The Colored Volunteer

Reproduced as a carte de visite—the pocket-sized photographic card collected by millions during the Civil War—this 1863 Nast image bears the caption "The Colored Volunteer" and his signature (Tho. Nast). It shows a Black boy in white shirt and trousers, holding a broom like a rifle and stepping forward with evident pride. The composition mimics standard soldier-portrait conventions of the format, lending the figure a martial dignity. Yet the drawing employs the bulging-eyed caricature that 19th-century American illustration routinely imposed on Black subjects—a dehumanizing visual shorthand Nast, despite his Unionist and later pro-Reconstruction politics, did not fully escape. The image appeared the same year Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation authorized Black enlistment, framing the figure as earnest but domestic, armed with a broom rather than a musket—ambivalent advocacy at the moment Black men were demanding the actual rifle.