hroughout the 1872 campaign, Nast continually alluded to a key slogan in
Greeley’s letter of May 20 accepting the Liberal Republican presidential
nomination. Underscoring the platform plank calling for amnesty of all former
Confederates, Greeley concluded:
with the distinct understanding that, if elected, I shall be president not of
a party, but of the whole people, I accept your nomination, in the confident
trust that the masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp
hands across the bloody chasm which has too long divided them, forgetting that
they have been enemies in the joyful consciousness that they are, and must
henceforth remain, brethren.
This was hardly a new thought for the Tribune’s founder. From the
week of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865,
Greeley’s strongest message had been a plea for lasting peace. In an editorial
published on Friday morning April 14, 1865, he urged President Lincoln to
administer a benign Reconstruction policy in the South. In a line anticipating
the core appeal of his challenge to Grant seven years later, the editor called
on Lincoln to say, “Slavery having through Rebellion committed suicide, let the
North and South united to bury its carcass, and then clasp hands across the
grave.” (The president was fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth that evening.)
The first of the series of “clasping hands” caricatures by Nast appeared in
the July 20, 1872 issue of Harper’s Weekly, available on newsstands July
10, the day Greeley and running mate Gratz Brown were nominated by the Democrats
in Baltimore. Taking its title from a Greeley nickname, “Old Honesty,” the
cartoon makes no reference to a “bloody chasm,” but features clasping hands.
Greeley has turned away from Liberal Republicans Reuben Fenton and Carl Schurz
(right background) to be introduced by Whitelaw Reid, his campaign manager, to a
succession of urban ruffians with whom the candidate clasps hands. The unsavory
group is characterized in Nast’s caption by a hostile quote from the Democratic
New York World of June 6: “If he [Greeley] does still think that all the
vilest classes (‘blacklegs, pugilists, keepers of dens, criminals,
shoulder-hitters, rowdies, burglars,’ etc. etc.), all the scum of the community,
are drawn to the Democratic party by ‘a sympathetic chord,’ he disgraces himself
in asking for Democrats suffrages [i.e., votes].” Signs on the back wall in the
cartoon follow the precedent of Nast’s “Battle of Dorking” by
referring to the candidate’s last name as “Greedey.”
On July 11, the day after “Old Honesty” was published, a remarkable, page-one
illustration appeared in the Greeley’s New York Tribune over a headline
reading “The Liberal Democracy” and a news report of the Democrats’ endorsement
of the Liberal Republican ticket and platform. The roughly drawn engraving
shows a white hand and a black hand clasping, and was probably an irresistible
signal to cartoonist Nast that he now might proceed to explore the graphic
possibilities of “clasp hands across the bloody chasm.”