“Of Course He Wants to Vote the Democratic Ticket!”

A political cartoon published in the October 21, 1876, edition of Harper's Weekly depicts a Black voter in Tennessee being threatened by a pair of white men who insist he cast his vote for the Democratic Party. After the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, newly enfranchised Black men throughout the South generally supported the Republican Party. (In Virginia, many also supported the short-lived Readjuster Party after it was formed in 1879.) The subtitle of the cartoon sarcastically quotes the gun-wielding harassers as telling the black man to say that he is "free as air"—or else, they will blow his head off.