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Plate Number Thirty-one—This cartoon, "From Our Special War Correspondent," was published inHarper'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.
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Plate Number Thirty-two—This cartoon, "Britannia Sympathizes with Columbia," published inPunch, 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 fromHarper s WeeklyandFrank 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 theLantern, 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 fromVanity 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 LondonPunchare 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 ofPunchin 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 foryou?
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.