'Slavery Is Dead (?)'

Thomas Nast divides his plate into two arched panels beneath the sardonic banner "Slavery Is Dead (?)" and the date of the Emancipation Proclamation. Left, labeled "The Land of the Free," shows a dignified Liberty figure beside a Black man in respectable dress, while notices of a "Public Sale" litter the foreground—a bitter irony. Right, labeled "The Home of the Brave," a blindfolded Justice sits passive while a white man whips a Black figure at her feet; a skull medallion marked "State Rights / 1866" anchors the bottom center. Flanking text columns document actual news items: Black men sold at auction and flogged as criminal punishment in Reconstruction-era Southern courts. Nast's Black figures are rendered with the simplified caricature conventions of 1860s illustration—broad features deployed sympathetically here, as victims of ongoing legal brutality—while the white aggressor is drawn with equal crudeness to signal villainy. The cartoon's fury is directed squarely at Southern state governments and Congressional timidity: emancipation on paper, slavery in practice.