20 Essential Works by Thomas Nast – Ranked
Twenty works trace the career of Thomas Nast, from the Civil War and Reconstruction to Boss Tweed, Tammany Hall, political symbols and Santa Claus.
Thomas Nast helped shape American political cartooning during the second half of the nineteenth century. His drawings followed the Civil War, Reconstruction, elections and political corruption, while his long campaign against Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall became one of the best-known episodes in the history of editorial cartooning. These twenty works move through different parts of that career.
The “BRAINS” That Achieved the Tammany Victory at the Rochester Democratic Convention
Thomas Nast was born in Landau, then part of Bavaria, in 1840. His family later settled in New York, the city that would become the setting for much of his political work.
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The Library of Congress identifies Boss Tweed by his money-bag face and diamond stickpin.
Library of Congress ↗Merry Old Santa Claus
Politics was only part of Nast’s output. His Christmas drawings helped establish a familiar American image of Santa Claus, a subject he returned to repeatedly during his career.
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Pardon. Franchise Columbia — “Shall I Trust These Men, and Not This Man?”
The Civil War and its aftermath established Nast’s national reputation. Black military service and the political rights of formerly enslaved Americans became recurring subjects in his Reconstruction-era work.
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Tweed-le-dee and Tilden-dum
Nast did not leave Boss Tweed behind once the original Tweed Ring collapsed. Tweed remained useful to him as a visual shorthand for corruption in New York politics.
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“Stop Thief!”
By 1871, Nast’s attack on the Tweed Ring had become a sustained campaign rather than an occasional subject. He returned to the same politicians, symbols and accusations from week to week.
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“That’s What’s the Matter”
Vote counting itself became part of Nast’s case against Tweed. His Tammany cartoons repeatedly returned to the idea that control of an election could matter as much as the votes cast.
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Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan!
Nast’s politics were not neatly progressive by modern standards. His treatment of Victoria Woodhull and other women involved in political reform could be openly hostile, even while he supported other reforms of his era.
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The Ignorant Vote — Honors Are Easy
Nast’s record on race and ethnicity contains real contradictions. He defended Black suffrage during Reconstruction, yet he also used demeaning stereotypes of Irish Americans and other groups.
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(?) Slavery Is Dead (?)
The end of legal slavery did not lead Nast to treat the issue as settled. Several of his Reconstruction drawings focused on violence, punishment and the gap between emancipation and actual freedom.
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Compromise with the South — Dedicated to the Chicago Convention
Nast supported the Union during the Civil War and used large, densely composed illustrations to argue against a negotiated settlement that he believed would sacrifice the Union cause.
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We Accept the Situation
Black voting rights became one of the clearest political positions in Nast’s Reconstruction work. Here and elsewhere, the Black Union veteran became central to his argument for citizenship and suffrage.
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Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner
Nast repeatedly used national personifications such as Uncle Sam and Columbia. He did not invent them, but his drawings helped keep such figures at the centre of American political imagery.
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(Dis-) “Honors Are Easy.” Now Both Parties Have Something to Hang On
By the 1880s, Nast was still using animals as political shorthand. Elephants, tigers and other figures had become part of a visual vocabulary that readers could recognise before they had read a word of the cartoon.
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The Library of Congress records the work as a wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly on 20 May 1882.
Library of Congress ↗“This Is a White Man’s Government”
Some of Nast’s strongest Reconstruction drawings attacked white supremacy and political violence against Black Americans. At the same time, the Irish figure in this image shows the ethnic stereotyping that also ran through his work.
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The American River Ganges — The Priests and the Children
Nast fiercely opposed what he saw as Catholic influence over public education. That position often became openly anti-Catholic and anti-Irish in his drawings, and this work is one of the clearest examples.
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Emancipation
Nast returned to emancipation as both a political event and a question about what freedom would look like afterward. His Civil War and Reconstruction work helped make him known far beyond New York.
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The Union as It Was — The Lost Cause, Worse Than Slavery
By the mid-1870s, the gains of Reconstruction were under sustained attack. Nast used the White League and Ku Klux Klan in this image to show how political violence threatened Black citizenship in the South.
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A Group of Vultures Waiting for the Storm to “Blow Over” — “Let Us Prey”
The Tweed Ring supplied Nast with some of his most memorable visual metaphors. Here its members became scavengers waiting for public outrage over New York corruption to pass.
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The Third-Term Panic
Nast repeatedly turned political parties into animals. In this cartoon, the Republican vote appears as an elephant — an image that became closely associated with the party and remains part of American political imagery today.
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The Library of Congress records the work as a Thomas Nast wood engraving from 1874 and lists no known restrictions on publication.
Library of Congress ↗The Tammany Tiger Loose — “What Are You Going to Do About It?”
Nast’s fight with Tammany Hall showed how much political force a drawing could carry. The tiger, Boss Tweed and the damaged symbols of public life brought his long campaign into a single scene and helped make the image one of the defining works of nineteenth-century American political cartooning.
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Published in Harper’s Weekly, 11 November 1871. The National Portrait Gallery records another impression of the work as CC0.
Library of Congress ↗Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery ↗
