A Parody on the Memory of General A. S. Johnston

This Currier & Ives lithograph uses grotesque caricature and dark humor to mock Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston following his death at the Battle of Shiloh. The print depicts Johnston's human head grafted onto a hyena's body, standing at a grave marked for Union casualties—a visual metaphor equating the general with a scavenging predator. The image reflects Northern wartime propaganda tactics that dehumanized Confederate leadership through exaggerated facial features and animal imagery. Such prints, mass-produced and distributed widely, shaped public opinion during the Civil War. Though crude by modern standards, this lithograph demonstrates how newspapers and popular prints functioned as the era's primary visual media, establishing compositional techniques—sequential narrative, symbolic juxtaposition, satirical commentary—that would later define early comic strip language.