The true issue or "thats whats the matter"

A political cartoon issued shortly after the Democratic Party's nomination of George Brinton McClellan as their Presidential nominee in the election of 1864. The cartoon depicts McClellan as the peace candidate. Crying "The Union must be preserved at all hazards!", McClellan attempts to reconcile Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis who are fighting over a large map of the United States with a tear down the center. Pulling at the Northern side of the map, Lincoln declares, "No peace without Abolition!" Grasping the Southern side of the map, Davis retorts, "No peace without Separation!!" Published late in the war during the 1864 Presidential campaign, this political cartoon depicts Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis pulling on opposite ends of a map, tearing the United States in two pieces. Gen. George McClellan, who ran on the Democratic ticket challenging Lincoln, is positioned in an intervening stance in the backgroun-This image, incorporating caricature and map, graphically demonstrates the significance of the Civil War to the course of American history. This conflict almost dissolved a tenuous union forged eighty-five years earlier. The sectional tensions of the 1840s and 1850s led to the secession of eleven southern states and four years of armed rebellion.
Courtesy of Boston Public Library