"Let Us Clasp Hands Over the Bloody Chasm"

Nast skewers Liberal Republican presidential candidate Horace Greeley, depicted as a rotund, bewildered figure being steered toward a polling booth bannered "Anything to Beat Grant." Behind him, armed white men shoot down Black voters in a scene of open massacre — bodies strewn across the foreground, an American flag trampled underfoot. The caption quotes Greeley's own reconciliationist rhetoric about clasping hands across the sectional "bloody chasm," then ironically pairs it with a New York Tribune line declaring Georgia's result "certainly conclusive." Nast's point is savage: Greeley's Southern coalition suppresses Black suffrage through terrorism while mouthing unity. The Black figures are rendered with the broad caricature standard to illustrated weeklies of the era — a dehumanizing visual shorthand Nast deployed even while politically defending Black civil rights.