Rigal, “Black Work at the Polling Place”
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Black Work at the Polling Place
The color line in George Caleb Bingham’s “The County Election.”by Laura Rigal
When Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was at work on his most popular and complex paintings he was also deeply engaged in Whig politics. Bingham was already well known for his genre scenes of riverboat men and frontier life—Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845); The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846); Boatmen on the Missouri (1846); among others—when he decided to run for state office in 1846. He had been involved in Whig politics since the early 1840s, when he painted banners and delivered speeches on behalf of William Henry Harrison and Henry Clay. Bingham especially admired Clay of Kentucky, whose fiery orations compared Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren to Caesar, Cromwell, and Napoleon as usurpers of executive privilege and destroyers of the people’s independence. In 1846, fearing Missouri’s enslavement to a Democratic majority, Bingham himself ran for the state legislature as a Whig candidate from Saline County. He lost the race in a bitter post-election appeal. But the razor-thin election became the subject of his best-known political painting The County Election (1850-52).
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