Great Speech of Clay––Bran Bread is Riz! Lithograph attributed to John L. Mager, 1847

This cartoon mocks Henry Clay, a longtime U.S. representative and senator from Kentucky. Clay protested the Mexican War in an 1847 speech published in the New York Tribune.  His son Henry Clay Jr., meanwhile, led a Kentucky regiment. Popular depictions of Clay Jr.’s death at Buena Vista made him a national icon of battlefield heroism.

Lithograph published by James Baillie, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress