Andrew Johnson Weeping Over the 1866 National Union Convention

A portly, jowly figure—exaggerated in the manner of Victorian caricature—sits slumped in an ornate chair, tears streaming in theatrical rivers down his face and onto papers labeled CONVENTION in his lap. The subject is President Andrew Johnson, rendered by Nast at his most contemptuous. The National Union Convention of August 1866 was Johnson's attempt to build a cross-party coalition opposing Radical Republican Reconstruction; Nast, a fierce champion of Black civil rights and the Radical cause, frames the effort as a humiliating failure. Johnson weeps not from grief but from political impotence. The exaggerated corpulence and blubbering expression were standard tools of the era's caricature vocabulary—mockery of body and temperament wielded as argument, unambiguous in its verdict: the president is a self-pitying obstructionist, not a statesman.