Greeley Cincinnatus

Nast stages a pointed split-identity joke: Horace Greeley the farmer—coatless, goat on a leash, squinting through spectacles—receives a scroll from Greeley the newspaper editor, who hands over 'The Democratic and Republican Parties…Nomination for the Presidency of the United States…Horace Greeley, 1872.' The Capitol dome looms in the background under the ironic banner 'Poetical Economy.' Behind the editor stand Carl Schurz, Reuben Fenton, and Jay Gould—strange bedfellows of the Liberal Republican movement—watching the self-congratulation. The Roman allusion to Cincinnatus (the farmer called from his plow to lead) frames Greeley's presidential ambitions as absurd vanity: a man nominating himself, applauded by opportunists. Nast considered Greeley dangerously naïve and his cross-party coalition a threat to Reconstruction's unfinished work.