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Salt River Gazette—Extra.

[Philadelphia, October 9, 1867]. Illustrated broadside, 12.125” x 8.125” (sheet size), backed with Japanese tissue. CONDITION: Good, old folds, repairs to small losses, mainly at edges.

An illustrated broadside employing various racist tropes to explain local Republican election losses in Philadelphia in 1867, here characterized as the death of the “Great Negro Party.”

The broadside consists of a series of captioned wood-engravings, including the head of an African American man above a coffin accompanied by the birth and death dates of the Republican party (“Born, 1856—Died, Oct. 8, 1867”); a black dandy commenting “Golly! Dis Child make ‘em sick dis time”; “a Scene at the Broad St. League House” depicting an interracial marriage between a white woman and an African American man, with the minister complaining “Marriage is a contract. I must do this or be fined,” to which the groom replies “Massa, you must marry us. De law says so”; a vignette entitled “The Work of Congress repudiated by the People,” showing a white man chopping wood with a caption nearby reading “the white man must work to pay his taxes,” while an oversized African American man lounges nearby, with language above him reading “Uncle Sam will have to keep me. Freedom and No Work. White women. Idleness. Whiskey”; a “statue to be erected in front of the Union League House” showing a black woman on a donkey or a small bedraggled horse (the Union League was founded to support the policies of Abraham Lincoln); and others.

At least two of these images previously appeared elsewhere. The dandy originally appeared as an illustration captioned “S.S. Sanford in One of his Great Delineations of Ethiopian Character” in “Our Day,” an 1860 minstrel show circular for Sam S. Sanford’s Opera House. The statue was published in the “Original Comicalities” section of the June 1854 edition of “Graham’s Magazine” bearing the title “Woolly Equestrian Statue of the late Mrs. Joyce Heth.” “Mrs. Heth, an early attraction of P.T. Barnum from 1835 until 1836, claimed that she was over 100 years old and a nanny to George Washington” (Library Company).

A virtual shotgun blast of racist tropes typical of the surge in anti-African American sentiment in the immediate post-Civil War years.

REFERENCES: “The Salt River gazette---extra, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 1867. [graphic]: The Great Negro Party--born, 1856--died Oct. 8, 1867” at The Library Company of Philadelphia online.

Item #7022

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