Treeing coons - Political cartoon, public domain image

One of the few satires sympathetic to the Democrats to appear during the 1844 presidential contest. Democratic presidential nominee James Polk is portrayed as a buckskinned hunter who has treed "coons" Henry Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen. (Clay's nickname "that old coon" had wide currency in the campaign.) Holding a knife in his left hand, Polk grasps the Clay coon by the tail, saying "You've got up the wrong tree this time! Down you must come." At left former President Andrew Jackson stands on a ladder leaning against the "Hickory" tree and chops at the branch holding the two Whigs. He exclaims "Get down from my tree you vermin!" Frelinghuysen says, "from this old man good Lord deliver us!" Clay adds in verse: The state of things is quite surprisin. / Such d--d bad luck my Frelinghuysen. / My struggles are of no avail / For Polk has got me by the Tail. Two other Democrats, John C. Calhoun and Richard M. Johnson, appear as dogs rushing in from the left, saying, "Down with the Coons." Another Democratic ex-President, Martin Van Buren, watches from the right, remarking, "This works according to my wish--The Coons are treed at last." In the right foreground incumbent President John Tyler sets his dogs on the coons, saying, "At them Bobby! Catch them Johnny! Dont let the other dogs get in before you I shall beat them yet." His dogs are son Robert Tyler (labeled "Repeal" for his activism on behalf of the Irish Repeal movement) and John Beauchamp Jones, editor of the newspaper the "Madisonian," organ of the Tyler administration. They also chant, "Down with the Coons."