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 Southern United States 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 women—people 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 Justice, Nast represented "the brutal treatment of Negroes, Unionists, and Republicans by unregenerate Southern whites" and the Northern expectation that after the harvest of death that "the ideals fought for would be translated into reality" during the Reconstruction Era.

Details
Southern Justice is unusually text-heavy for a Nast cartoon; half of the text is a list of references to incidents visually described, half is an excerpt from Andrew Johnson's veto of the military government bill. Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts over Johnson's veto.

"My own opinion is that the trial of a white man for the murder of a freedman in Texas would be a farce, and in making the statement make it I make it because the truth compels me, and for no other reason." —General Sheridan

"You could not find a jury in South Carolina that would convict a man for killing a Union soldier, no matter what the testimony." —General Sickles

"Homicides of Union men, soldiers, and freedmen, are on the increase." —General Thomas J. Wood

"If a freedman is murdered by men who had been in the rebellion, it is impossible to get the criminal arrested even; and if he is arrested, he is sure to be released on very low bail." —General Baird

"I do not believe there is much chance of convicting a resident or citizen of Georgia for murder if the victim is a Union man or a negro." —Gen. Thomas