An Ice Water Toast

This engraving, also from the twenty-first anniversary edition of Bowen’s Independent, printed in gold, shows U.S. Grant, his Vice President Schyler Colfax, Horace Greeley, Charles Sumner, and others—some waving the white flag, a symbol of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—joining Uncle Sam in an ice water toast—fitting for a temperance newspaper. Hanging on the wall in the background are portraits of Lincoln and John Brown. A basket of congratulatory telegrams and, in Uncle Sam’s hat, the Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1869, are included in the celebration.