On a whiskey jug, they seem like sensational warnings: vipers, dung beetles, a woman running for her life. Indulge and you’ll be dealing with this. But regular readers of the news in 1865, at the end of the American Civil War, would have understood the jug as a biting send-up of the southern Confederate States and their supporters in the North. Cornwall and Wallace Kirkpatrick, the brothers behind the designs, were Radical Republicans—basically the ultra-liberal Democrats of their day: anti-slavery, pro-equality progressives. And they pulled the scenes and characters straight out of the caustic but hilarious political cartoons published in the most Northern-leaning newspapers.
Even a bleary-eyed drinker would have recognized the man dashing across the jug as no lady. It’s Jefferson Davis, president of the southern Confederate States, who allegedly wore his wife’s clothes to escape Union soldiers. Adding insult to indignity, the Kirkpatricks left Davis’s genitals exposed. Adding injury to insult, someone later chipped them off.
The snakes are venomous copperheads, per the dots on their heads. “Copperhead” also referred to Northern sympathizers with the Confederate cause. Anna, Illinois, where the Kirkpatricks lived, was full of them—a vipers’ den. Here, the snakes have imprisoned a Northern soldier, yet the Union won the war. Another jab.
The damsel in classical Greek get-up, dreamily strumming a lyre, is Columbia, a personification of the United States. Her name derives from Christopher Columbus, then considered the “discoverer” of America. She appears here as an unnecessary reminder of who won the Civil War—and, more importantly, who lost.
Yes, that’s a ball of poop. Dung beetles lay their eggs in the stuff, roll it into a sphere, then bury it. Usually associated with Africa—the famous Egyptian scarab is a type of dung beetle—they were also a relatively common sight in agricultural America where there was plenty of dung to go around. Why this one is labeled “UNION” is unclear.