Liberty, the fair maid of Kansas-in the hands of the "Border Ruffians."
Magee, John L.
artist
still image
Graphic
Political cartoons -- 1850-1860
pau
Philadelphia]
PA. Philadelphia
[publisher not identified]
[1856]
1856
monographic
eng
1 print : lithograph ; sheet 30 x 47 cm (11.75 x 18.25 in.)
Cartoon addressing the Democratic administration's responsibility for the violence in Kansas following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Depicts Democratic leaders as violent, proslavery invaders known as "Border Ruffians." In the center, a drunken President Franklin Pierce, armed with a tomahawk, knife, pistol, and rifle, hovers over "Liberty," depicted as a white woman, and tramples the American flag draped on her shoulders. Senator Lewis Cass, armed with a tomahawk, sword, knife, and rifle, looks at Liberty with his tongue sticking out. Liberty stretches her arms out and exclaims, “O Spare Me Gentlemen, Spare Me!!” They assure her that she will not be harmed. In the right, Senator Stephen Douglas scalps a dead, white man farmer, who carries a scythe in his left hand. In the left, Secretary of State William Marcy, attired in a “fifty-cent" trouser patch (a joke used by his political enemies referring to his use of state funds to repair his pants when he served as an associate justice for the Supreme Court of New York,) empty the pockets of a slain, white man settler. Presidential candidate James Buchanan, stating "Might makes right," steals the dead man’s watch. In the left background, a white woman settler, made insane by the violence, mistakes a border ruffian for her husband as they mock her, "Ho! ho! She thinks I'm her husband, we Scalped the Cus and she like a D--m fool went Crazy on it, and now she wants me to go to heaven with her, ha! ha! ha!" In the distance are additional scenes of violence and murder.
Title from item.
Artist and publication information supplied by Reilly.
Magee was a New York cartoonist and lithographer who eventually established his own lithographic firm in Philadelphia in 1850.
Buchanan, James
1791-1868
Caricatures and cartoons
Cass, Lewis
1782-1866
Caricatures and cartoons
Douglas, Stephen Arnold
1813-1861
Caricatures and cartoons
Marcy, William L. (William Learned)
1786-1857
Caricatures and cartoons
Pierce, Franklin
1804-1869
Caricatures and cartoons
United States
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Abolition movement
Kansas
1850-1860
Allegories
Destruction & pillage
Kansas
Farmers
Kansas
Liberty
Presidential elections
United States
1850-1860
Scalping
Kansas
Slavery
United States
Extension to the territories
Violence
Kansas
Kansas
Politics and government
1854-1861
5760.F.90
Library Company of Philadelphia | Print Department
Political Cartoons - 1856-9 [5760.F.90]
Reilly,
1856-9
Weitenkampf,
p. 115
Murrell, Graphic humour,
vol. 1, p. 190
Nevins and Weitenkampf, A Century of political cartoons,
p. 78
aacr
dcrmg
ppl
990405
20230913195651.0
66923
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