Southern Justice

This full plate arranges four vignettes around a central courtroom scene. Corner panels, labeled Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina, depict riders attacking freedmen, plantation workers driven off at gunpoint, soldiers murdered, and—most explicit—"Twenty-Two Negro Prisoners Burned to Death." The central image shows a smirking Southern jury foreman delivering a verdict beneath the caption "A Good Joke on a Nigger"—Nast's direct quotation of actual press accounts, not an invention. A partially visible allegorical figure at right ("Southern") clutches a sword. The headline reads: If He Is a Southern Gentleman. Nast's argument is prosecutorial: Reconstruction-era Southern courts systematically denied Black citizens any legal protection.