In the cartoon, Nast’s harsh, malicious image depicts Horace Greeley smirking over the anticipated miseries of defeated Confederate soldiers returning home after losing the Civil War.  They find their land devastated, their homes destroyed, and their families suffering in abject poverty and despair.  Undeterred by the cartoon’s message, desperate Democrats accepted the entire Liberal-Republican platform at their own convention, which Greeley could view with guarded satisfaction as a necessary step forward.  Nast, however, perceived this coalition as a cynical repudiation of virtually everything for which the Tribune editor had stood previously.

This Nast cartoon figured in at least two large broadsides (posters) during the 1872 campaign.  The Republican State Central Committee of Georgia issued one, accompanied by numerous Tribune editorial extracts on a variety of inflammatory subjects.  The Republican National Committee distributed 1½ million copies of another single-sheet piece of campaign literature, particularly targeting the South, in the final weeks of the campaign.  It consisted of Nast’s wood engraving on one side and 25 excerpts from Tribune editorials and Greeley’s other writings and speeches on the other side.  The cartoonist later concluded that this satire of Horace Greeley gloating over the devastation of the post-war South was one of the most effective he had ever drawn.