{"id":2899,"date":"2010-07-16T09:36:36","date_gmt":"2010-07-16T14:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=2899"},"modified":"2010-07-16T13:41:53","modified_gmt":"2010-07-16T18:41:53","slug":"the-national-game-three-outs-and-one-run-1860-political-cartoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2010\/07\/16\/the-national-game-three-outs-and-one-run-1860-political-cartoon\/","title":{"rendered":"“The national game. Three ‘outs’ and one ‘run,'” 1860 political cartoon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The German artist, Louis Maurer, drew upon an American sport\u2014baseball\u2014for this pro-Lincoln political cartoon, which Currier & Ives published in September 1860, only two months before the presidential election of 1860<\/a>. Maurer created a parody of the four main presidential candidates (from left to right): Constitutional Union Party candidate John Bell<\/a>, Northern Democratic Party candidate Stephen A. Douglas,<\/a> Southern Democratic Party candidate John C. Breckinridge<\/a>, and Republican Party candidate Abraham Lincoln<\/a>.\u00a0 Lincoln, who stands on the home plate, reminds his opponents that they need a \u201cgood bat\u201d to hit a home run.\u00a0\u00a0 Each baseball player\u2019s bat represents the platform they are running on.\u00a0 The artist suggests that Lincoln\u2019s bat of \u201cequal rights and free territory\u201d is more powerful than Breckinridge\u2019s Southern \u201cslavery extension\u201d bat, Douglas\u2019 pro-states\u2019 rights bat of \u201cnon intervention\u201d or Bell\u2019s bat \u201cfusion,\u201d which the cartoon of Douglas refers to as a strategy to defeat Lincoln. All of the candidates also wear belts that either reflect a personal or party characteristic.\u00a0 For example, Douglas\u2019 belt reads \u201cLittle Giant,\u201d a nickname that became popular during the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates<\/a> for Illinois senator. On the other hand, Lincoln\u2019s \u201cWide Awake Club\u201d belt eludes to the group of young, Republican men of the same name who marched in Northern cities to gain support for Lincoln.\u00a0 To learn more about the \u201cWide Awakes\u201d and their influence as a grassroots political group, read this article<\/a> from the Journal of American History<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the end, Breckinridge admits defeat, holding his nose as he moves away from the skunk in the foreground. At the time, \u201cskunk\u2019d\u201d was used as a baseball term to describe a shutout or a large margin of victory.\u00a0 The baseball context of \u201cThe national game. Three \u2018outs\u2019 and one \u2018run\u2019\u201d presents an engaging way to introduce this political cartoon to the classroom.\u00a0\u00a0 The first chapter<\/a> of Jules Tygiel\u2019s book Past Time: Baseball as History<\/em> (2001) explains this cartoon\u2019s political references within the framework of the history of baseball as an American sport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The German artist, Louis Maurer, drew upon an American sport\u2014baseball\u2014for this pro-Lincoln political cartoon, which Currier & Ives published in September 1860, only two months before the presidential election of 1860. Maurer created a parody of the four main presidential candidates (from left to right): Constitutional Union Party candidate John Bell, Northern Democratic Party candidate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,156,174],"tags":[158],"class_list":["post-2899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antebellum-1840-1861","category-images","category-recent-scholarship","tag-campaigns-elections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2899"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2922,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899\/revisions\/2922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}