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Plate Number Twenty-six—This cartoon, "This Reminds Me of a Little Joke," published in Harper's Weekly, on September 17, 1864, recalls the extraordinary Presidential campaign of that year. There was, during the opening months of 1864, a determined and more or less noisy opposition to the renomination of Lincoln. This came from two sources—the radical abolitionists, who chafed at what they called the President's half-hearted policy in regard to slavery, and another element, which, while supporting the Union, believed that slavery should be let alone; but it shrank into insignificance as time went on, and when the Republican Convention met at Baltimore on June 7, Lincoln was renominated on the first ballot. The Democratic National Convention was held twelve weeks later in Chicago. A few days before it met President Lincoln said to a friend: "They must nominate a peace Democrat on a war platform, or a war Democrat on a peace platform." The convention chose the second of these alternatives. It adopted a platform which declared the war a failure and demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities, and it nominated for President the best known of all the war Democrats, General George B. McClellan. The latter's chances of election, whatever they may have been, disappeared within a fortnight of his nomination. The course of the war during the summer had been studded thickly with bloody and seemingly indecisive battles. Both in the East and the West the opposing armies were grinding in almost continuous struggle. But Sherman's capture of Atlanta and Farra-gut's entrance into Mobile harbor, proved to the people of the North that the end was in sight, and when the President called for five hundred thousand more men they came forward rapidly, a large and valuable percentage of them being volunteers who had served their time under previous enlistments. Long before election day it was evident that no prospect remained of Democratic success. When the polls were closed and the votes counted, Lincoln's enormous popular majority of more than 400,000 fairly buried the McClellan electoral tickets. Kentucky and Delaware, with New Jersey, testified their disgust with Emancipation, but they were of small account in an electoral college of 233 votes, wherein 212 were solidly against them.
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Plate Number Twenty-seven—This cartoon, "The American Brothers; or, How Will They Get Out of It," was published in Punch on November 5, 1864. It has, in the light of after events, a touch of humor not intended by the artist. When it was drawn, the belief was generally prevalent in England that Lincoln's defeat at the coming election was a foregone conclusion. Thus, this cartoon pictures Lincoln and Davis bound to adjacent benches by ropes, significantly labelled "Debts," but it was still wet from the press when Lincoln, as we have just seen, was re-elected by the largest majority in the electoral college ever given to a candidate.
