President Ulysses S. Grant presided over the legacy of the Civil War, declawed the KKK, and helped the nation heal, but those accomplishments were largely overshadowed by his defense of corrupt appointees and a financial panic during his second term. In light of those events, his decision to run for a third term was all the more galling — at least in the opinion of New York Herald owner James Gordon Bennett, who used the editorial pages to crusade against Grant. In response, Harper’s cartoonist Thomas Nast created an enduring image of the Republican party as an elephant.

On this day, November 7, in 1874, the new issue of Harper’s magazine, with a Thomas Nast cartoon, entitled Third Term Panic, was published. It featured the Republican party in form of an elephant, and the Democrats as a donkey dressed in lion’s skin, alluding to an Aesop’s fable.

Nast, a staunch Republican and supporter of Grant, meant the elephant to evoke regality, strength, and intelligence. The Democratic donkey alluded to the fable of a donkey that tried to fool a fox by dressing up as a lion, only to be given away by his bray — the moral of the story being a fool (in this case meaning Bennet) is recognized as soon as they would speak up.