Christmas in the American Civil War the Union blockade, and one little girl, Sallie Brock Putnam, plotted the course Santa Claus would have to take to avoid it. Sometimes fathers on both sides were allowed furlough, and children were said to react to their fathers as if seeing "near strangers". Excuses for a lack of Santa included Yankees having shot him. Thomas Nast, who used his editorial cartoons to issue Union propaganda, made several illustrations reflecting the war. The one for Christmas Eve 1862, which ran in the January 1863 issue of Harper's Weekly shows a wife on one side praying though a window in one
Thomas Nast Thomas Nast." In the 1872 presidential campaign, Nast's ridicule of Horace Greeley's candidacy was especially merciless. After Grant's victory in 1872, Mark Twain wrote the artist a letter saying: "Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for Grant—I mean, rather, for Civilization and Progress." Nast became a close friend of President Grant and the two families shared regular dinners until Grant's death in 1885. Nast and his wife moved to Morristown, New Jersey in 1872 and there they raised a family that eventually numbered five children. In 1873, Nast toured the United States as a