The great match at Baltimore, between the "Illinois Bantam" and the "Old Cock" of the White House

Dissension within the Democratic party in 1860 and Stephen A. Douglas's capture of the party's presidential nomination at the party's May convention are satirized as a cockfight. Douglas stands, the victorious cock, atop his badly beaten rival, incumbent president James C. Buchanan. Feathers still fill the air from the fray. Douglas crows:"Cock a doodle doo!! / I've got the best of you. / And I can beat the Lincoln Cock; / And Old Kentucky too!" Buchanan moans, "Oh dear! Oh dear! this is my last kick, I'm a used up old rooster." On the right an unidentified man sets a new cock into the ring, Kentucky senator John C. Breckinridge. The man warns Douglas, "Don't crow too loud my fine fellow, here's a Kentucky chicken that will worry you a little." The Breckinridge cock says anxiously, "I suppose now I'm in the pit that I must tackle the bantam, but I don't much like the job." A simian Irishman wearing a stovepipe hat watches from ringside left, probably representing the old-line Tammany Democrats of New York. He reflects, "He [Buchanan] wos a werry game old bird, but that ere bantam, was a leetle too much for him!"

Probably drawn by Louis Maurer.
Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit, MI : Gale Research, c1983, no. 2846
Weitenkampf, p. 121
Published in: American political prints, 1766-1876 / Bernard F. Reilly. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1991, entry 1860-21.