The Insult Returned

After Ulysses S. Grant's landslide re-election crushed the Liberal Republican movement, Nast settled scores with characteristic relish. At left, a pile of defeated figures—Carl Schurz, August Belmont, Reuben Fenton, Lyman Trumbull, Thomas Tipton, and allies—sprawl in a tangle of hats, papers labeled Envy, Malice, Slander, and Misrepresentations. One figure, likely Schurz, wears a sunburst halo of wild hair and spectacles; another screams open-mouthed at the ground. A placard catalogs the campaign's humiliations, quoting the N.Y. Tribune conceding the Liberal triumph was "postponed." Columbia, robed in white, stands over them with cold authority while Uncle Sam waves his hat in triumph at the Capitol gate. The caption quotes the Cincinnati Convention's own boast—"it did not name the Next President"—thrown back as verdict. No ethnic caricature appears; the figures are individualized as recognizable political enemies, Nast's preferred mode when targeting educated white reformers he considered traitors to Reconstruction.