The True Issue or "Thats Whats the Matter"

Throughout the Civil War, Currier & Ives issued political satires. Here, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, presidents of the United States and the Confederacy, struggle to control a map of the eastern United States that has started to rip from east to west. General George McClellan, Lincoln’s opponent in the presidential campaign of 1864, stands between the contenders and declares that the Union must be preserved at all costs. Lincoln counters, "No peace without abolition!!" while Davis insists, "No peace without separation!!" The image encapsulates the chief political positions presented to Union voters in 1864 as well as the Confederacy’s official position on the war.

The New York firm of Currier & Ives (established by Nathaniel Currier, who formed a partnership with his brother-in-law James Merritt Ives in 1857), lithographed 4,300 subjects between 1835 and 1907 for distribution across America and Europe. They offered images of almost everything animal, vegetable, or mineral in the United States, and issued landscapes, genre subjects, caricatures, portraits, historical scenes, foreign views and reproductions of art works. The pictures were drawn on lithographic stones, printed in monochrome, then generally hand-colored by women who worked for the firm at home. This example remained uncolored.