ment. Women forgot everything except the fact that husband and brother had been shot down-perhaps with horrible mutilation to die in lingering agony. Guerrilla atrocities were continually reported and magnified in the North. In sections of the South a Northern soldier was likely to be regarded as a wild beast. Sixty-three was a poor time to investigate. Nast simply used the material that came to his hand, and each resulting picture brought volunteers to the Northern cause. They also brought scores of threatening letters to the Harper office from the infuriated South, and Nast would have been burned at the stake had he been captured during the occasional trips he made to the front. We cannot consider these pictures fairly at this time. Fierce they were, and brutal as were the times and scenes they depicted, appealing in their sentiment to those elemental impulses which always leap uppermost in the hour of impending evil, especially during the ever-present dangers of civil war. Even the more domestic drawings of this period were done in a spirit of homely melodrama little in vogue to-day. They were

not works of art-Nast did not so consider them. War is not a time of culture and discrimination, but of blows, and those

dealt by Thomas

Nast were Swift

and savage and aimed to kill.

During the spring of sixtythree, on a trip to

Fort Moultrie,

Nast first met
General Butler,

and made a sketch
from life of the
face he was to
caricature so fre-
quently in the
days to come. He
also made for his
paper the "Ar-
rival of a Federal
Column," from
which, somewhat
later, he painted
his large picture.

66

(Nast afterwards painted his "Saving the Flag" from this picture) "'61 to '65." During these trips to the front he met and became the friend of General Sheridan, who invited the artist to establish headquarters in his camp.

In July of sixty-three, Lee was in Pennsylvania, and Nast was anxious to get additional sketches of armies in action. Through a rather humorous complication with one of Mrs. Nast's English relatives, under arrest at Harrisburg for wearing as a sash the

Confederate flag, Nast himself was held for a few days, during which time the battle of Gettysburg was fought. Meantime, he enjoyed the freedom of the camp, and upon being discharged hurried to the scene of action, meeting at every stage of the journey wounded men, painfully making their way northward. At Carlisle he was among those who were shelled by the Confederate forces, and secured some sketches. The portrayal of this scene appeared in Harper's for July 25th. The front page of the same issue bore a fine portrait of MajorGeneral U. S. Grant, now styled the "Hero of Vicksburg," and Unconditional Surrender" Grant, and recognized as the commander whom the paper had endeavored to point out the year before. Nast greatly admired Grant's picture, and perhaps foresaw in it the nation's hero, but little he guessed how closely they were to be allied in the days to come, or what assistance his pencil was to render that serene and stalwart man.

CHAPTER XIII

IN THE DRAFT RIOTS

Bluebeard of New Orleans (Specimen carte de visite sold by E.

and H. T. Anthony)

Returning to New York, Nast found himself in the midst of the Draft Riots-the streets of the city a bedlam of insurrection. All the "Copperhead" roughs of the metropolis were united-ostensibly to oppose the Draft Act, which had made all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five subject to active servicebut mainly for the purpose of arson and plunder, and for the destruction of inoffensive negroes and their friends.

"Down with the negroes!" "Down with the Abolitionists!" "Hurrah for Jeff Davis!" were cries heard everywhere. Terrified citizens locked and barred their doors. Those who had negro servants concealed them, often to have them dragged forth and murdered before their eyes.

Nast, mingling with the mob, saw the assault on the Tribune office, also the burning of the colored orphan asylum, where many of the fleeing inmates were overtaken and beaten-some of them slaughtered and left in the streets. At one place he saw

a dead Union soldier-the children of the rioters dancing about him and poking at him with sticks. It would have been madness to attempt any interference with the inflamed and drunken

mobs, which were not unlike those of the French Revolution. He made sketches as best he could and hurried home to look after the safety of his family.

Horatio Seymour, Democratic Governor of New York, came down from his home in the quiet lake country to quell the mob by calling the rioters his "friends," and by assuring them that he would have the draft suspended and stopped." This sentiment, though cheered, was not of a nature to check the reign of lawless carnage. The police, aided by the military, at length suppressed the insurrection, but not before a thousand persons had been killed or wounded and more than two million dollars' worth of property destroyed. Houses had been burned and buildings sacked. New York showed in this incident the temper of a foreign element which has not improved with time,