Hamilton Fish — 'Consequential Damages'

Plate No. 185 in the Statesmen series depicts Hamilton Fish, U.S. Secretary of State under President Grant, rendered as a squat, broad-shouldered figure in a dark frock coat, holding a top hat at his side. The chromolithograph exaggerates his heavy brow, pendulous nose, and drooping jowls in the house style of the period — caricature conventions borrowed partly from physiognomic illustration, applied here without the overtly ethnic distortion the magazine reserved for Irish or Jewish subjects. The caption, 'Consequential Damages,' is a sharp legal pun: Fish had just negotiated the 1871 Treaty of Washington, which submitted American Civil War shipping claims against Britain — the so-called Alabama Claims — to international arbitration. Critics argued the consequential damages sought were grossly inflated. The cartoon treats him as pompous but formidable.