Looking Up Lincoln's Inaugural Dress

Okay, friends: I've spent nearly a month searching for that reported Vanity Fair cartoon of  President-elect Abraham Lincoln borrowing wife Mary Todd's dress as a disguise. And I am hereby officially throwing in the towel.

Our story so far: during Lincoln's pre-inauguration train trip from Springfield, Illinois to Washington, D.C., his security detail headed by Allan Pinkerton reported learning of an assassination plot planned for his stop in Baltimore. 

This is supposed to be a Graphical History Tour, so let's let the cartoonists tell the story:

The Flight of Abraham," cartoonist unknown, in Harper's Weekly, March 9, 1861

It is helpful to understand that the United States didn't have so much a railroad system as it had a lot of disparate railroads that didn't necessarily connect to each other, or even use the same width rails. To get across the country, Lincoln had to get off one train at its station, and get a ride to a station elsewhere in town to get on the next train. One should also keep in mind that the Secret Service didn't yet exist; Pinkerton's agents, then as now, were a private firm.

But don’t ask me to explain that last panel. I got nothing about attacks of Ager or shadows or Lincoln turning into an Edward Sorel sketch.

"The New President of the United States: From a Fugitive Sketch" in Vanity Fair, March 9, 1861

The above cartoon probably represents Lincoln's actual disguise more closely than any other that I was able to find. 

Instead of the long military cloak, however, cartoonists liked to seize upon the tam-o-shanter to draw Lincoln in full Scottish garb.

"The MacLincoln Harrisburg Highland Fling," cartoonist unknown, in Vanity Fair, March 9, 1861 

The episode was first reported in the New York Times — a paper aligned with the Republican cause — and was a public relations disaster for the incoming president.

"What would the nation think of its President stealing into its capital like a thief in the night?" Lincoln had rightly asked as the operation began. The answer, as the covert trip was illuminated in the press, was, "He is a coward."

One newspaper, Baltimore's Sun, declared: "We do not believe the Presidency can ever be more degraded by any of his successors than it has by him, even before his inauguration." Editorial writers and cartoonists of the time had a field day with the rumors that Lincoln had worn a Scotch cap and long cloak as a disguise. The harangues and caricatures stung Lincoln, and he resolved to never again shy away from threats to his life, no matter how real or imminent they may be.

"Prof. Lincoln in His Great Feat of Balancing" by Henry L. Stephens in Vanity Fair, March 23, 1861 

Could this cartoon of Lincoln wearing a kilt have been mistaken by whomever first reported that elusive Lincoln-in-a-Dress cartoon? I cannot be certain. 

The on-line archives of Vanity Fair are likely sourced from bound volumes of the magazine that were sold to libraries and collectors at the time. The Vanity Fair volumes do not include the front cover of any issue, so I can't rule out the possibility that the Lincoln-in-a-Dress cartoon appeared there.

Or on some missing page. That four-panel cartoon at the top of this post originally appeared on page 160 of a volume of Harper's Weekly issues; pages 159 and 160 happen to be missing from the archive at the University of Michigan Library's website.

"Passage Through Baltimore" by Adalbert Volck in Confederate War Sketches, Baltimore MD, 1863

Mockery of President Lincoln over this escapade disappeared from pro-Union publications in the North once Civil War hostilities broke out in April, 1861, but was kept alive by such cartoonists as rebel sympathizer Adalbert Volck. Volck was a German immigrant and dentist in Baltimore who published a series of cartoon pamphlets for distribution in the Confederate states. Three volumes are known to have existed, but only one survived the war.

"Proposed Meeting of Ex-Presidents" by Henry L. Stephens in Vanity Fair, May 11, 1861

Well, I wanted to find you a cartoon of a 19th-Century president in a dress, and here's a Vanity Fair cartoon by H.L. Stephens of every living ex-president at the time. As far as I can tell, misgendering them added nothing to the point Stephens was trying to make, blaming them for decisions leading up to the Civil War.

Including the consistently anti-slavery Martin Van Buren might have been a little unfair. In 1848, the presidential nominees of the Democratic and Whig parties both favored extending slavery into some western territories seeking statehood. Anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats met in Buffalo, New York, joining the abolitionist Liberty Party to form the Free Soil Party, and Van Buren accepted their nomination as the Free Soil candidate for president.

Van Buren didn't get much support from Whig party exiles; the 10% of the vote he received in November came at the expense of Democratic candidate Lewis Cass and helped throw the election to slaveholder Zachary Taylor. Although many from the Free Soil Party later helped found the Republican Party, Van Buren rejoined the Democrats, supporting Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Stephen Douglas in 1852, 1856, and 1860.

But to find a cartoon of Abraham Lincoln in a dress, I had to close the book on Vanity Fair and turn instead to the work of 20-year-old Thomas Nast in New York Illustrated News. It wasn't about Lincoln's Baltimore disguise per se, but it was published the same day as the first three cartoons in today's blog post.

With apologies for not being able to get that eagle into focus, here it is:

"President Lincoln's Inaugural" by Thomas Nast in New York Illustrated News, March 9, 1861

Could this have been the elusive cartoon I was looking for all along?

Honest Abe's Sneak Peek

"Prof. Lincoln in His Great Feat of Balancing" by Bobbett-Hooper SC in Vanity Fair, New York, March 23, 1861

I've found a couple sources on line for the 1860's iteration of Vanity Fair, but although the magazine's cartoonists got a fair amount of mileage out of depicting Abraham Lincoln in a tam-o-shanter and kilt, I have not yet come across that reported cartoon of him borrowing Mary Todd Lincoln's dress as a disguise.

I'll keep you apprised of my search; in the meantime, and speaking of disguises, here's a snippet from this week's upcoming cartoon:

The Flight of Abraham

Detail from "The Flight of Abraham" by unknown cartoonist, in Harper's Weekly, March 9, 1861

You have, no doubt, heard about Donald Taco Trump being sneaked off Air Force One via a food service truck at the Ankara, Türkiye airport to a waiting Air Force C-32A, because of an allegedly credible threat that Iran or its proxies were planning to shoot down the President's plane.

Members of the press and the White House staff on board were unaware of what was going on as the supposedly targeted plane they were on took off; happily, it landed without incident. That was two months ago, but was just reported this week by the Washington Post and New York Times.

Similar episodes have taken place involving Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Clay Jones summarizes them in his Substack, so I won't go into detail here, save to note that the head of the White House press corps was in the loop during the Clinton incident, and the others all entailed the media playing along with the fiction that the President was at Camp David, or his ranch, or the White House.

Those presidents may have avoided the mockery that editorial cartoonists and Jimmy Fallon have heaped upon the present one, but it has not always been that way.

"Passage Through Baltimore" by Adalbert Volck in Confederate War Sketches, Baltimore MD, 1863

On February 11, 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln was about to leave for Washington D.C. by train, when railway security agent Allan Pinkerton informed him that there was a plot by southern separatists to assassinate him along the route. On Pinkerton's advice, Lincoln, wearing a Scotch cap and overcoat as a makeshift disguise, changed trains at Baltimore, avoiding a crowd that had gathered to greet him. He arrived in Washington before dawn, without any reception or fanfare.

The New York Times reported the episode on February 23, leading to merciless mocking of Lincoln as a coward in journals both Democratic and Republican. While it was a public relations disaster for the incoming president, Pinkerton used it to advertise how effective his security firm was in foiling the assassination plot.

Two years later, a German-American Confederate sympathizer in Baltimore, Adalbert Volck, published the above cartoon mocking Lincoln over the incident. His cartoon appeared in a book of his Confederate propaganda, distributed in Dixie but not in Baltimore. The book was one of a series, only one of which survived the Civil War.

I've seen reports of another cartoon, in Vanity Fair, lampooning the incident by depicting Lincoln borrowing his wife's dress as a disguise. If anyone knows of a copy of that cartoon in print or on line, I'd love to know where to find it.

Tales of Future Past Pluperfect

Is it time for my weekly Graphical History Tour again already? Oh, shoot! Looking back at my February cartoons from decades ago, I find that I don't have much to say today about many of them.

But since I did set this one up last month, here's one starring then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) from 1995, after he had made a slip of the tongue calling Congressman Barney Frank an antigay slur during a radio interview:

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Feb. 6, 1995

How an inadvertent slip of the pen made it into my homage to George Cruikshank I have no idea. I'm sure it was purely unintentional.

for Q Syndicate, February, 2015

For decades now, Republicans have labored tirelessly to deprive the poor of sustenance and children of free school lunches. To atone for such unChristian attitudes, they demand that public schools post the Ten Commandments in every classroom so that children know which Lord Thy God the government has decreed for them.

They like the Ten Commandments rather than those woke Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount.  Especially not the version from the Gospel According to Luke read in "Lutheran" (and Episcopal and Catholic) churches last Sunday, which include some verses not in Matthew's account:

24 “But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have already received your comfort.
25 Woe to you who are well fed now,
    for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
    for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
    for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets."

Hey, I don't mean to cut this post short, but, well, it is a holiday weekend, after all.

for Q Syndicate, Jan./Feb., 2005

Happy Presidents' Day!

It's Always Something

Every once in a while when I'm cyberleafing through old newspapers in search of a topic for these Saturday posts, I run across a cartoon that makes me stop and wonder what could possibly have been in the cartoonist's mind.

"Jimmy Earl Carter's Camp David Quiz Show" by Pat Oliphant in Denver (D.C.) Star, April 1, 1978 

Well, this is not a post about that. (It's April Fools' Day. What did you expect?)

This is, instead, a book report on the latest addition to my library.

I found this 2020 book in the U.S. History section of my local Barnes & Noble. Liberally illustrated with Bill Mauldin's original artwork, pencil edits and all, from the Pritzger Military Museum and Library, the first half of the book consists of separate essays about Mauldin's life and work.

There is some overlap in subject matter in these essays, although each approaches the subject from a different angle.

Taken together, the essays take you from Mauldin's hard-scrabble youth in a classically dysfunctional family and his early attempts to sell his cartoons, through parlaying his fame and fortune drawing for Stars and Stripes into a storied career in St. Louis and Chicago. 

Many of the cartoons in this book are taken from the original drawings rather than the published product, so you get to see the edits and compositors' markings along the way. Some captions got tweaked here and there; at least one was changed completely from the original concept.

Awarded the Pulitzer at the age of 23 for his cartoons of infantry men in World War II (the youngest Pulitzer winner ever), Mauldin risked peaking early and fizzling out. Retooling his Willie and Joe grunts for a postwar gag panel lacked the qualities that made the characters so special. But he rediscovered his passion in politics, returning to cartooning after an unsuccessful run for Congress.

His cartoons argued forcibly for the rights of Japanese-Americans, Black Americans, and women (also gay rights, although that is missing from this book), earning him his second Pulitzer in 1958. The Chicago Sun-Times gave the cartoon he drew immediately after Kennedy's assassination the entire back page of the Extra edition, and many outlets sold that paper with the back page up instead of the front page.

His later years are more tragic; an essay by Charles Schulz's widow, Jean, describes how his fellow cartoonists stepped forward when, as featured speaker at the 2003 National Cartoonist Society convention, he was too drunk to take the podium. Hers is a sympathetic account; colleagues I've spoken to who were there recall the episode with some sadness.

(Many of us at last year's convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists were brought to tears watching the 2021 documentary about Bill Mauldin's life and work, If It's Big, Hit It. Alcoholism and Alzheimer's Disease in his last years should have been awful enough, but having a jeep fall on his drawing hand and his later suffering third degree burns from his habit of relaxing in a hot bath left him withdrawn and uncommunicative. The film doesn't end with that, so neither will I.)

One chapter that stands out from the typical book of any given cartoonist's work is Christina Knopf's "Bill Mauldin's Legacy in Military Cartooning," which profiles soldier/sailor cartoonists from the Vietnam War to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some of the cartoonists in this chapter were inspired by Mauldin; one admitted never having heard of him. The works illustrating the chapter include one direct reference to one of Mauldin's Willie and Joe cartoons.

Mauldin's classic cartoon shows a cavalry sergeant about to shoot his own jeep to put it out of its misery because it has a flat tire. The tribute cartoon by Steve Opet depicts a soldier about to do the same to a computer because it's showing an "access denied" screen.

by Mill Bauldin in St. Louis Sun-Times, Sept., 2002

The same cartoon inspired one of mine occasioned by the financial controversies that terminated Palotta Works "AIDS Ride" fund raising bicycle marathon. I kind of screwed up, however, by drawing Mr. Palotta on the left side of the cartoon and his bike on the right — and the western garb took the whole idea back to the practice Mauldin was riffing on of shooting a wounded horse.

The other two times that I've referenced Mauldin's cartoons, I made more of an effort to mimic the source material.

by Dan Liliblum in Chicago Highways Stripes, November, 2016

So when the 2016 election inexplicably went to Donald Berzelius Trump, my cartoon based on the one Mauldin drew after JFK's assassination was in grayscale except for the barf bag and my signature, two items that didn't belong in the original. My medium was india ink rather than charcoal and grease pencil, but I deliberately tried to draw every line just the way Mauldin had.

The only other major difference was that his cartoon was portrait oriented whereas mine had to be landscape oriented.

by Ludmilla Nib in Arizona Post-Dispatch, March, 2021 

I decided to go ahead and add color to this 2021 cartoon. The Mauldin cartoon I based this one on is not in Drawing Fire; the original had the crow perched atop the flagpole and the eagle demanding his "seat back."

Using landscape orientation afforded me plenty of room to add the elephant to the scene. It did, however, force me to draw the eagle smaller than I would have liked.

Well, it wouldn't be fair of me to tease you with my own cartoons and not include any of Mauldin's, so I want to leave you with this one from toward the end of his career. He drew it at the outset of Bush the Elder's Iraq War, and although the book doesn't say so one way or the other, I think this is how Mauldin imagined Willie and Joe would look 45 years after returning stateside.

"Inside It Says the Pentagon Doesn't Want a Lot of Fuss" by Bill Mauldin in Chicago Sun-Times, January, 1991

Keep the Dents in Presidents' Day

Hey, kids! Let's get our Presidents' Day holiday weekend off to a roaring start with some 100-year-old cartoons celebrating the Father Of Our Country!

"Washington Still Lives" by Robert L. Ripley in New York Globe, Feb. 22, 1922

If Washington still lives, someone had better tell Uncle Sam. Because I don't think he's still decorating for Christmas.

And yes, that cartoonist is the Ripley of "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" fame. "Believe It Or Not" started out as an occasional diversion from Ripley's sports cartoons for the New York Globe; this tribute to George Washington is another.

"February 22, 1922" by Clifford Berryman for Evening Star, Washington DC, February 22, 1922

Hanging a sketch of our first president where it blocks Uncle Sam's view of the seas ahead doesn't seem to me to be the brightest idea in the world; but as long as Captain Sam can see the horizon, I guess that's where anything that might be in the way is likely to turn up. 

It might be a nuisance when trying to navigate by the stars, however.

"If His Dad Could Only See Him Now" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., February 22, 1922

Okay, let's get serious. (As George Washington once said, "I cannot tell a joke.") Dorman Smith was pretty pleased with how the Republicans were running things in Washington D.C., so he celebrated the fact that, unlike Europe, the U.S. hadn't been ravaged by war in 57 years. 

Nelson Harding, on the other hand, used Washington's birthday to comment on domestic legislation to grant a bonus to U.S. World War I veterans. The bonus itself was hugely popular, but the issue of how to pay for it had the bill hung up in Congress, and it failed to pass.

"Washington (D.C.)" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 22, 1922

When Congress made Washington's Birthday a national holiday in 1971, they managed to schedule it on a Monday that is never on his actual birthday, either Julian or Gregorian. Some people urged that the holiday be named Presidents' Day in order to include Abraham Lincoln, a name change that quickly become commonly accepted, in spite of not being the official name Congress gave to the third Monday in February. 

So here are some cartoons commemorating Abraham Lincoln on his 113th birthday, starting with some meticulous trompe l'oeil by the great Winsor McCay:

"Lest We Forget" by Winsor McCay for Star Publising, February 12, 1922

I'll follow that with a Lincoln cartoon from Leo Bushnell, like Nelson Harding, using a dead president's birthday to comment on paying bonuses to Great War veterans. 

"His Words Are as Apt Now As in '65" by Leo Bushnell for Central Press Assn., Feb. 12, 1922

The image of young Abe Lincoln studying in a log cabin by candle light has always been attractive for story-tellers, so it is hardly surprising that cartoonists would draw youngsters studying Mr. Lincoln in turn:

"Lincoln" by Magnus Kettner for Western Newspaper Union, February 22, 1922

Besides, they didn't have Doris Kearns Goodwin to draw studying Old Abe back then. She, by the way, has a 3-episode series about Lincoln coming up on the History Channel next week.

"Handicapped" by Gaar Williams in Chicago Tribune, February 22, 1922

And finally, a cartoon that is a little off topic today, except for that pissed-off portrait on the wall:

"The Interloper" by William C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. Feb. 24, 1922

I don't suppose Mr. Morris would have cared for this year's Superbowl halftime show, either. Or, for that matter, any of the other shows since Al Hirt, Doc Severensen, and Lionel Hampton got Tulane Stadium groovin' in 1970.

Well, that's all the festivity I can offer you this early on a Saturday morning. But if you're stretching your own Presidents' Day celebration all the way from here to Tues. 2/22/22, enjoy your 2²-day holiday weekend!

February Festivities

So you have a cartoon due for February 2 and you've got no ideas and there's nothing in the news to inspire you and your bristol board is as white and pristine as the newfallen snow. So you look at the calendar and see, Oh, Goody! February 2 is Presentation of Our Lord! I'm saved!

No, of course it's Ground Hog Day, that wonderful festival when we all suddenly care what the weather is in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania for some reason (and how to spell it). I live in Wisconsin, where we're in for six more weeks of winter at the very least whether some overgrown rat sees its shadow or has the sense to stay in its burrow.

What's the ground hog got to do with it, anyway? Those Punxsutawney bastards don't have to drag the critter out of its box to figure out whether it's sunny or overcast.

But it's a holiday, even if it's rather one-dimensional, and you can always drag some inspiration for a hackneyed cartoon from it. Sadly, unlike Christmas, there's only one movie about Notorious GHD, and we've all drawn some version of this cartoon.

So perhaps you shouldn't discount Presentation of Our Lord Day so quickly. In Mexico, it's Candelaria, and time to take the yuletide decorations down. They celebrate forty days of Christmas, which is why having a live evergreen in the house and singing that partridge in a pear tree song have never caught on there.

Fortunately, February is chock full of holidays, unlike, say, August. With Valentines Day on the fourteenth, you have the quadrennial cartoons of presidential aspirants wooing the heart of the Republican elephant or Democratic donkey.

Or, if your governor's name is Tommy Thompson, you can pursue another Valentines Day theme.

Did you know that the Jewish equivalent of Valentines Day is Tu B'Av in August? Save that factoid for those late summer news doldrums!

Returning to February: Presidents' Day will come just in time so that the renewal of Trump's government shut-down can start on a day when the government was going to shut down anyway.

Just so you readers from around the world know, we don't celebrate all the presidents on Presidents' Day. Most Americans wouldn't know James Polk from Calvin Coolidge, and we'd be at each others' throats if someone tried to make the day about any president since JFK.

No, the day is all about Honest Abe Lincoln and Even More Honest George Washington, either of whom supplies our cartoonists with a smörgåsbord of clichés.

Finally, I'm not forgetting the most important February holiday of all: Superbowl Big Game Sunday. (Until I cough up the dough to be named Official Cartoonist of the NFL, I gotta be careful about infringement of that trademark.)

The story behind this cartoon is that when I was drawing for The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, editors Gary Miller, Mark Kass, or Steve Jagler would email me the topic (and usually the entire copy) of the coming issue's editorial so that I could draw a cartoon to accompany it. But this particular week, and they emailed me that the editorial board hadn't decided what the editorial should say; for a change, they were giving me carte blanche to draw about whatever I wanted (but taking into consideration that the Beej readership was very different from my audience at the UW-Milwaukee Post).

With the Green Bay Packers heading for The Big Game, however, there was precious little else being covered by Wisconsin news media. Packers cheerleading was the only memorable part of Tommy Thompson's State of the State message, fercryinoutloud.

I don't remember the editorial having been about managed stock funds, either.

Well, that's all for this edition of Sciuridaeback Saturday. It's time to take down the Christmas tree. We can't leave it up until Mardi Gras like we did last year.

Mardi Gras isn't until March.

The Trial of the Century

It's Sesquicentenniback Saturday in this corner of the blogosphere; last week's post called to my attention that this spring marks the 150th anniversary of the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.

Last week's post offers a brief summary of what happened in 1868, so I'll try not to repeat myself too much while still going into excruciating detail. Here goes.

Andrew Johnson, in Harper's Weekly, May 13, 1865

Andrew Johnson was a Tennessee Democrat opposed to southern secession. President Lincoln appointed the Senator as military governor of Tennessee in 1862, and he and Secretary of State William Seward were impressed enough with Johnson's administration there to recommend him over incumbent Vice President Hannibal Hamlin as Lincoln's running mate in 1864. Lincoln and Johnson ran under the banner of the National Union Party, for which Johnson campaigned personally (not standard practice in those days) in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana.

His first impression on a national audience, however, did not go well. Badly hung over from Inauguration Eve partying — for which he self-medicated with more hair of the dog — he delivered a rambling, incoherent inauguration speech, and was hastily sworn in once he began to run out of steam. He kind of went into hiding after that, but his political enemies would never let him forget about it.

Just over a month later, he was suddenly elevated to the presidency by Lincoln's assassination. (Johnson was a target of the plot, too, but the man assigned to kill him got drunk instead.)

Three panels from "Bal Opera" by Thomas Nast, in Harper's Weekly, April 14, 1866

As president, Johnson stubbornly pursued a policy of reinstating Confederate states into the union, opposing voting rights for freed slaves, and pardoning Confederate leaders. This put him at odds with Radical Republicans, who favored voting, property and basic civil rights for freed slaves, and the punishment of Confederate leaders. Moderate Republicans were less eager to extend voting rights to freedmen; it's worth noting that several northern states still denied Black men the vote, and post-war moves to enfranchise Blacks were voted down in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Connecticut.

Panel from "Andy's Trip" by Thomas Nast, in Harper's Weekly, October 27, 1866

On Washington's birthday, 1866, Johnson delivered another disastrous speech in which he managed to refer to himself over 200 times over the course of the hour. (Remind you of any other presidential ego?) Worse, he accused Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, Senator Charles Sumner and abolitionist Wendell Phillips of plotting to assassinate him and destroy the Union.

Panel from "Andy's Trip" by Thomas Nast, in Harper's Weekly, October 27, 1866

Johnson's already strained relationship with Radical Republicans was thus permanently ruptured; his veto (overridden) of the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, on the grounds that it discriminated against white men, convinced Moderate Republicans that they couldn't work with him, either. Republicans sent the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution to the states for ratification that year, and passed a Tenure of Office Act the next to shield Republicans in Johnson's cabinet from being fired. The amendment was ratified once Nebraska was added to the union (again, vetoed and overridden); the Tenure of Office Act was passed — you guessed it — over presidential veto.

"Samson Agonistes at Washington," unsigned, in Harper's Weekly, August 24, 1867

Testing provisions of the Act in August, 1867, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton during a congressional recess and replaced him with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant ad interim. Congress reinstated Stanton in January, 1868, and Grant stepped aside.

"The Hurt Can Not Be Much" by Alfred R. Waud in Harper's Weekly, February 1, 1868.

Johnson fired Stanton a second time, choosing as his replacement this time General Lorenzo Thomas (who resembles the guy lurking around the corner in this next cartoon, rather than the birdman in the foreground, so I'm not quite sure how to interpret it).

"General Thomas Begs to Be Excused," unsigned, in Harper's Weekly, March 14, 1868

During the war, Stanton had stripped Thomas, then working in the War Office, of the title of Adjutant-General on the grounds of inadequacy, and sent him to organize Black troops in the South. Thomas was brevetted to Major General after the war, but nursed a grudge against Stanton.

"Advice Not Easily Followed," unsigned, in Harper's Weekly, April 4, 1868

Accompanied by a Gen. William H. Emery, Thomas personally delivered Johnson’s dismissal notice to the War Secretary. But Stanton not only refused to vacate the office; he had Thomas arrested. Realizing, however, that the arrest would allow the courts to review the Tenure of Office Act and possibly find it unconstitutional, he let the charges drop. Thomas promptly sued Stanton for false imprisonment.

"A Brace of Dead Ducks," unsigned, in Harper's Weekly, March 14, 1868

Based on the mutton chops, "Forney" in the above cartoon appears to be John W. Forney, Secretary of the U.S. Senate from 1861 to June of 1868. Mr. Forney had pulled his early support of President Johnson and become a vocal advocate of impeachment by the time this cartoon was published. Johnson, who shared our current president's proclivity for attacking his critics, uncharacteristically held his fire against Forney, explaining, "I do not waste my ammunition on dead ducks."

"This Little Boy Would Persist...," unsigned, in Harper's Weekly, March 21, 1868

I would presume that "Vol. 14" of the Constitution refers to the Fourteenth Amendment, which would be adopted in July after this cartoon appeared.

"The Paroquet of the Wh—e H—e," unsigned, in Harper's Weekly, March 21, 1868

Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (he of Johnson's imagined assassination plot) was the House's floor manager for prosecution of the impeachment, but due to his age and deteriorating health, the lion's share of the duties fell to Rep. Benjamin Butler (R-MA). Butler, a Civil War general, was elected on an anti-Johnson platform in 1866 and prosecuted the case with enough histrionics for both men put together. "Luff" in the below cartoon of the two congressmen refers to unwanted flapping of the sails.

"Coming Into Port," in Harper's Weekly, May 2, 1868

On May 16, 1868, 35 Senators voted to convict Johnson on three of the articles of impeachment. They needed 36. As the remaining eight articles were decided, the 35-19 margin held through the final votes on May 26; enough Republicans broke with their party to prevent Johnson's removal from office.

"Effect of the Vote on the Eleventh Article of Impeachment," unsigned, in Harper's Weekly, May 30, 1868

One such Senator, James Grimes (R-IA) explained, “I cannot agree to destroy the harmonious working of the Constitution for the sake of getting rid of an Unacceptable President.” And thus the nation was spared the ten-month presidency of Senate President Pro Tem Benjamin Wade.

Johnson ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for President that year, but what support he had at the party's nominating convention evaporated after the first ballot. As for the Tenure of Office Act, Congress scaled its provisions back as soon as Johnson was out of office. The Supreme Court eventually found it unconstitutional in 1926 in Myers v. United States, in a ruling delivered by Chief Justice — and former President — William Howard Taft.