Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction

Nast arranges this broadside around a triumphal arch labeled RECONSTRUCTION that frames President Andrew Johnson. Above the arch, two riot scenes—captioned Memphis and New Orleans—show armed white men attacking Black civilians. A center inset labeled What They Were shows antebellum plantation violence. Johnson himself appears below the arch keystone, grimly clasping hands with a wounded Confederate veteran—the alliance Nast accused him of forging through pardons to rebels and vetoes of the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bill. Surrounding text quotes Johnson's own campaign rhetoric against him: Treason is a crime and must be made odious now reads as self-condemnation. The composition is a prosecutorial brief in ink.