According to Marcy Sacks of Albion College, the Darktown representations "lampooned black people in order to discredit the urban migration of southern blacks" to rationalize northern Americans' withdrawal from reconstructionist ideals. In the early pre-Civil War period prints typically alternated between representing happy, contented enslaved people with representing the horrific conditions for enslaved people; Blacks were portrayed in propagandistic ways in support of certain political agendas rather than as people with their own concerns. As the Civil War drew nearer, Blacks were represented as "the cause of sectional politics" and finally of the war itself. During the war, "respect for Negroes rose together with the hostility against the white southerner," and Blacks were portrayed as helping Union soldiers and spying for the Union.