T h o m a s N a s t . c o m

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Thomas Nast and New Orleans

Thomas Nast was born in Landau in the Rhineland Palatinate of what is now Germany in 1840. Under Napoleon I, this area was French, but it fell under the control of Bavaria in 1816. To some extent, therefore, Nast had a Franco-Prussian heritage.

Nast came to America in 1846, and drew his first cartoon for Harper’s Weekly in 1859. He joined the staff of that illustrated newspaper in 1862, and published more than 2200 cartoons in it over the next 25 years.

A dozen of Nast’s Harper’s Weekly cartoons center on New Orleans or Louisiana; most of them are unfavorable to the city as they present Union viewpoints during the Civil War and Radical Republican viewpoints during Reconstruction.

Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum
Harper's Weekly, March 30, 1867

Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum, which shows President Andrew Johnson as Emperor Nero watching blacks being slaughtered by the New Orleans police under Mayor John Monroe on July 31, 1866, is considered one of Nast’s finest cartoons for both its conception and execution.

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