The “Light Guard”

Good Morning!

Today’s Friday Funny is an 1861 Harper’s Weekly cartoon.

Entitled “Costume Suggested for the Brave Stay-at-Home Light Guard,” this sketch mockingly questions the masculinity of Union men who did not voluntarily enlist. It casts these cowards as the “stay-at-home” guard—a feminized “soldier” attired in a dress-like uniform with hairbrush epaulets and a cooking-pot hat. He is armed with a feather duster, broom, and dustpan.

Image Credit: Harper’s Weekly, September 7, 1861.

Leave a Reply

DUNKELMAN: Marching With Sherman (2012)

Marching With Sherman: Through Georgia and the Carolinas With the 154th New York by Mark H. Dunkelman. Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Cloth, ISBN: 0807143782. $39.95. By now most accounts of…