Cartoonist Thomas Nast vs. Candidate Horace Greeley Content Page

The Democratic National Convention


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“The Deathbed Marriage”

	Source: Harper’s Weekly
	Date: July 27, 1872, p. 584

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Complete HarpWeek Explanation:
“The Death-Bed Marriage” of Greeley’s Liberal-Republicanism to “The Daughter of Democracy” took place at the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore on July 10, 1872, and was duly celebrated in this grim caricature. Longtime Republican Horace Greeley kneels to take, for better or worse, the moribund hand of the Democratic Party, which has nominated him as its presidential candidate. The sarcastic use of “Nigger” in the subtitle refers to an 1868 Nast cartoon, “Would You Marry Your Daughter to a Nigger?” which wondered if the anti-black Democratic Party might nominate civil rights veteran, Salmon Chase. (They did not.) Here, the term refers to Greeley, the former abolitionist, and underscores the abandonment of his principles.

In the left-foreground the Democratic/woman’s dowry of “Fraudulent Votes,” “Stuffed Ballot Boxes,” and “Tammany Ring Money Stolen From the People” is stacked in crates and boxes. Complementing the unhappy couple, an equally mismatched and grotesque wedding party of grieving Tammanyites, Democrats, and embittered Liberal Republicans are gathered to endure the moment. Behind Greeley on the right, Whitelaw Reid is holding the former editor’s trademark white hat and coat; the pocket of the latter contains a publication, “The Recollections of a Busy-Body, By H. G.”

The longhaired figure on the far right is Theodore Tilton, editor, evangelist, and lecturer. In his jacket pocket is a book, Life of Mrs. Woodhull, a biography Tilton had written about Victoria Claflin Woodhull. She was an outspoken advocate of women’s rights and free love, who in 1872 became the first woman nominated for president (running on the ticket of the Equal Rights Party). Shortly before the election, she revealed evidence of an affair between Tilton’s wife and the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, perhaps the most popular and well-known evangelist in the country. The scandalous revelations led to one of the nation’s most widely-reported and sensational trials.