In this cartoon, artist Thomas Nast reacts to a series of editorials in the New York Herald criticizing what Herald owner/editor James Gordon Bennett Jr. considered to be President Ulysses S. Grant's bid for an unprecedented third term. There was no constitutional limit on the number of presidential terms until ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951, but the tradition of serving no more than two terms, set by President George Washington, carried a strong stigma against anyone who attempted to violate it. To Bennett and others long dissatisfied with the policies and scandals of the Grant administration, any possibility that the former general would seek a third term was condemned as “Caesarism”—an undemocratic attempt to wield imperial power. Grant declined to pursue the Republican nomination actively in 1876, but was a candidate in 1880, when the deadlocked convention selected Congressman James Garfield, instead.
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