Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum
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Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum – Massacre of the Innocents at New Orleans, July 30, 1866 (commonly referred to as Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum) is a political cartoon by American artist Thomas Nast that appeared as a double-page spread in the March 30, 1867, issue of Harper's Weekly.[1]
Description
The cartoon portrays U.S. president Andrew Johnson as the Roman emperor Nero, seated in an imperial box above a crowded amphitheater and looking on with indifference — "fiddling," in the cartoon's visual language, with the Constitution — while armed mobs below slaughter unarmed Black victims and their white allies. The imagery casts Johnson's presidency as a modern-day version of imperial Rome's bloodsport spectacles, with Johnson in the position of an emperor who tolerates, and by his inaction effectively sanctions, mass violence for the entertainment and political benefit of his supporters.
This cartoon was Nast's response to the Memphis and New Orleans massacres of 1866, two of the deadliest episodes of anti-Black violence of the early Reconstruction era. These events left scores of freedpeople dead at the hands of white mobs and, in the case of New Orleans, local police. Johnson's administration was widely criticized at the time and has since been assessed by historians for its failure to protect freedpeople and Southern Unionists from such violence, as well as for pursuing a lenient Reconstruction policy toward former Confederates.[1] During this period, Nast repeatedly returned to this theme in his work for Harper's Weekly, including in the related cartoon Southern Justice.
Significance
Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum is considered one of Thomas Nast's most severe indictments of the Johnson presidency, notable for its sustained classical allegory and its unusually explicit condemnation of racial violence for a mainstream illustrated magazine of its time. It is frequently reproduced and discussed in historical scholarship on Reconstruction-era visual culture, on Nast's career, and on the broader use of editorial cartooning as a tool of political accountability.