American Historical Ephemera & Photography

9 3/4  x 7 3/4 in. print, ca mid-19th century (light soil, later ink notations above and to the right of the image, pencil notations on verso). 

During the hotly contested United States presidential election of 1840, Whig candidate William Henry Harrison's rallies were known to draw enormous crowds. This illustration shows a Harrison rally in Cincinnati about which John Quincy Adams wrote that he had never witnessed "such a state of agitation." Just over a month later, Harrison defeated Democratic incumbent President Martin Van Buren.

Image re-produced in History of Ohio by Eugene H. Roseboom and Francis P. Weisenberger. The original illustration may be the work of Charles Foster (1802-1889), an English immigrant who sketched impressions of life in the United States, including the city of Cincinnati which was his home in the 1840s.