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Title: Southern chivalry - argument versus club's
Description: Cartoon critically addressing the Brooks-Sumner Affair in which Southern Congressman Preston S. Brooks caned antislavery Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate on May 26, 1856. Brook's "chivalrous" attack on Sumner was a reprisal for Sumner's two-day speech, "The Crime against Kansas," which attacked the violence occurring in Kansas over the issue of slavery; the South; and Brook's uncle, Andrew Butler. Depicts Sumner, head bloodied, quill in his raised hand and clutching a paper symbolically inscribed "Kansas.," He is held to the ground by Butler whose face is obscured by his raised arm and hand that holds his cane above his head. Butler is posed in mid-strike. Members of Congress observe in the background, some laughing, some scowling, with one member raising his hands in surrender from another who has his fist and cane raised., Title from item., Date inferred from content., Originally part of American political caricatures, likely a scrapbook, accessioned 1899. Collection primarily comprised of gifts from Samuel Breck, John A. McAllister, and James Rush., Description revised 2021., Access points revised 2021., Part of digital collections catalog through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, Governor, 2013-2014., Magee was a Philadelphia lithographer who established his own lithographic firm in Philadelphia in 1850.
Creator: Magee, John L., artist
Date: [1856]
Location: Library Company of Philadelphia | Print Department Political Cartoons - 1856-3W [5760.F.105]

Title: Liberty, the fair maid of Kansas-in the hands of the "Border Ruffians."
Description: 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., Originally part of American political caricatures, likely a scrapbook, accessioned 1899. Collection primarily comprised of gifts from Samuel Breck, John A. McAllister, and James Rush., Description revised 2021., Access points revised 2021., Part of digital collections catalog through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, Governor, 2013-2014., Magee was a New York cartoonist and lithographer who eventually established his own lithographic firm in Philadelphia in 1850.
Creator: Magee, John L., artist
Date: [1856]
Location: Library Company of Philadelphia | Print Department Political Cartoons - 1856-9 [5760.F.90]

Title: The Cincinnati platform, or the way to make a new state in 1856
Description: Antislavery cartoon criticizing presidential nominees James Buchanan and John C. Breckenridge's support of pro-slavery forces over freesoilers in the violent political struggle in "Bleeding Kansas" during the Democratic Convention of 1856 in Cincinnati. Depicts a pro-slavery militia, carrying a flag labeled "Kansas and Liberty," that has marshalled a group of shackled, enslaved African American men who wear loin-cloths. Several of them clasp their hands together and look with pleading expressions at the white militiaman, behind them, and who carries a whip in his left hand and drives them forward. They march toward a settlement, which has a "Free Soil and Fremont" flag where homes burn and settlers and cattle lay wounded or dead. In the right is the corpse of an assaulted, white mother, who lies on the ground with her breasts exposed. Her naked, dead baby lies face down over her left arm. In the upper left, Buchanan and Breckenridge, standing in front of seated convention delegates on a platform, oversee the violence and comment about the freesoilers being a curse to the country who would surely leave if forced to work for "10 cents a day.", Title from item., Date inferred from content., Copyright statement printed on recto: Entered in according to act of congress in the Clerk’s Office of the district Court for the Eastern District of Penna. By I. [sic.] Childs., Originally part of American political caricatures, likely a scrapbook, accessioned 1899. Collection primarily comprised of gifts from Samuel Breck, John A. McAllister, and James Rush., RVCDC, Description revised 2021., Access points revised 2021., Part of digital collections catalog through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, Governor, 2013-2014.
Date: [1856]
Location: Library Company of Philadelphia | Print Department Political Cartoons - 1856-10W [5760.F.95]

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