Dead Presidents
By Anthony Bergen
E-Mail: bergen.anthony@gmail.com
Like I said earlier, I’m doing some organizing of the files on my computer and finding some great little photos that I may or may not have previously posted. Despite what I do, I’ve never really been drawn to political cartoons — even those from what might be the golden age of American political cartoons stretching from the time of Jackson to Lincoln when they were particularly creative and often quite brutal.
However, I’d love a large print of this one. I forget which newspaper it ran in, but I believe it was published the morning after LBJ died in January 1973. This print is located in the stairwell leading to the basement restrooms at the LBJ Library in Austin and I never walked past it without wondering if I could pull it off the wall and make it out the door before security tackled me.
Anonymous Asks:
deadpresidents Said:
The Emancipation Proclamation was largely symbolic. It freed the slaves in most of the areas under rebellion, not throughout the entire country, and almost all of the places covered under the order were controlled by the Confederacy at the time of its signing.
What it really did is signify that the Civil War was being fought for more than the suppression of a rebellion or the preservation of the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation made it clear that the abolition of slavery was a key objective in the war. With the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln basically married himself to emancipation as a condition of victory.
It doesn’t matter that the actual order was virtually toothless. The symbolism behind the Emancipation Proclamation helped lift the spirits of an oppressed people, helped establish a lofty cause for a nation exhausted by combat, and ensured that foreign countries would resist supporting or giving international recognition to the Southern Confederacy because of the North’s intention to abolish slavery.
