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“On To Washington!”
No caption
This cartoon appeared a month before The New York Times began
a series of exposes on Tweed Ring corruption, which provoked cartoonist
Thomas Nast's all-out assault on Tammany Hall in Harper's Weekly.
Here, Governor John Hoffman is a cigar-store Indian whose presidential
candidacy is
furtively pushed through the backwoods by William "Boss" Tweed
and his henchmen. On the White House portico, President Ulysses S. Grant sits
placidly reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar, while a poster on the
pillar promotes his reelection. Looming in the background is the
equestrian statue of President Andrew Jackson, a frequent Nast symbol of
the political spoils system.
Hoffman
entered politics early in his life, and at the age of twenty became a member of
the state central committee for the Democratic
Party.
After being admitted to the state bar on his twenty-first birthday, he
moved to New York City to establish the law firm of Woodruff, Leonard, and Hoffman. In 1860, Hoffman was
elected the youngest recorder (judge) in the city’s history and presided over
the Draft Riot trials in 1863. His
reputation was so high that he was endorsed for reelection by the Republican
party as well as both factions of the Democratic party (Tammany and Mozart), and
received nearly 95 percent of the vote total.
In
1865, Hoffman defeated three other candidates to become mayor of New York City.
In 1866, while still serving his first mayoral term, he ran
unsuccessfully for governor as the Democratic challenger to Republican incumbent
Reuben Fenton. After being
reelected mayor in 1867, he again ran for governor in 1868, this time defeating
his Republican opponent, John Griswold, by a comfortable majority. Hoffman was reelected governor in 1870, but thereafter his
reputation became tainted by his association with the corrupt Tweed Ring.
At the end of his second term, Hoffman retired from active politics and
returned to the practice of law.
Besides warning that the Tweed Ring was angling for Hoffman to
capture the presidency in 1872, this cartoon jibes Horace Greeley, editor
of the New York Tribune, who had recently been floating his own
trial balloon for a presidential nomination. The cartoon's title
mimics the "On to Richmond!" headlines that the Tribune
ran early in the Civil War in which Greeley urged the Union to focus on
capturing the Confederate capital. After the Union's
major loss at the Battle of Bull Run in late July 1861, the slogan became a
shorthand phrase for rash optimism.
In
this cartoon, the financier Jim Fisk, armed with tomahawk and
dagger, leads the Tammany war party.
His belt, perhaps filled with wampum, reminds viewers of his
involvement in the Erie Railroad Ring. He is restrained by a perspiring Peter Sweeny,
head of New York City's Department of Public Parks, who has grabbed Fisk’s foot after
dropping the front handle of the mobile platform on which Hoffman holds a
tomahawk and a totem (sacred symbol) of the Tammany Tiger. Tweed, the real
chief, struggles to push from behind,
as Oakey Hall, mayor of New York City, is a court fool slithering on the ground, perhaps on the verge of
kissing the Boss’s foot.
Others
in the main group include: Manton
Marble, editor of the New York World,
crouching behind Sweeny; publisher Sinclair Tousey, leaning on the tree behind
Tweed; John McCloskey, Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, beside Hall; and,
bringing up the rear (left to right) are lawyer Thomas G. Shearman, counsel to
financier Jay Gould and co-founder of the prestigious law firm of
Shearman & Sterling; Judge George Barnard; and Gould himself, armed
with a rifle. Richard Connolly, New York City comptroller (treasurer), is conspicuously absent from the
picture.
On
the day following its publication (June 8), The
New
York Times called their readers attention to Nast’s recent cartoon:
"Harper's
Weekly
ought to be in everybody’s hands. The
current number contains one of Nast's
best drawings—a drawing which would alone suffice to gain a large reputation
for its designer."
Robert C. Kennedy
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