The full title of this 1873 parade was “Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of Species”, and its satire bristled against the post-Civil War changes in the South. Michael Taylor describes its identifiable characters on the Louisiana State University Special Collections site: "Ulysses S. Grant, for example, has been crossed with a caterpillar and lounges on a leaf smoking a cigar. General Benjamin Butler, the despised commander of the Union army in New Orleans during the Civil War, is shown in another cartoon dining with a party of bears and hyenas." The parade's political barbs did not go undetected, and it was ultimately blocked by police from crossing Canal Street. Among the costume drawings that survive in the Carnival Collection is Darwin himself as an ass, and one of a gorilla playing a banjo, a racist caricature that ridiculed the humanity of black people at a time when Reconstruction amendments were constitutionally affirming their rights. Within the Carnival whimsy was the use of its sumptuousness to elevate white Southerners as “kings” and “queens”, with finery and balls that excluded non-white participants.