Description

This etching is a political cartoon by Adalbert Volck, a Southern sympathizer living in Baltimore, Maryland, during the United States Civil War. This cartoon, one of the Confederate War Etchings series, depicts Northern leaders practicing "Negro Worship" and sacrificing a white man, speared in the side and bleeding, to a shrine atop which a black man sits that is labeled "Chicago Platform." The composition includes dark imagery such as skulls, weapons, and snakes. Henry Ward Beecher uses a sacrificial knife; Charles Sumner holds a torch, and Horace Greeley holds a censer from which snakes slither. John Brown, with a pike, is represented as St. Ossawatomie. General H.W. Halleck, General Winfield Scott, General David Hunter, Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts, and Harriet Beecher Stowe are all present in the crowd. Original etching one of thirty published in Volck's "Confederate War Etchings." Part of the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, courtesy of the Indiana State Museum.