As a leader of the Liberal Republican bolt against President Ulysses S. Grant, Greeley appears as the title character, who "mounted into the Windsor Chair on which he had previously been seated, and addressed the club he himself had founded."  In place of the fifteen individuals represented in Seymour’s steel-plate etching, Nast’s Greeley-Pickwick is surrounded by an ill-matched group of Liberal Republicans, Democrats, and mavericks, each with his own agenda.  The banner overhead aptly begins, "Extremes Meet Here." The cartoon's subtitle, with its mixed metaphors, is taken verbatim from Greeley’s Tribune editorial of January 29, 1872.

The placards on the walls range from "The Millennium Has Come" to "After This—Peace" (on the drapery valence), the latter being a reference to Greeley’s appeal for universal amnesty of former Confederates. The alleged hypocrisy of the Liberal Republican Convention is emphasized by juxtaposing posters proclaiming liberal high-mindedness—"The Liberal Infallibles" (an allusion to the 1869 decree of Papal infallibility)—with signs promoting political expediency—"Anything to Beat Grant"; and by placards pointing out the contradictory nature of the convention-goers: free-traders and protectionists, Democratic Republicans and Republican Democrats. 

Although this cartoon features Greeley, the poster on the left-back wall, reading (in part) "For Vice Pres. A Protectionist," puts Nast in line with most political observers who expected Greeley, a trade protectionist, to be selected as the convention’s vice-presidential nominee.  In fact, Greeley's operatives won him the presidential nomination, which was also endorsed by the Democratic National Convention a month later.