# The Great American Tanner, a pro-Grant Currier & Ives cartoon of 1868

The Great American Tanner is a pro-Grant cartoon published by Currier & Ives in 1868 from a sketch by Thomas Worth. Grant, in a tanner's apron, promises to "finish" Seymour and Blair in November, while a Tammany figure drawn as a Native American caricature holds Seymour and Confederate commanders say Grant has already tanned them.

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      The Great American Tanner

      The Great American Tanner, a pro-Grant Currier & Ives cartoon of 1868
      Currier & Ives, 1868: Grant in a tanner's apron vows to "finish" Seymour and Blair, set beside a Tammany caricature and three Confederate commanders.

## Techniques named on the archive record

Name-callingTransfer
      Date1868Made byCurrier & Ives (sketch by Thomas Worth)MediumCartoonCountryUnited StatesRegimeJohnson AdministrationSourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceLibrary of Congress , retrieved October 2, 2026SourcePublic domain (published 1868; over 150 years old); LOC records no known restrictions on publication Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
      Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

      Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  The Great American Tanner is a pro-Grant cartoon published by Currier & Ives in 1868 from a sketch by Thomas Worth. Grant, in a tanner's apron, promises to "finish" Seymour and Blair in November, while a Tammany figure drawn as a Native American caricature holds Seymour and Confederate commanders say Grant has already tanned them.

## The scene in the print

Content note: the figure labeled Tammany is a period caricature of a Native American, and the archive shows the print as published.

Ulysses S. Grant appears in a tanner's apron. According to the archive, he says he will "finish" Horatio Seymour and Francis P. Blair "early in November." Seymour is held by a figure in Native American dress labeled Tammany. A separate group of Confederate officers, named in the record as Lee, Pemberton and Buckner, tell the viewer that Grant has already "tanned" their hides.

The archive holds no transcription of the full lettering, so this page quotes only the words its description gives.

## Maker and record

Currier & Ives published the cartoon from a sketch by Thomas Worth. The Library of Congress holds it, and the archive retrieved the scan on 2 October 2026. It is public domain by age. FRAME files it under the 1868 election with a domestic audience and gives its purpose as "Demonize," with name-calling and transfer as the techniques.

## How the argument works

The joke is a pun on tanning a hide, and the argument is guilt by placement. The case against Seymour and Blair rests on where they are drawn. They are put in the hands of Tammany Hall and in the same frame as three Confederate commanders, and the viewer is left to connect them. That is transfer: the Democratic ticket borrows the reputation of the company it is drawn beside.

The way the cartoon draws Tammany deserves separate notice. It could have named Tammany with a label alone. Instead it put a political organization into a racial costume and let the caricature carry the insult. That insult falls on Native Americans as a people as well as on the New York organization the label names.

A voter in 1868 could fairly ask what a ticket's allies stood for. A print that answers by seating the opponent among former Confederate commanders asks him to vote on a feeling about the war rather than on the platforms. Both sides' printers worked the memory of the war in 1868. On the Republican side, Thomas Nast's Leaders of the Democratic Party set extracts from the men's own speeches under his caricatures; from the other direction, the anti-Republican Patriotism versus Bummerism answered with a graveyard and a slur. The campaign print hub sets the 1868 race beside the other elections of the century, and the gallery has the wider set.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, The Great American Tanner, 1868. Currier & Ives (sketch by Thomas Worth). Rights as recorded: public domain (published 1868); LOC records no known restrictions on publication.

- Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, item 2003674582, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/great-american-tanner-currier-ives-1868/