G. W. Bromley & Co. of New York published this 1864 lithograph, No. 3 in a numbered run of "Political caricature" prints for the McClellan side. A "Democracy" engine pulls a "Union" train toward the White House past a Republican train wrecked on rocks labeled "Emancipation" and "Confiscation."
Content note: the print's captions use a racial slur and the label "Miscegenationists." The archive notes the slur but does not transcribe it, and this page does not supply it.
What the print shows
Two trains, one track to the White House. The winning one is labeled "Union," pulled by an engine named "Democracy," and carries George B. McClellan with a carload of cheering passengers. The losing one, the Republican train, has come off the rails onto rocks marked "Emancipation" and "Confiscation." The wreck lies beneath the words "$400,000,000 public debt." The passengers' captions call the Republicans "Miscegenationists," use a slur for Black Americans, and close the matter with a line of their own.
The archive gives that closing line as Thus ends the Abolition Party!
It does not give a full transcription of the other captions, and this page does not reconstruct them.
Who made it
G. W. Bromley & Co. of New York published it as No. 3 of a series. The archive files it under the Lincoln administration and the 1864 election, for the Democratic side. The Civil War print case study places it beside a companion in the same series, Miscegenation or the millennium of abolitionism, and beside the Republican answer from Martin W. Siebert, Union and Liberty! And Union and Slavery!
How to read it
The archive tags the print for bandwagon, name-calling, and straw man. The bandwagon is the train itself, already moving and already full. The straw man is the Republican wreck: the party is reduced to two words, emancipation and confiscation, and both are drawn as rocks. Nothing on the rails mentions that the war was being fought to keep the Union together, which is the word printed on the Democrats' own carriage.
The name-calling matters most. "Miscegenationists" borrows the title word of a hoax. Late in 1863 two men at the Democratic New York World, David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, put out an anonymous pamphlet written as if by Republican abolitionists, urging racial intermarriage. Democratic speakers and papers then quoted it as the Republican plan. Bromley's caption takes the pamphlet's title word and hangs it on the whole opposing party. A label made from a lie, set beside a slur, is a racist appeal. It should be called one.
It is also worth recording what did not happen. The print was sold openly in New York in the middle of a war, against the sitting president, and the election it predicted went ahead on schedule. Lincoln won it.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Political caricature. No. 3, The abolition catastrophe. Or the November smash-up, 1864. G. W. Bromley & Co., New York.
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. loc.gov/item/2008661681, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain by age.
- FRAME case study on Union and Confederate print, 1861 to 1865, for the Bromley series, the Miscegenation pamphlet and its authors, and the 1864 result, as rewritten on this site.
