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[Johnston, David Claypoole.]

A Proslavery Incantation Scene or Shakspeare Improved. See Macbeth.

[United States, 1856]. Lithograph, 14” x 21.5”. CONDITION: Good+, light toning to right margin, not affecting image, .75” tears at left, right, and bottom edges, occasional light creases, mostly in the margins.

A scarce presidential campaign cartoon by David Claypoole Johnston, using the cauldron scene in Macbeth to condemn the seemingly unstoppable march of pro-slavery forces in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the presidential election of 1856.

This print depicts Democratic politicians and cronies gathered, like the witches of Macbeth, around a cauldron emblazoned with the words: “Double, double, Free State trouble; Till Fremont men are straw & stubble.” Most prominent among them is James Buchanan, who ultimately beat first time Republican candidate and Free Soiler John C. Frémont. Standing on a raised platform, Buchanan clutches the 1854 Ostend Manifesto (advocating the seizure of Cuba from Spain in order to expand slave territory and representation) and leads the “pro slavery incantation”:

Ere we begin our mystic course,

Bear this in mind, that indorse

The laws of Kansas now in force.

Now round about the cauldron go,

And in its bubbling liq[u]id throw

Ingredients fetid, rank, and foul:

To make the Hellbroth, hiss and growl.

Double double Freesoil trouble,

Till Slavery crush the Freesoil bubble.

Next to Buchanan sits Stephen A. Douglas, who introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and who holds a whip and manacles, chanting:

To see the blood of Freemen spill,

To hear the widows cries, so shrill,

To know my Kansas-Nebraska bill,

Has caus’d these woes; to me is joy,

Here and at home in Illinois.

A crowd of thuggish men gather round the cauldron, continuing the incantation with calls for additions to the cauldron, including “forked tongue of Freesoil adder,” “fillet of a Freesoil frog,” “Tail of skunk, from a Freesoil state,” and so on. One man has “for sale” and “ran away” slave notices in his coat pocket; another grips the cane of Preston Brooks—used to beat Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, and here labeled “Badge of Chivalry”—and raises a handful of straw to illustrate the refrain “Till Free State men are straw and stubble.” A third fuels the cauldron’s fire with anti-slavery papers including “Quincy’s Letters,” “N.Y. Tribune,” “Beecher Sermons,” and more.

David Claypoole Johnston (ca. 1797–1865) was an important American political cartoonist. He was born in Philadelphia to storekeeper, printer, and theater-treasurer William P. Johnston, and English-born actress Charlotte Rowson, and after an apprenticeship to a Philadelphia engraver and a brief brush with acting, began his career as an artist and engraver with the newly-established Boston firm of Pendleton—the first lithographer in the city. In 1828 Johnston began publishing on his own account, with a series titled Scraps, based in concept (though not in style) on British caricaturist George Cruikshank’s Scraps and Sketches. This was an immense success, doing “more to enhance Johnston’s reputation than any other of his drawings or publications, and earned him the sobriquet of ‘The American Cruikshank’” (Brigham, p. 103). Johnston was also a landscape artist and drawing teacher (counting among his students the young Louisa May Alcott), but he is best remembered as “comic invention’s first great American master” (Tatham, p. 14).

OCLC records holdings at the University of South Carolina, the Folger Library, AAS (two examples), and Princeton. We locate others at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Syracuse University.

A scarce allegorical print condemning the disproportionate power of pro-slavery Democrats and their contempt for Free Soiler Republicans.

REFERENCES: Not in Reilly. Weitenkampf, p. 115. Brigham, Clarence S. “David Claypoole Johnston: The American Cruikshank,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. 50, No. 1 (1941); McKenzie, David. “Macbeth and the End of Slavery in the United States” at the Folger Shakespeare Library online.

Item #9444

Price: $2,500.00

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