The way that the cartoon came to be was something like this: Once Ben: Perley Poor, the famous correspondent of the Boston _Journal_, and Richard J. Hinton, a Washington journalist, were both active and earnest on the side of the Republican ticket. Hinton was the press secretary of the Congressional and National committees of his party, and is fond nowadays of asserting that the “campaign of education,” then carried on under his direction, was the active cause of the destruction of the franking privilege that followed during the first session of Congress in Grant’s second term. Between these two keen-witted “Knights of the Quill,” it was decided to prepare and publish a campaign document containing choice extracts from all the various denunciations of the Democracy which had appeared in the columns Mr. Greeley edited. Major Poor was clerk of the Printing Records Committee of Congress; he knew where the files were. A score of searchers and copyists were employed, and in a few days a huge document of nearly two hundred pages was put into type. A bundle of revises was sent to Nast by the press secretary with a request for a cartoon. They were returned at once with the famous picture of Mr. Greeley with the bowl and the long handled _Tribune_ spoon, from which he was, politically speaking, thus made to sup sorrow of his own making. Petroleum V. Nasby’s letters--to these, next to the cartoons of Thomas Nast, will the historian undoubtedly give credit in their influence in inspiring people with enthusiasm for the cause of the Union. Indeed, a member of Mr. Lincoln’s cabinet, the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Boutwell, said in a public speech shortly after the war: “The rebellion was put down by three forces: the army and the navy of the United States, and the letters of Petroleum V. Nasby.” [Illustration] Petroleum V. Nasby was the _nom de plume_ of David R. Locke of Ohio. At the beginning of the Civil War he was a young and obscure man, editing a little country paper in the interior of Ohio. It occurred to him that it would be a good idea to write a series of letters, one a week, exposing and ridiculing the Democratic party. These letters pretended to be written in earnest by a Confederate War office-seeker. They succeeded in deceiving even the County Democrats for a time. One meeting of the faithful framed a resolution commending the fidelity to Democratic principles shown in the Nasby letters, but urging Mr. Nasby, for the sake of policy, not to be so outspoken. The sarcasm was so broad that it is difficult, if one reads them to-day for the first time, to understand how the most illiterate partisans could mistake them. But at a time when men’s passions were red hot, and their prejudices volcanic, they were universally applauded by the upholders of the Union.