The American caricaturist and painter Thomas Nast (1840-1902) is noted for his political cartoons attacking corruption in New York City government and supporting Radical Reconstruction in the South.

Thomas Nast was born on Sept. 27, 1840, in Ludwig, Bavaria. The family emigrated to the United States in 1846, and Thomas was raised and schooled in New York City. He displayed an early talent for drawing. At the age of 15 he took some drawings to Leslie's Weekly, one of the popular magazines of the day, and was hired as an illustrator. In 1862 he joined Harper's Weekly. Throughout the Civil War he turned out patriotic drawings exhorting Northern readers to help crush the Rebels. Abraham Lincoln called him "our best recruiting sergeant."

By the end of the war Nast and Harper's Weekly had become virtually inseparable, and Nast turned his hand toward attacking President Andrew Johnson's attempts to subvert the Radical Republican Reconstruction...