Republican Elephant

Thomas Nast, a German-born cartoonist was the originator of the elephant mascot for the Republican Party. He went to work for Harper's Weekly in New York in 1862 as a political cartoonist. He depicted the "Copperhead Democrats" as a donkey. He hated them because they opposed the Civil War and he felt they had too much power. He didn't feel that way about the elephant, though, because he felt it represented the party he held dear. But he had become disappointed and disillusioned with them because he felt they had strayed from social liberalism.

He had used the republican elephant in 1864 in some campaign literature for Abraham Lincoln and then again in Harper's in 1872. In 1874, he published the "Third Term Panic" cartoon depicting the donkey, in disguise, chasing the other animals into a pit labeled "Inflation" and "Chaos" with the elephant labeled "Republican Vote." In 1876, the republican elephant was a two headed elephant, having to choose the "Democratic Road" or the "Republican Road." In 1877, just before a very controversial presidential election of Rutherford B. Hayes, he published a picture of a battered elephant crouching before a democratic tombstone. Hayes was victorious, but not with the popular vote. His "Sacred Elephant" cartoon was a nostalgic depiction of his once loved party.

Nast introduced the republican elephant as the party symbol in 1877. Lincoln called him his "best recruiting sergeant" in his re-election of 1864. That year the Republican Party adopted the symbol and it remains so to this day.