"The Inauguration at Richmond"

By Justin Faircloth

“The Inauguration At Richmond” depicted Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, as a pirate monarch, leading the newly formed Confederacy in a war for slavery. The representation of Davis illustrates the northern Republican anger at the Confederacy. Northern Republicans viewed Davis as a traitor and a false king who portrayed himself as protecting the constitutional rights of southern slaveholders but who instead destroyed the United States of America. 

The northern Republican periodical Harper’s Weekly published the cartoon on March 15, 1862, soon after President Davis’ Second Inaugural Address on February 22, 1862, in Richmond, Virginia. Davis outlined in his address the constitutional rights of southerners being violated by the United States government under the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln. Davis condemned the United States Government’s actions against slavery as violations of southerners’ right to own slaves. Davis outlined the difficulties experienced in founding the Confederacy and breaking away from the Union and appealed to foreign nations for recognition and assistance in securing independence.

Davis’ words may have moved many in the South to passionately take up the banner of secession and war in the name of the Confederacy. However, in the North his words did little but create feelings of animosity toward the Confederacy and its cause. Northern Republican sentiment toward Davis was harsh. Harper's Weekly, in an article entitled “The Rebel Inaugural Address” published on March 8, 1862, referred to the “the ruined, heart-broken, panic-stricken, and despairing people of the South” turning in vain to Davis “in search of consolation for the past and hope for the future.” The author noted that “the gripe of a mighty government is clutched round the throat of the traitors, and their gurgling death-rattle is already audible.”

The cartoon is rich in symbolism. The cartoonist depicted Jefferson Davis as a skeleton king, which may have suggested that Davis was already a dead man. Davis sits on a throne made of cotton bales and a whiskey barrel, showing the southern exports driving secession and one of the main points outlined in his Inaugural Address. Davis holds a pirate flag and a torch bearing the word “desolation.” The cartoonist most likely meant the flag to suggest that the South and Davis were pirates in the cotton industry, maintaining the institution of slavery and thus their profit margin. The torch of desolation probably symbolized the destruction of not just the Confederacy, but the whole country as well. At Davis’ feet sits a slave bound to the throne, showing the Confederacy’s reliance on slavery to maintain its empire, which also appeared in Davis’ Inaugural Address as a main justification for the formation of the Confederacy. Also beside Davis, lies a knife, which likely showed the Confederacy’s aggression. Immediately to the right of Davis, a gaunt looking mother holds an equally poorly looking child. This suggested the hardship experienced by Confederate women and children who were left to suffer and fend for themselves when President Davis called their husbands away to war. Behind Davis and his throne, a cheering crowd of men praised Davis. This shows the Confederate President’s appeal to the southern fighting men in his Inaugural Address, which he hoped would inspire them to take up arms for their beliefs and to fight the tyrannical United States Government. Behind the crowd of Davis’ supporters is a hangman’s noose, a burning house, and a ghastly appearing ship. The ghost ship could have multiple meanings. It could be a reference to the nearly non-existent Confederate Navy, the looming Union Blockade that was part of President Lincoln’s Anaconda Plan, or the faint hope of foreign intervention on the Confederacy’s behalf. The burning house showed the devastation being brought by the war or it suggested that the Union would burn the Confederates out of their homes before letting them become an independent country, an eerie foreshadowing to General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march at the end of the war. The noose also has multiple meanings; it could foreshadow the fate of Davis for betraying the United States Government or it could also be an insinuation that the South hanged itself by seceding from the Union.

Overall, this interpretatively rich cartoon may be analyzed in a variety of ways. The predominant intention of the cartoon, however, was to mock and vilify the Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy itself. This image clearly presented the northern Republican outlook on the Civil War.