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The Republican Party Going to the Right House.
New York: Currier & Ives, 1860. Lithograph, 13.375” x 17.875”. CONDITION: Very good, one .5” spot of discoloration to lower margin, a few very small marginal tears and a few old creases to margins at corners. A scarce 1860 presidential campaign cartoon depicting Abraham Lincoln being carried into a lunatic asylum on a rail, followed by the radical outcasts who support him. Loosely based on an anti-Frémont cartoon from the previous election cycle, this print satirizes the Republican Party platform represented by Lincoln and (it suggests) spearheaded by Horace Greeley. Carrying the tousle-haired Lincoln on a wooden rail over his shoulder, Greeley leads the way through a door labeled “Lunatic Asylum,” instructing his candidate: “Hold on to me Abe, and we’ll go in here by the unanimous consent of the people.” Lincoln, in turn, calls back to his followers: “Now my friends I’m almost in, and the millennium is going to begin, so ask what you will and it shall be granted.” At the front of the rag-tag group is a trio of moral degenerates: a long-haired, full-bearded man arm-in-arm with a sour-looking woman and a Mormon. The bearded man “claims to ‘represent the free love element, and expect to have free license to carry out its principles.’ The woman looks at Lincoln, saying ‘Oh! what a beautiful man he is, I feel a ‘passionate attraction’ every time I see his lovely face.’ The Mormon adds, ‘I want religion abolished and the book for Mormon made the standard of morality.’ They are followed by a dandified free black, who announces, ‘“De white man hab no rights dat cullud pussons am bound to spect,” I want dat understood.’ Behind him an aging suffragette says, ‘I want womans rights enforced, and man reduced in subjection to her authority.’ Next a ragged socialist or Fourierist, holding a liquor bottle, asserts, ‘I want everybody to have a share of everybody elses property.” At the end of the group are three hooligans, one demanding ‘a hotel established by the government, where people that aint inclined to work, can board free expense, and be found in rum and tobacco.’ The second, a thief, wants ‘the right to examine every other citizen’s pockets without interruption by Policemen.’ The last, an Irish street tough, says, ‘I want all the stations houses burned up, and the M.P.s killed, so that the bohoys can run with the machine and have a muss as they please’” (Reilly). OCLC records just two holdings, at the Library of Congress and the AAS. We locate another at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art. The example offered here is likely an earlier issue, as the phrase “I want everybody to have a share of everybody elses property”—as it reads on the examples at the LOC and AAS—is printed here as “everybody else, property.” REFERENCES: Reilly 1860-32; Weitenkampf, pp. 122–23; Gale 5546; Murrell, p. 119.
Item #7961
Price: $4,500.00
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