"The Insult Returned" (1872)

Days after Ulysses Grant's landslide re-election, Nast gloats over the collapse of the Liberal Republican movement. A stately female Columbia gestures dismissively toward a heap of tumbling men—representing Horace Greeley's defeated coalition—sprawled beneath a wall plastered with humiliating headlines: the New York Tribune's premature crowing about a "Liberal Triumph" and a placard naming the Cincinnati and Baltimore conventions that nominated Greeley and B. Gratz Brown. Scattered on the ground are papers labeled Envy, Malice, and Misrepresentation. The Capitol dome rises serenely in the background, Grant's Washington undisturbed. The caption quotes Greeley's own oratorical register back at his allies in mordant mockery. Nast's figures are broadly caricatured—wild hair, splayed limbs, gaping mouths—stock comic grotesquerie rather than ethnic caricature in this particular plate.