The political cartoonist who drew the elephant and donkey as symbols of the two political parties, Thomas Nast chronicled the hopes and later the disillusions of the mid-nineteenth-century’s civil rights leaders. Morton Keller, professor of history at Brandeis University and an authority on the post-Civil War era, restores to the public light this timeless and timely cartoonist in the following article adapted from his book THE ART AND POLITICS OF THOMAS NAST,to be published this month by Oxford University Press.

Stumbling on a forgotten Reconstruction tragedy, in a forgotten corner of Louisiana