Our featured  cartoon—the Hurley-Burly Pot (1850)—is a witches’ brew that looks awfully familiar. The political cartoonist James S. Baillie seems to have it in for the Union and opponents of slavery and especially William Lloyd Garrison,  an abolitionist who Baillie thinks urges black slaves to cut their masters’ throats:

“Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble—

Abolition

Our condition

Shall be altered by—

N*****’s strong as goats—

Cut your master’s throats—

Abolition boil!

We divide the spoil.”