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"Cincinnatus"
H. G. the Farmer Receiving the Nomination from H. G. the Editor.
This Harper's Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast satirizes the presidential
ambitions of Horace Greeley, the maverick editor of the New York Tribune.
In the early 1870s, a faction of liberal Republicans became increasingly dissatisfied
with the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. The liberals opposed a
continued military presence in the South to enforce Reconstruction and objected
to what they considered to be Grant's expansionist foreign policy and
insufficient commitment to civil service reform. On January 24, 1872, Senator Carl Schurz of
Missouri issued a call for a national
convention of liberals to nominate a candidate for president. The two
leading possibilities were former diplomat Charles Francis Adams of
Massachusetts and Supreme Court Justice David Davis of Illinois.
When this cartoon appeared, Greeley was thought to be a possible
vice-presidential candidate, but not considered seriously as a presidential
contender. His depiction (on the left) as a farmer alludes to his
residence on a farm near Chappaqua, New York, where he applied experimental scientific methods to
agriculture. In early 1871, he
published his findings in a book called What I Know About Farming.
Cartoonist Thomas Nast plays on the title, using "What I Know About …"
in a series of cartoons to mock Greeley’s pretensions to expertise in various
subjects. Here, "What I Know About The Presidency" sticks out of the
pocket of Greeley-the-editor (right).
The cartoon's title--"Cincinnatus"--refers to the ancient Roman
general who selflessly left his farm to serve his country, and is a play on the
chosen site of the Liberal Republican convention, Cincinnati, Ohio. On the
right of Greeley-the-editor stand (left to right): Schurz, Senator Reuben
Fenton of New York, and Sinclair Tousey, owner of the American News
Company. The latter two were supporters of Greeley, but Schurz backed
Adams.
At the Liberal Republican convention on May 3, 1872, Greeley's managers
secured the presidential nomination for their candidate, to the shock of many in
the press and public. For one thing, the largely free-trade
Liberal Republicans had chosen a fierce trade protectionist as their standard-bearer.
Moreover, the Tribune editor had virtually no experience in government,
was known for his support of a wide variety of (at the time) fringe ideas, from vegetarianism to spiritualism, and had left a
massive paper trail of controversial and sometimes contradictory public
statements for the press and his political enemies to pick over.
On July 10, a weakened Democratic party, with no other viable candidate, also
nominated Greeley for president. It was a dual-nomination for the
editor-farmer, just as Nast's cartoon predicts. The regular Republicans
nominated Grant for a second term.
The presidential campaign of 1872 degenerated into a mudslinging melee, epitomized in the
anti-Greeley cartoons of Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly and the
anti-Grant cartoons of Matt Morgan in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
Greeley partisans called Grant a
dictator and a drunk, while the president’s forces portrayed the editor as a
flake and a traitor (for calling for a truce during the Civil War and bailing
Jefferson Davis out of prison after the war). At the end of the campaign, Greeley complained, "I
have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly knew whether I was running for the
presidency or the penitentiary." Grant could have said much the same.
A few weeks after the losing the election, an exhausted and disheartened
Greeley, whose wife had died during the campaign in October, died at his Chappaqua home.
Robert C. Kennedy
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