How Did The Civil War Influence Nast

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It is widely agreed that Nast had an influence unparalleled by nearly any other in American history; his cartoons showed the faces of injustice to the public, swaying support to the side of justice in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Nast was born in 1840 to a small family in the west of Germany. His father, a military musician, exposed him to a liberal point of view from an early age. His father was among the most outspoken of German liberals, instilling in Nast from a young age, among other beliefs, a commitment to progress. This surely influenced Nast’s future dedication to justice. Nast showed a talent for drawing his military surroundings from an early age, but it was only after he moved to America that he began his artistic …show more content…

Much of New York City, including its mayor, supported the seceding South, and the notion was even entertained that the city itself should secede so as to choke the Union. Opponents of the dissident South were few and powerless. It was at this time that Nast began to develop his political involvements. A staunch Republican and passionate supporter of the Union, he started to follow President Abraham Lincoln’s political pursuits, painting the events he saw along the way. Originally, the young man painted realistic scenes of the war. As he saw more and more of the war, however, he became inclined to attack his opponents - and what better medium for this young artist to use than …show more content…

He, in league with a select few others with the same depraved interests, puppeted the city’s entire leadership with their well-fed hands, not without the use of bribery and threats. In addition to this distortion of leaders, the Ring, as it was called, had the support of most of the city’s lower-class immigrant population. As the city rapidly became more industrial, it seized the opportunity to use the influx of working immigrants for their own gain. In exchange for jobs and services, Tweed asked only for votes; in this simple manner the group’s control of the city was secured. Defendants claimed that the Ring brought “energy,” “system,” “order” to the city; they were not wholly wrong, as the services it provided benefited the city’s poorest. However, these benefits came at a steep cost: $200 million - nearly $6 billion in today's money - defrauded in taxes. Few outlets were available to protest this gross abuse, as most of the city's people had been inculcated into support of the Ring, and most newspapers had been bought out by it. However, Nast’s paper Harper’s Weekly remained

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