The Wartime Christmas Art of Thomas Nast

For the December 23 Emerging Civil War Podcast, Chris Mackowski and I discussed Christmas during the Civil War. As part of that discussion, I made mention of a number of images drawn by Thomas Nast. The picture of Nast, below, comes from 1889, but he was all of 21 years old when the war broke out—and all full of the pepper of youth.

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Before Nast started drawing for Harper’s Weekly, he sketched for the New York Illustrated News. This image shows a Christmas tree decorated with “ornaments” consisting of Confederate generals hung on the tree with nooses. Note the laurels that are also draped on the tree.

The same week Nast’s Christmas tree image appeared, the front cover of Harper’s Weekly featured a woodcut from a Winslow Homer drawing, “Christmas Boxes in Camp.”

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Nast commemorated Christmas 1862 with a two-page spread in Harper’s Weekly that showed the home front thinking of the soldier on the front line and the soldier on the front line thinking of the home front. Note the soldier graves in the center at the bottom.

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That same issue of Harper’s featured an image that became one of Nast’s most famous sketches of all time: his first rendering of Santa Claus. Note the “blue” jacket with white stars and the red-and-white striped pants. Nast’s version of Santa is true-blue pro-Union.

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Nast’s centerfold spread in Harper’s from Christmas 1863:

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Nast’s Christmas 1864 image shows a bountiful “Union Christmas dinner.” It’s a hopeful scene that captures the mood in the North that things might finally be winding down. The imagery presages Lincoln’s soon-to-be articulated “charity for all, malice toward none.” Note Lee surrendering to Grant in the lower-left corner—an event that still lay almost three and a half months in the future.

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Nast’s 1865 Christmas sketch focused on happier holiday images with the exception of a politically packed stage show along the bottom of the page.

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Merry Christmas and ho, ho, ho!

[Editor’s Note: For more on Nast and Christmas, read Tonya McQuade’s December 24, 2023 post, “How Civil War Cartoonist Thomas Nast Created Our Image of Santa Claus and Turned Santa into a Full-Fledged Union Supporter.”]