At the age of 78, a frail Jefferson Davis journeyed back to Montgomery, Alabama, where he had first been sworn in as president of the Confederacy a quarter-century earlier. There, greeted by an “ovation…said never to have been equaled or eclipsed in that city,” the once-unpopular Davis helped lay the cornerstone for a monument to the Confederate dead. Despite failing health, he then embarked on a final speaking tour in the spring of 1886 to Atlanta and on to Savannah—ironically retracing General Sherman’s march through Georgia, which had crushed and humiliated the South and brought the Civil War closer to an end.
“Is it a lost cause now?” Davis defiantly thundered to the adoring, all-white crowds who set off fireworks and artillery salutes in his honor. He provided his own answer, shouting: “Never.”
Clearly, much had changed since Davis had ignominiously tried escaping Union pursuers by disguising himself in his wife’s raincoat. For this masquerade, he had been mercilessly lampooned in Northern caricature as a coward in drag—portrayed in hoopskirts and a ludicrous bonnet. Yet now, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, one of the New York weeklies that had mocked Davis in 1865, marveled at his comeback.
The paper was not alone in this about-face.
As the South rewrote the history of the war and reaffirmed a white supremacist ideology, the North’s printmakers, publishers and image makers operated right beside them. Reaping financial windfalls, these firms helped propagate what’s known as the “Lost Cause” phenomenon through sympathetic mass-marketed prints designed for homes, offices, and veterans’ clubs throughout the former Confederacy. Most critically to the modern era, these images also helped fund the erection of statues that are only now beginning to be removed from public squares.
Printmaking was a lucrative industry in the late-19th century. Publishers (Currier & Ives is probably the best-known) sold mass-produced separate-sheet pictures by the thousands to wholesalers, in retail shops, through news dealers and other sub-retailers and via mail to distributors and individuals. Lithographs from a printmaker could cost as little as ten cents; engravings five to ten dollars—depending on size—though one oversized Lincoln deathbed engraving went for $50 for signed artist’s proofs.
In addition to being profitable, these images were ubiquitous. Home decorating books and magazines of the time made clear that framed artworks testifying to patriotic and political impulses were crucial additions to the American home.
Historians believe, based on an 1890s New York Times story, that a New York-issued print of the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation sold some 100,000 copies over 30 years; it was the big best-seller of its day. But not all New York image-makers confined their attention to pro-Union and anti-slavery themes.