The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things

Nast draws an Irishman perched atop a barrel labeled Uncle Sam's Gun Powder, bottle of rum raised, torch at his back already igniting the fuse. Surrounding him are fragments of incendiary rhetoric: 'Everything obnoxious to us shall be abolished,' 'Our liberty has been taken away,' 'We must rule,' drawn from actual Fenian and Irish nationalist handbills. The composition equates Irish-American political agitation—specifically tensions following the Orange Riots of July 1871—with suicidal arson directed at the American republic itself. Nast, a Protestant German immigrant, was fiercely hostile to Tammany Hall's Irish Catholic base.