A Group of Vultures Waiting for the Storm to "Blow Over" — "Let Us Prey"

Nast draws the Tammany Hall ring as a cluster of vultures with human faces perched on a cliff ledge during a lightning storm, huddled over a carcass labeled New York Treasury. Scattered beneath them are bones marked Law, Justice, and Tax Payer. The central figure — Boss Tweed — dominates as the fattest bird, his bulk signaling the scale of his graft. His associates crouch beside him, waiting for public outrage to pass. The caption's pun, "Let Us Prey," condenses Nast's entire argument: these men are not politicians but predators, and patience is their only remaining strategy. Nast renders Tweed's associates with hooked-nose caricature rooted in anti-Irish and anti-Semitic visual conventions common in illustrated press of the 1870s — a reminder that reform cartooning and ethnic slander coexisted without contradiction in Gilded Age print culture.