ABSTRACT
Modern caricature is generally dated to the late 1750s when the English amateur George Townshend began to draw satiric representations of public figures that exaggerated their features and figures. The use of the term 'cartoon' dates from about eighty-five years later when in the early days of the journal Punch, the word began to be used for the full-page drawing that appeared near the front of each weekly issue, and almost always referred satirically to some current political topic. 1 Because of their close connection to contemporary social or political issues, cartoons can offer an important resource for the historical investigator, and they have sometimes been used as evidence of how a wide spectrum of society lived. However, employing cartoons as sources in this way presents difficulties. Although they can provide evidence concerning institutions, practices, and events, many cartoons cannot be read straightforwardly to mean only what their overt message appears to say, nor can historical events or attitudes be read through them as though through a transparent medium. This is especially true of the most powerful cartoons and their artists. For example, for more than a century Thomas Nast's cartoons in Harper's Weekly in 1871 were taken to be responsible for the demise of William Tweed and the Democratic patronage machine that was centred on Tammany Hall. However, in the last few decades, this narrative of the heroic efforts of a lone cartoonist against an immensely powerful and corrupt ring of officeholders, which was based in part on Nast's own later account of the affair, has come to be questioned and revised. Thus, it has been shown that 'Boss' Tweed was not the leader of the political machine, that he was not the focus of Nast's attack on Tammany Hall during the first year of the campaign, that Nast was not acting alone but in line with the political sympathies and purposes of his own bosses, the Republican Harper brothers who owned the weekly for which he worked, and that exposes published by the New York Times contributed significantly to the bringing of corruption charges against Tweed. 2 Political cartoons, like satire and caricature generally, work by means of exaggeration: Nast exaggerated Tweed's importance in the machine and the extent of his takings in order to sharpen his focus and increase the effectiveness of his attack. His cartoons cannot be taken to represent accurately and straightforwardly the political situation in New York City after the Civil War. 3
