"[6] Amphitheatrum is one of a series of images by Nast that castigate Johnson "for his failure to secure for the liberated slaves the privileges to which their newly won freedom entitled them.

"[9] Nast's illustration reflected the public's disgust with Johnson's failure to keep promises that the Abraham Lincoln-led Union had made during the American Civil War.

To Republicans, the violence in New Orleans exemplified everything that was wrong with President Johnson's approach to Reconstruction and starkly illustrated the need to require states to protect the rights of speech, press, assembly, and due process.

"[10] The action in Nast's arena is essentially documentary, drawn from reports made by government investigators about the "pre-meditated act of ex-Rebels intent on destroying the native Republican movement in Louisiana.

[5] In 1914, J. Henry Harper said His views were his own rather than those of any particular party or faction...Nast was an ardent student of politics, and one reason for his great success was that he was always thoroughly conversant with a situation before he attempted to attack it...In disposition he was urbane and sociable, but never the courtier.

[31]The Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum image is an exemplar of Nast's "crisp linear technique, sharp tonal contrasts and knack for monumental design.

[33] Nast sometimes set his cartoons on the stage, making manifest their theatricality: "He was partial to proscenium arches as an artistic device, and occasionally created a grand spectacle as in a coliseum.

"[32] One source suggests Nast's image was specifically inspired by an 1859 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme called Ave Caesar Morituri te Salutant  [d] (transl.

[32] The Gérôme painting, currently in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, has a different composition and perspective than Johnsonianum, but much the same theme: a self-indulgent monarch looks on, disinterested, as the bodies of recently slain gladiators are dragged off the field and the victorious (for today) celebrate in a knot in the foreground, a position that ironically highlights their isolation from the politically influential but passive observers who sit above them in the stadium.

[35] In almost every stump speech Andrew Johnson made in his 30-year political career, he claimed to be a plebeian, a commoner, opposed to the patrician enslavers of the planter class.

[38] These animals first appeared in a Nast cartoon about the 1866 National Union Convention, which was organized to build support for Johnson and his policies ahead of the 1866 United States elections.

[38] The Northern press roasted Johnson for his claim of tearfulness, incensed that he had never before evinced a sympathetic emotion, not least at happenings like 400,000 Union casualties in the war, the assassination of Lincoln, or the massacre of 3rd Regiment Heavy Artillery U.S.

[38] Moreover, while a candidate for vice president on Lincoln's National Union Party ticket in 1864, Andrew Johnson had made a stirring and famous address in Nashville that came to be known as the Moses speech for its pledges on civil rights and racial progress.

[41] Once elevated to power on the authority of John Wilkes Booth and the presidential line of succession, Johnson turned almost immediately away from any such campaign promises, leading newspaper writers to Nile River metaphors such as, "There is good reason to believe, that when Miss Columbia, in imitation of Miss Pharaoh, fished among the bulrushes and slimy waters of Southern plebeianism for a little Moses, she slung out a young crocodile instead.

Charles Sumner of Massachusetts referenced the illustration in a speech on the floor of the United States Senate on March 28, 1867:[42] The victims are black, and their sacrifice, as gladiators, makes a "Roman holiday"[d] now red.

For example, the author of A History of American Graphic Humor (1938) argued, "The widespread propaganda to the effect that Johnson was betraying the principles and program of Lincoln inflamed many much older men than the youthful Nast...All the fierce invective and scathing ridicule then at his command were launched at the unfortunate Johnson...Yet Nast quite deliberately and with honest conviction did his share in the vilification of the President.