Thomas Nast

The family left Landau because his father's politics had become inconvenient to the Bavarian government. Joseph Nast, a trombonist in the Ninth Regiment band, shipped out on a French man-of-war and sent his wife and children ahead. They reached New York in June 1846, Thomas not yet six, born in the regimental barracks at Landau in what was then Bavaria. He went to school in the city from six until 14 and did badly at nearly all of it. Drawing was the exception. He studied a year with Alfred Fredericks and Theodore Kaufmann, then at the National Academy of Design, and at 15 was working as a draftsman for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. His first drawing in Harper's Weekly appeared on March 19, 1859. He was 18.

He bore down on Tammany in 1869, and through 1871 Harper's Weekly carried the ring as vultures on a rock, the bloated Boss, and the Tammany tiger loose in the arena. Tweed is said to have complained that his constituents could not read but they could see the pictures. An emissary offered Nast 100,000 dollars to go and study art in Europe. He haggled the figure up to a reported 500,000 and refused it. Tammany lost the legislature that November. Five years later, after Tweed escaped to Spain, officials at Vigo identified him from a Nast cartoon.

The same pen did both of these things. Nast drew for abolition, against segregation, and against the Ku Klux Klan with a fury nobody else in American illustration matched. His 1874 shield reading Worse than Slavery put a Klansman and a White League man shaking hands over a Black family and a dead child. He also drew Irish immigrants as apes with jutting jaws and whiskey bottles, year after year, and in The American River Ganges of 1871 he drew Catholic bishops as crocodiles crawling up a riverbank with their mitres open on schoolchildren. He thought parochial schooling a threat to the republic and he made the Irish the face of mob violence and machine politics. The stereotyping later reached Black subjects as well. Both records are his.

The influence faded first. Harper's ran him less after 1877, the style came to look heavy beside Joseph Keppler's, his hands hurt. In 1884 he put most of his fortune into Grant and Ward, the brokerage Ferdinand Ward was running as a fraud, and lost it. Nast's Weekly lasted seven months. In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt, who said Nast had been our best teacher, made him consul general at Guayaquil. Yellow fever came that autumn and Nast stayed, helping foreign missions and firms get out. He caught it and died on December 7, aged 62. The Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, the Tammany tiger and the Santa Claus he drew across two decades of Harper's Christmas issues all outlived him.

Thomas Nast's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Santa Claus in Camp artwork
  Harper's Weekly Christmas number — the first of the modern Santa Claus 1863
• Compromise with the South artwork
  Reprinted by Lincoln's managers as a campaign poster 1864
• A Group of Vultures Waiting for the Storm to Blow Over artwork
  The Tweed Ring perched on the carcass of New York 1871
• The American River Ganges artwork
  Catholic bishops drawn as crocodiles coming ashore for schoolchildren 1871
• Third Term Panic artwork
  The cartoon that gave the Republican Party its elephant 1874
• Peace in Union artwork
  A nine by 12 foot oil of Appomattox, given to the citizens of Galena, Illinois 1895

• June 1846 aged 5 Arrives in New York with his mother and sister His father followed in 1850, at the end of his enlistment.
• 1856 aged ~16 Hired at 15 as a draftsman for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
• March 19, 1859 aged 18 First drawing in Harper's Weekly, illustrating a report on police corruption He was 18.
• 1862 aged ~22 Joins the staff of Harper's Weekly Lincoln called him our best recruiting sergeant.
• August 24, 1864 aged 23 Compromise with the South runs as the Democrats gather in Chicago Lincoln's campaign printed more than a million copies of it.
• November 7, 1871 aged 31 Tammany Hall loses both houses of the New York legislature Nast's Tammany tiger had run in Harper's days before the vote.
• November 7, 1874 aged 34 Draws the Republican elephant in Third Term Panic
• 1884 aged ~44 Loses most of his fortune in the collapse of Grant and Ward He went back on the lecture circuit for money.
• December 7, 1902 aged 62 Dies of yellow fever at Guayaquil, five months into the consulship He stayed through the outbreak helping missions and businesses get out.

• Boss Tweed 1823–1878
  Boss of Tammany Hall, whose ring looted New York City while it fed and naturalized the city's immigrants. opposed
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. campaigned for
• Ferdinand Ward 1851–1925
  Financier whose Ponzi scheme destroyed the firm bearing Ulysses S. Grant's name and bankrupted him. ruined by
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. drew for
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. appointed by
• Horace Greeley 1811–1872
  Founding editor of the New-York Tribune whose editorials shaped antebellum and Reconstruction-era debate. attacked