# Lincoln with a schoolhouse, McClellan with a slave auction, 1864

Martin W. Siebert's 1864 wood engraving for the Republican side splits the election in two. Lincoln stands with a workman before a schoolhouse under "Union and liberty"; McClellan stands with Jefferson Davis beside a slave auction under "Union and slavery."

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      Union and liberty! And union and slavery!

      Lincoln with a schoolhouse, McClellan with a slave auction, 1864
      Martin W. Siebert's 1864 print sets Lincoln and a schoolhouse against McClellan, Jefferson Davis and a slave auction. A Republican either-or.

## Techniques named on the archive record

ScapegoatingFear appeal
      Date1864Made byMartin W. SiebertMediumPrintCountryUnited StatesRegimeLincoln AdministrationSourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceLibrary of Congress , retrieved October 2, 2026SourcePublic domain (published 1864; work is over 160 years old) Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
      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

  Martin W. Siebert's 1864 wood engraving for the Republican side splits the election in two. Lincoln stands with a workman before a schoolhouse under "Union and liberty"; McClellan stands with Jefferson Davis beside a slave auction under "Union and slavery."

## What the print shows

The sheet is a diptych. On one side Lincoln stands with a working man in front of a schoolhouse, under the heading of union with liberty. On the other McClellan stands with Jefferson Davis beside a slave auction, under the heading of union with slavery. The title supplies the whole argument: the Union will be restored either way, and the only question is what kind.

## Who made it

Martin W. Siebert cut the engraving in 1864. The archive files it under the Lincoln administration as a print made during the presidential race, aimed at the home public. The Civil War print case study notes that Siebert worked for the Republicans and G. W. Bromley & Co. for the Democrats, and that Currier & Ives sold to both.

## How to read it

The archive tags it for scapegoating and fear appeal. The target is the Democratic platform adopted at Chicago, which called for an end to hostilities after what it named four years of failure. Siebert's answer is that peace on those terms means peace with slavery, and he draws the candidate beside the Confederate president to make the point unmissable.

Part of that charge was fair and part was not. Fair: the archive reads the print as an attack on the platform's opposition to emancipation, and the question of what a negotiated peace would do to the enslaved was a real one. Not fair: McClellan's own acceptance letter of 8 September 1864 rejected an armistice without the Union restored, and the print leaves that out. The pairing with Davis is a picture of what Siebert feared, not of anything McClellan did. That is the same move the Democrats' printers made in reverse, when they reduced Lincoln to abolition alone.

Set it beside its Democratic counterpart, Bromley's Abolition Catastrophe, and the difference in the two sides' appeals is visible. Bromley's sheet sold racial fear built on a forged pamphlet. Siebert's sold the end of slavery, which was a just cause, and trimmed his opponent's record to do it. One standard covers both: each printer cut the other candidate down to his worst sentence, and only one of them did it with a slur.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, "Union and liberty! And union and slavery!", 1864. Martin W. Siebert.

- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. loc.gov/item/2008661670, 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 print's two scenes, the Chicago platform wording, and McClellan's acceptance letter of 8 September 1864, as rewritten on this site.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/union-and-liberty-1864/