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“Let Us Clasp Hands Over the Bloody Chasm”
No caption
This
cartoon by Thomas Nast essentially characterizes Horace Greeley, the
1872 presidential nominee of the Liberal Republican and Democratic
Parties, as a traitor. The candidate and editor of the New York
Tribune reaches across the remains of 13,000 Union servicemen who
died at the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia,
to embrace the South. Such a harsh judgment
against Greeley, a former abolitionist, sprang from his postwar push for
sectional reconciliation, particularly as manifested in bailing
Jefferson Davis, the former Confederate president, out of jail, and
endorsing amnesty for all former Confederates. Although
not anticipated by Nast, his post-dated cartoon, “Let Us Clasp Hands Over the Bloody Chasm,”
appeared in print (on September 11) shortly before Greeley embarked on a campaign
tour through the Upper South.
Throughout the
summer and fall of 1872, Nast made continuing use of a key slogan in Greeley’s letter accepting the Liberal Republican
nomination on May 20. Emphasizing the amnesty plank in the party platform, Greeley concluded the letter with a
plea for the North and South “to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has
too long divided them...” (Greeley
had used a similar phrase as early as April 1865 while calling for sectional
reconciliation.) In various “clasping hands”
cartoons, Nast incorporated the Ku Klux Klan, John Wilkes Booth over the grave of Lincoln, a
“shoulder-hitter” (i.e., a strongman for an urban political boss), and
former Confederate soldiers, all symbolically underscoring the Democratic
Party's supposed commitment to the Confederate "Lost Cause"
and Greeley's treachery in associating with them.
Although
it operated for only 14 months, the Confederate prison camp (officially
called Camp Sumter) at Andersonville, Georgia, housed 45,000 Union
servicemen, of whom nearly 13,000 died from diseases caused by
exposure, malnutrition, overcrowding, and poor sanitation.
Constructed in the winter of 1863-1864, the nearly 16 acres of prison grounds
were designed to hold about 10,000 prisoners of war. The first
prisoners arrived in February 1864, and by June they numbered 20,000,
forcing the Confederates to extend the grounds by 10 acres.
By the
end of the summer, there were 30,000 POWs in the Andersonville
compound. Exposed in the open pen of the camp to the hot Georgia
sun, rain, and other inclement weather, nearly 100 men a day died during
the summer months. When Atlanta fell to Union forces under General
William Tecumseh Sherman on September 2, most prisoners were transferred
to other camps, leaving only 1500 by November. From December until
the end of the Civil War in April 1865, about 5000 POWs were imprisoned
at Andersonville.
The atrocious conditions at
Andersonville led to shocked outrage in the North, making the prison camp a
symbol of alleged Confederate barbarity. The
prison commandant, Henry Wirz, became the only person executed for his
participation in the Confederate war effort. Andersonville attracted
worldwide attention and helped forge the way for the Geneva Convention
regulating proper treatment of prisoners of war under international law.
Robert C. Kennedy
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