Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum â Massacre of the Innocents at New Orleans, July 30, 1866 (generally known simply as Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum) is a political cartoon by the 19th-century American artist Thomas Nast that depicts U.S. president Andrew Johnson as Emperor Nero at an ancient Roman arena, "figuratively fiddling with the...Constitution" while martyrs are slaughtered. The image depicts Johnson's alleged complicity in, and indifference to, the Memphis and New Orleans massacres of 1866. Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum was published in the March 30, 1867 issue of the illustrated newsmagazine Harper's Weekly in a double-page spread measuring 20 inches wide by 13 inches high.
The illustration was prepared in the latter part of 1866, but apparently the 27-year-old artist held it "until an official report on the massacre was released in 1867." Amphitheatrum is one of a series of images by Nast that castigate Johnson "for his failure to secure for the liberated slaves the privileges to which their newly won freedom entitled them. These cartoons are excellent examples of Nast's technique, showing the elaborate detail that characterized so much of his work." Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum has been called a "truly impressive work," Nast's most important work of 1867, and "one of the most important cartoons that Thomas Nast ever drew."
Nast's illustration reflected the public's disgust with Johnson's failure to keep promises that the Abraham Lincoln-led Union had made during the American Civil War. This outrage led directly to the passage of the monumental Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: "No single event in 1866 more clearly illustrated the states' continued failure to protect the constitutionally enumerated rights of American citizens than the New Orleans Riot of July 30, 1866. The riot left scores dead and wounded, many of them blacks who had fought for the Union in the Civil War. To Republicans, the violence in New Orleans exemplified everything that was wrong with President Johnson's approach to Reconstruction and starkly illustrated the need to require states to protect the rights of speech, press, assembly, and due process."
The action in Nast's arena is essentially documentary, drawn from reports made by government investigators about the "pre-meditated act of ex-Rebels intent on destroying the native Republican movement in Louisiana." The brutality is intentionally remote from the high-status individuals in the foreground but Nast was careful to include clearly recognizable figures within the stands and, down on the field, recognizable scenes drawn from news reports. For example, "the very small figure of Mayor John T. Monroe is depicted on horseback and has the initials CSA (Confederate States of America) on his breastplate. His Roman soldiers are labeled the Monroe Police. The mayor had recruited former Confederate soldiers and white supremacists to serve in the reconstituted civilian police force. Nast drew unarmed Black civiliansâÂÂboth men and womenâÂÂas Christian martyrs pleading for their lives as they were hacked to pieces."
According to the historian Morton Keller In 1914, J. Henry Harper said Gary Land said
The Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum image is an exemplar of Nast's "crisp linear technique, sharp tonal contrasts and knack for monumental design." Nast often used a multi-panel format that allowed him to present various scenarios, portraits, and tableaux side-by-side (and to integrate quotes from news accounts into the framework between the images), but "here...Nast uses only one picture." The image, which has a strong overall visual cohesion, is nonetheless an assemblage of "striking and unmistakable" portraits.
According to Albert Bigelow Paine writing in 1904, these careful depictions were "always the case in the work of Nast. Even among the concourse of little figures in the crowded Coliseum galleries, we may today pick out the familiar faces of history. Nast almost never thought it necessary to label his characters, as is the custom now. Johnson was always Johnson, whatever the guise. Seward, who had kept his place in the Cabinet, and lost prestige thereby, was usually prominent and never could be mistaken." The picture extended a previously established characterization of Johnson as an unelected tyrant out of concord with the American people.
Nast sometimes set his cartoons on the stage, making manifest their theatricality: "He was partial to proscenium arches as an artistic device, and occasionally created a grand spectacle as in a coliseum." In the early 1970s, Nast's grandson Thomas Nast St. Hill wrote:
Amphitheatrum is one of Nast's works that is influenced by "the French academic, painters who treated history with dramatic realism...A frustrated history painter, Nast incorporated and burlesqued the work of well-known rivals, thus guaranteeing himself an aura of 'academic' respectability. This tension with 'high' art is often experienced in Nast's cartoons even when the original source remains unknown and is expressed as part of the general effect."
One source suggests Nast's image was specifically inspired by an 1859 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme called (), which was clearly the visual inspiration for Nast's Tammany Tiger four years later. The Gérôme painting, currently in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, has a different composition and perspective than Johnsonianum, but much the same theme: a self-indulgent monarch looks on, disinterested, as the bodies of recently slain gladiators are dragged off the field and the victorious (for today) celebrate in a knot in the foreground, a position that ironically highlights their isolation from the politically influential but passive observers who sit above them in the stadium.
In almost every stump speech Andrew Johnson made in his 30-year political career, he claimed to be a plebeian, a commoner, opposed to the patrician enslavers of the planter class. For decades Johnson had relentlessly assailed plantation owners as source and sink of all that ailed the antebellum South, but in the end, writes historian Annette Gordon-Reed, "Johnson's supposed hatred for the southern aristocracy turned out to have been just so much talk when compared to his determination to maintain the South and the country as a 'white man's government.'"
With Johnsonianum, Nast assails what he perceives to be the dishonesty and hypocrisy of Johnson's plebeian pose, revealing him instead as , in whose name the carnage is done, and anathema to "we the people." The Nero metaphor may first have been used by Johnson's ancient Tennessee frienemy, the storied newspaper editor and politician Parson Brownlow. Brownlow's was one of many voices accusing Johnson ofat minimumnegligence in the matter of New Orleans. "I have long been familiar with the history and deeds of Andrew Jackson, the hero of New Orleans," said Brownlow, while traveling to a convention with a delegation from his state, "and I wanted to hear from Andrew Johnson, the Nero of New Orleans."
There are a number of snakes and crocodilians present in the imperial box in Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum. The crocodilians are meant to be suggestive of crocodile tears, the Nile crocodiles of Biblical Egypt, and American crocodiles and alligators of southern swamps and bayous, these last being a creature of some dread in American folklore. The snakes are Eastern copperheads, a kind of pit viper native to the woods and wetlands of the Southern United States, known for both its effective camouflage and its dangerous venom, and here representative of politicians who were disparagingly called Copperheads because they were perceived to be Confederate sympathizers of the Democratic Party (Third Party System) elected from Union states.
These animals first appeared in a Nast cartoon about the 1866 National Union Convention, which was organized to build support for Johnson and his policies ahead of the 1866 United States elections. Andrew Johnson claimed, "I could not finish reading the dispatch for my own feelings overcame me," about reports that Governor Darius Couch of Massachusetts (representing Billy Yank) and Governor James Orr of South Carolina (representing Johnny Reb) had entered the convention hall arm-in-arm. The Northern press roasted Johnson for his claim of tearfulness, incensed that he had never before evinced a sympathetic emotion, not least at happenings like 400,000 Union casualties in the war, the assassination of Lincoln, or the massacre of 3rd Regiment Heavy Artillery U.S. Colored Troops and dozens of civilians in Memphis in May 1866. Nast thought Johnson was being disingenuous, at best, and his cartoon of the convention included an image of the president comically crying crocodile tears within a visual framework bedecked with crocodiles, an image he carried forward into his imagined American coliseum.
Moreover, while a candidate for vice president on Lincoln's National Union Party ticket in 1864, Andrew Johnson had made a stirring and famous address in Nashville that came to be known as the Moses speech for its pledges on civil rights and racial progress. Once elevated to power on the authority of John Wilkes Booth and the presidential line of succession, Johnson turned almost immediately away from any such campaign promises, leading newspaper writers to Nile River metaphors such as, "There is good reason to believe, that when Miss Columbia, in imitation of Miss Pharaoh, fished among the bulrushes and slimy waters of Southern plebeianism for a little Moses, she slung out a young crocodile instead. He is a crocodile by nature, although he calls himself Moses. He craunches and gulps down whatever stands in his way, without any signs of mercy, yet is always prepared to shed tears to order."
Responses to Nast's political artwork were divided along party lines in his time and for many decades thereafter. Amongst the Southern whites, Nast's reputation was never good: "Even prior to Reconstruction, Nast and Harper's had pilloried the South during the Civil War to such an extent that in New Orleans Harper's was identified as a form of obscene literature." Whereas in the North, Nast was deemed a sage. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts referenced the illustration in a speech on the floor of the United States Senate on March 28, 1867:
The Congressional shield arguably came in the form of the Fourteenth Amendment, Fifteenth Amendment, Enforcement Acts, and Ku Klux Klan Act.
The ebb and flow of Andrew Johnson's historical reputation has often determined the critique of pieces like Amphitheatrum. In particular, during the nadir of American race relations, "when Reconstruction racial and economic policies were viewed with particular disfavor, Johnson emerged the valiant hero who had bravely withstood the evil Radicals," and Nast was viewed as a useful idiot. For example, the author of A History of American Graphic Humor (1938) argued, "The widespread propaganda to the effect that Johnson was betraying the principles and program of Lincoln inflamed many much older men than the youthful Nast...All the fierce invective and scathing ridicule then at his command were launched at the unfortunate Johnson...Yet Nast quite deliberately and with honest conviction did his share in the vilification of the President. He showed him as a would-be king aiming at absolute power, as a drunken sot, and as a Roman tyrant." Similarly, a 1957 analysis of Nast as crusader artist asserted that Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum was Nast's "most ambitious assault" on Johnson's Presidential Reconstruction but that Nast helped create false impressions of Johnson that "took two generations to correct." Then, beginning in the 1960s, "Once black equality and the injustice of racial discrimination became the prevailing belief, Johnson's historical reputation had no place to go but down." With Johnson's decline came a commensurate ascendance in the evaluation of Nast's Reconstruction-era art, which in 1965 was called "the best record we have of that era of American public life a century ago...Nast spoke to, and for, a vast number of Americans who were ready to believe that the good society lay close at hand...He had a strong sense of the United States as a nation of diverse peoples, welded together by self-government...Not until our own time could Nast's aspirations and his disappointments regain their original evocative power."