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 Fredericks and Theodore Kaufmann, and then at the school of the National Academy of Design. In 1856, he started working as a draftsman for "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper". His drawings appeared for the first time in "Harper's Weekly" on March 19, 1859, when he illustrated a report exposing police corruption; Nast was 18 years old at that point. In February 1860, he went to England for the "New York Illustrated News" to depict one of the major sporting events of the era, the prize fight between the American John C. Heenan and the English Thomas Sayers sponsored by George Wilkes,