Commander in Chief & Great Emancipator
Adalbert Johann Volck. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Baltimore, [ca. 1864]. Etching on china paper. |
Adalbert Volck (1828-1912) was born in Bavaria and moved to Baltimore in 1852, where he worked as a dentist and a political cartoonist and caricaturist. An avid supporter of the South, Volck aided the Confederate cause through his political cartoons, such as the one shown here; by smuggling drugs and medical supplies to rebel soldiers; and by acting as a courier for the Confederacy’s president, Jefferson Davis (1808-1889). Lincoln was a frequent target of Volck’s ridicule and sarcasm. The image shown here, portraying Lincoln as a bumbling commander in chief with one of his incompetent generals, Benjamin Butler (1818-1893), who was reviled in the South, was one of a series of secretly published anti-Union works produced by Volck during the war. *61-1673 (br) Purchased in 1962 on the Keller Fund. |
