The Complexities of Race
This cartoon takes aim at Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, the distraught man being comforted by abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. A longtime congressman and senator, Johnson was the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in 1836. Although the party stood for the South and slavery — and condemned mixed-race unions — Johnson lived openly with an African American woman, Julia Chinn, whose daughters hold her portrait. Future Supreme Court justice John Catron noted with disgust that Johnson tried “to force his daughters into society” and that they and their mother “claimed equality.” Racial prejudice cost Johnson some votes, but he won a plurality in the electoral college, and, on a party-line vote, Democrats in the Senate elected him Martin Van Buren’s vice president. Library of Congress.