Only a few can see and hear everything that he had said, only a few citizen attends the debate and usually only selected citizens were invited to listen to him. So he thought of political cartoon where he can post his political platform and political agenda. He knew that through this cartoons every American citizen will have a knowledge of who he is, what he wants, and his plans for the country of United States. Even those people in the different states will know who this person is. And another reason is that since the United States is so big, he cannot go to every state in just a short period of time so if he do the cartoon ads, people all over the country will get a grasp of him. Based on Smith, A. (2004):
The language of political pamphlets and cartoons has always been the raw material with which historians have examined structures of ideas and their relationship to politics. "In 1864," writes David Long, the issue of slavery "was before the voters and they overwhelmingly rejected the institution." Although, in retrospect, that appears to be self-evidently true -- Lincoln was after all running on a platform that committed him to the support of what would become the thirteenth amendment -- the evidence of the campaign literature complicates the picture considerably. The chairman of the Union party national committee, Henry J. Raymond, feared that "we have not a ghost of a chance in November" because of the "suspicion ... that ... [Lincoln] does not seek peace, that he is fighting not for the Union but for the abolition of slavery." This perception guided...
Campaign texts rarely mentioned slavery. Instead, the focus was relentlessly negative.
Some of the caricatures can be found in one of the popular newspaper during that time, Harper's Weekly. People reading this paper can surely notices the caricature of Lincoln because of the comic strip that they used and the
symbolism that they promoted. Punch magazine was where most of the cartoons of Lincoln can be found. It is truly one of the reasons why Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election because of his exposure in the newspapers and
magazines as a cartoon figure that attracted people.
Bibliography:
Backer, D. "A brief
history of political cartoons" [Online] Available at:
Bartleby.com. "Lincoln, Abraham," The Columbian Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. [Online] Available at:
Megan C, et al. "Lincoln's Main Goal" [Online] Available at:
'Punch Cartoons on the
American Civil War, 1861-1865" [Online] Available at:
Smith, A. "Review Essay" [Online] Available at:
Zwick, J. "Abraham Lincoln in Political Cartoons" Political Cartoons and Cartoonists 2005 [Online] Available at:
