Rare. There are examples of this print at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Boston Athenaeum, John Carter Brown Library (“trimmed beyond plate mark on all sides except for the top…repaired with tape on fold on back of sheet”) American Antiquarian Society (thought to be a restrike, see Stagg), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Clements Library (“imperfect: some foxing in margins, tears at edges of print”). Advertised in the Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser August 20th 1793.
The only copy of this print recorded in Rare Book Hub was at Heritage in 2022 and sold for $25,000 (“Some light toning is present and the edges are uneven with the left, top, and bottom exhibiting small tears. Some minor staining is barely visible at the bottom and top edges. At the back of the piece, tape is present along the top edge, and pieces of foreign paper have been affixed to the bottom right corner and center of the bottom edge, possibly to reinforce areas with tearing…We believe this is the only copy in private hands”)
A remarkably early American satirical caricature which continues to confound scholarship. The print references the pro-French sentiments of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans amidst the first stirrings of the bloody Terror of the French Revolution. The characters in this print are shown as “crackpots, anarchists, dreamers, millenarians, criminals” while an African-American man (named “Mungo”) looks on hoping that this will lead to his liberation.
The print shows thirteen, slightly grotesque, figures packed into a small space around a table while Satan looks on in the lower left corner (now unfortunately damaged). The group are supposed to represent a meeting of the antifederalist movement and includes a figure in the centre who exclaims, “To be or not to be a Broker is the question whether tis nobler in the mind to knock down dry goods with this hammer, or with this head, contrive some means of knocking down a Government and on its ruins raise myself to eminence and fortune, glorious thought thus to emerge from dirt to Gold.”
Alison Stagg in Prints of a New Kind, Political Caricature in the United States, 1789-1828, has impressively described this print and the “conflicting” scholarship that surrounds it:
“A problematic figure for scholars has been the individual placed above the group, with his arms raised and a gavel in his right hand, with the most likely candidates being Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr” (p.28)
Stagg has traced newspaper advertisements for the print in Boston, Philadelphia and New York in 1793 and suggests that the seeming imprint in the lower right-hand corner “New York Aug 16 1793” could in fact refer to the setting of the print and that rather than being a group of Philadelphia antifederalists it is in fact mocking a democratic club in New York. Stagg concludes: “What can be understood is that the subject matter found in some of these earliest caricature prints continues to confound even with information from newspapers and personal letters” (p.30)
John E. Ferling though is confident that the central figure represented here is Jefferson, describing it as, “the earliest known anti-Jefferson cartoon” (Adams Vs. Jefferson: the tumultuous election of 1800 (2004) p.55)
While Pascal Dupuy has noted:
“While the quality might be mediocre, this print demonstrates much of the ingenuity characteristic of English satirical prints during its golden era. Familiar features include the evocation of the Devil as the progenitor of radical ideology, the references to Shakespeare’s works, and the caricatural representation of well-known political figures in a clearly propagandist message” (Pascal Dupuy, “The French Revolution in American Satirical Prints”, Print Quarterly, Vol 15, No. 4 December 1998, p.376).
A manuscript note on the example of this print at the Library Company of Philadelphia states: “This Caricature the work of an Artist of our own Country is presented to the Library Company by the friends of that Institution.”
While the damage to this impression is unfortunate it does only obscure the price, seven words spoken by the figure of Satan and about twenty words on the banner displaying the “Creed of the Democratic Club.” It still remains a very striking, remarkably early and still contested political caricature from a ferocious period of political upheaval in the America.
