for John McEnery.  

On January 4, 1875, Democrats prevented Republicans from organizing the

state legislature, and (a fact soon forgotten in the public discourse) requested
reinforcement from federal troops.  President Grant did dispatch Philip 
Sheridan, commanding general of the U.S. Army, to keep the peace, but
ordered the general to ensure that the Republican government was duly
installed.  

Newspapers and Democratic politicians from across the country assailed

Grant and Sheridan for imposing "bayonet rule," or military dictatorship, on
the South.  Grant was accused of "Caesarism" amid calls for his resignation.  
Many Republicans worried that the administration's Louisiana policy was a
political liability.  Liberal Republican Carl Schurz wondered how long it would
be before troops marched into Northern statehouses or the U.S. Congress.  
Even the president's cabinet was divided over the appropriateness of the
response.

Lost among all the hysteria against federal intervention (besides the fact that
the Louisiana Democrats had requested it first) was the fact of massive
corruption, intimidation, and violence perpetrated by white Democrats in the
state, and their attempt to circumvent the democratic process.  

On January 13, President Grant responded to criticisms in a message to the

U.S. Senate.  While admitting that both parties were guilty of corruption, the 
president chastised the Democrats for inexcusably resorting to terrorism to
achieve their political goals.  Employing impassioned language, Grant detailed 
Louisiana's record of past violence against black and white Republicans.

President Grant's strong statement of moral principle, however, was used by

other Republicans merely to limit political damage from the affair.  
Congressional Republicans agreed to a compromise which gave the lower
house of the Louisiana legislature to the Democrats, while the Republicans
retained the upper chamber and the governorship.

The 1874 elections were a turning point for Reconstruction policy.  Significant
civil rights legislation would not be passed or enforced by the new Democratic
house, and the notion was reinforced among Republicans that Reconstruction
was best abandoned if the party wanted to stay in power.

Cartoonist Thomas Nast had long been committed to both black civil rights
and President Grant, who was one of his great heroes.  Here, the main 
cartoon lampoons those in the press critical of Grant's Louisiana policy; they
are wild animals, blinded by bayonets on their heads, who have escaped from
the Central Park zoo.  The latter is a reference to a hoax perpetrated by 
James Gordon Bennett Jr., publisher of the New York Herald.  

In late 1874, Bennett reported in bold headlines that wild animals had broken
loose in Central Park, causing "Terrible Scenes of Mutilation."  Many readers 
were hoodwinked by the sensational hoax.  Nast used the image in several 
cartoons over the ensuing months, including this one which mocks Bennett
and his journalistic colleagues.  The cartoonist's message is clear:  charges 
against the Grant administration of military despotism are the equivalent of a
public hoax, and the offending journalists are blinded by their own prejudiced
rhetoric.

Robert C. Kennedy

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