Compromise—Indeed!

Published in the weeks before the Compromise of 1877 resolved the disputed Hayes-Tilden presidential election, this wood engraving captures the violent intimidation surrounding that crisis. Four disembodied hands—a visual device Nast favored for anonymous menace—crowd the frame: one levels a revolver, another grips a club, a third clutches threatening handbills reading Tilden or Blood, while a fourth holds papers listing fraudulent vote tallies. Pasted-in newspaper scraps quote Ben H. Hill's warning that "our constitutional system is on a magazine of powder." The bottom caption, Compromise—Indeed!, drips with sarcasm: Nast argues that Democrats threatening bloodshed over Samuel Tilden's disputed 185 electoral votes are not offering compromise but coercion at gunpoint. The threat here is cast as white Democratic demagoguery.