The Chicago Platform (1864)

A full broadsheet plate titled "The Chicago Platform: Union Failures," this composition arranges a dozen circular vignettes around a central figure — George B. McClellan, labeled as candidate for President, standing on a ship's deck. Each vignette illustrates a plank of the Democratic Party's 1864 peace platform as Nast interprets it: arbitrary military arrests, suppression of free speech, Confederate prisoners given lenient treatment, and enslaved Black people shown in chains or under the lash — Nast's argument being that Democratic peace would re-enslave them. Black figures appear in subordinate, suffering poses consistent with abolitionist propaganda imagery of the era, deployed here to condemn the Copperhead platform rather than to mock. Tattered Union flags frame the whole, signaling Democratic treachery. Nast frames McClellan's candidacy as capitulation to the Confederacy dressed in constitutional language.