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Complete HarpWeek Explanation:
This cartoon is an impassioned attack on Abraham Lincoln and the human toll of the Union war effort.
Columbia, wearing a liberty cap and a shirt made of an American flag, demands, "Mr. Lincoln, give me back my 500,000 sons!!!" At the right, Lincoln, unfazed, sits at a writing desk, his leg thrown over the chair back. A proclamation calling for "500 Thous. More Troops," signed by him, lies at his feet. He eplies, "Well the fact is—by the way that reminds me of a Story!!!" The artist refers to the false report published in the New York World that Lincoln had irreverently joked on the battlefield of Antietam.
Source: American Political Prints, 1766 - 1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Library of Congress, 1991, by Bernard F. Reilly, Jr. |
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