The Anna Pottery in Anna, Illinois is best known today for its eccentric wares, often laden with political and temperance sentiment. The most innovative of these objects are highly sculptural jugs, invariably designed with realistic writhing snakes, symbolic of the evils of drinking. This tour de force jug shows Union troops attempting to apprehend Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, disguised in the female attire he purportedly donned during his last escape. Bizarre yet strangely attractive, the jug speaks to the 19th-century passion for naturalism and American patriotism at the time of the Civil War, all wrapped up in an object indelibly linked to the Mississippi Valley, from its clay material to its subject matter.