Southern Justice (political cartoon)
Southern Justice is a multi-panel political cartoon by Bavarian-American caricaturist Thomas Nast, advocating for continued military occupation of the U.S. South to protect freedmen, Unionists, and Republicans from violence. Published as a double-page spread in the March 23, 1867 issue of Harper's Weekly, Southern Justice is one of a series of images Nast produced in 1866 and 1867 that "emphasized freedmen's potential in American life...the suffering of freedmen, the barbarity of night riders, and the dangers of Johnson's reconstruction policies to real men and womenpeople whose potential could be lost through northern inaction." Patting its own back a bit, Harper's Weekly ran an unbylined feature on Nast in May that described Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum and Southern Justice as "very significant. They tell their own story. They represent not accidents, such as might happen anywhere, but a system of brutal crime...persecution and destruction of loyal citizens of the United States...These pictures are the argument of the Reconstruction bill. The civil law of Rebel states, made and administered by ex-rebels, is found to be no defense against committed upon loyal men, and if those men are to be protected, it must be for the present by the national arm." In images like Southern