The Copperhead Party—In Favor of a Vigorous Prosecution of Peace!

Three serpents rear up before a figure of Columbia—helmeted, bearing a shield marked UNION and a sword—who recoils in disgust. Each snake sprouts a human head wearing a broad-brimmed hat, their mouths open in harangue. The caption's italicized irony is the whole joke: Peace Democrats (Copperheads) who demanded an armistice with the Confederacy are shown not as doves but as venomous reptiles. The copperhead snake was the Republicans' preferred smear for anti-war Democrats, and Nast literalizes it mercilessly. The caricatured faces carry the exaggerated, hook-nosed features Nast routinely applied to political enemies he coded as disloyal—a visual shorthand his audience read immediately. Columbia's revulsion frames the Copperheads as threats to the Union itself, casting peace negotiation as cowardice dressed up as principle.