On Forgetting: Thomas Nast, the Middle Class, and the Visual Culture of the Draft Riots

Abstract

In September of 1863, Thomas Nast produced a seemingly bucolic scene of children at play, The Attack on the “Home Guard,” for the lithographic firm of Currier and Ives (Figure 1). Organized around a strange confrontation, in which a dog bites at the pant leg of a little boy in a military uniform as another, nonuniformed boy stabs at the dog with a bayonettipped rifle, the print diverges from sentimental 19th-century envisionings of middle-class domestic life by including an act of violence in the normally sanctified space of the home. Not surprisingly, the unusual content and ambiguous tone of The Attack on the “Home Guard” has puzzled historians of visual culture. When read in the context of contemporaneous popular illustration, however, the elusive meaning of Nast's lithograph begins to take shape.