Death at the Polls, and Free from "Federal Interference"

A skeleton in a wide-brimmed hat and boots—labeled "The Shotgun"—stands triumphant atop a ballot box marked "Suffrage," rifle in hand. Around him Nast plasters the composition with sardonic placards: "Brute Might Makes Right," "Shoot Suffrage to Death," and a mocking inversion of Lincoln's Gettysburg phrase—"A government of the people, for the people, and by the people, to be shot to death?" Trampled beneath the figure lie documents reading "Freedom," "Liberty," and "The Polls." References to the Yazoo Gun, the KKK, and "free shooting on election day" indict Southern Democrats for using armed intimidation to suppress Black Republican voters during Reconstruction's violent unraveling. The caption's quotation marks around "federal interference" drip with sarcasm: Nast argues that withdrawing federal troops from the South under Hayes's reconciliation policy handed elections to white-supremacist terror, not to democratic self-governance.