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Just as Polk became probably the third best-loved figure in the Confederacy (after Lee and Jackson) he became unlike them-a hated symbol in the North. This was particularly true among his own Episcopal brethren, to whom the idea of a high priest leading troops was particularly odious.
This cartoon, which I think appeared first in the "Church Intelligencer," portrays a man both vicious and ridiculous, whose charger is trampling the revered canons of the Church. The implication in the caption that he headed the "division" of the Church is not accidental.
The venomous nature of Northern opinion of Polk, so well exemplified here, might well have prevented the reunion of the Northern and Southern dioceses at the touch-andgo convention of 1865, had he not died (by God's direct intervention, according to Northern sermons) in the war.