Liberal Republicans Surrender

Captioned "A 'Liberal' Surrender — 'Any Thing to Beat Grant,'" this Nast plate skewers the Liberal Republican breakaway faction that nominated Horace Greeley to oppose Ulysses Grant in 1872. The composition stages a Civil War–era fortification as political battlefield: Liberal Republicans man the ramparts and operate a cannon against Grant's forces, yet their leader atop the parapet waves a "Truce / Surrender" flag toward the advancing enemy — figures representing the Ku Klux Klan and Tammany Hall, rendered on the right with the ethnic caricature conventions Nast routinely applied to Irish Democrats. The lower left shows caricatured Liberal politicians literally knocked off a board. Nast's argument is blunt: in their desperation to unseat Grant, the reform-minded Liberals were capitulating to the very white-supremacist and corrupt urban-machine forces Reconstruction was meant to defeat.