Christmas in the American Civil War "the best recruiting sergeant the North ever had". Nast was not the only one to use Christmas as a propaganda tool. On the Union side, "The New York Herald" also engaged in propaganda. One illustration published in the paper included Santa Claus fuming that he could not reach southern children, due to the northern blockade. On the Confederate side, "The Richmond Examiner" described Santa to its young readers as "a Dutch toy monger" who was a New York/New England "scrub" and Hottentot that had nothing to do with traditional Virginian celebrations of Christmas. Even through the war was over, Nast
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