elective*

This Thomas Nast cartoon was published in the August 5, 1865 issue of Harper’s Weekly. You can read more about it at the Library of Congress: “Centerfold prints show Columbia considering why she should pardon Confederate troops who are begging for forgiveness when an African American Union soldier with an amputated leg does not have the right to vote.”

John C. Breckinridge, former United States Vice President and former rebel general, might be peering between the two columns in the left-hand pane.

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Nine years later Thomas Nast applied the obeisance theme to himself:

Nast asks Pardon from U.S. Senate (Harper’s Weekly, June 6, 1874, p. 480.)

*There sure has been a lot of progress in the last 150 years. The 1865 Nast cartoon portrayed Columbia having to decide about African-American suffrage – at a time when Columbia herself couldn’t vote in the United States. … make that African-American man suffrage.