The Modern Samson

Nast retells the Samson and Delilah story as Reconstruction-era electoral alarm. At center, a Black man—drawn in the broad, exaggerated caricature standard to illustrated press of the period, here consciously cast as heroic in physique if vulnerable in circumstance—lies half-wakened while the figure of "Southern Democracy," a scheming Delilah, holds aloft the shorn lock labeled "Suffrage." Behind her a statue of Andrew Johnson poses as a Black Americans' "Moses"—Nast's bitter irony. Rushing in from the left are armed Democrats: Wade Hampton with a torch, Nathan Bedford Forrest wearing a Fort Pillow medallion, a horned Seymour in a Klan breastplate bearing a pro-slavery Confederate flag, running mate Frank Blair similarly armored, Raphael Semmes, and Governor Hoffman clutching an Irish-Catholic ward heeler. The composition argues that the Democratic Party—Confederate generals, Klan leadership, and Tammany machines alike—conspired to strip Black male suffrage, newly won by the Fourteenth and nascent Fifteenth Amendments, before the freedman could rise to defend it.