The County Election

A frontier town square teems with citizens on election day - men casting votes on the courthouse steps, electioneering, arguing, drinking, one too drunk to stand - the whole rowdy spectacle of frontier democracy laid out in a lively panorama. George Caleb Bingham, who ran for office himself, observed the scene with affectionate, clear-eyed humor. Now in St. Louis, the County Election is his great chronicle of American political life - neither idealized nor cynical, but a crowded, comic, remarkably honest record of self-government as it was actually practiced on the muddy frontier.