Christmas in the American Civil War circle, and in another circle shows her husband on the battlefield, also in prayer. The same issue's cover started how Santa Claus would be perceived by future Americans, as a white-bearded Santa hands such gifts as socks to Union soldiers, while also holding a Jefferson Davis dancing puppet with a rope tied around its neck to perfectly insinuate a lynching. The Christmas 1863 issue showed the couple back together. The Nast Christmas cartoon for 1864 was a more conciliatory piece, showing Lincoln inviting Confederate soldiers into a warm lodge hall full of merriment. Lincoln called Nast's use of Santa Claus
Thomas Nast in the background is a lynching and a schoolhouse destroyed by arson. Two members of the Ku Klux Klan and White League, paramilitary insurgent groups in the Reconstruction-era South, shake hands in their mutually destructive work against black Americans. Despite Nast's championing of minorities, Morton Keller writes that later in his career "racist stereotypy of blacks began to appear: comparable to those of the Irish—though in contrast with the presumably more highly civilized Chinese." Nast introduced into American cartoons the practice of modernizing scenes from Shakespeare for a political purpose. Nast also brought his approach to bear on the usually