This campaign song, with lyrics by Stephen C. Foster and his brother Morrison Foster, is sung to the tune of “Villikins and His Dinah.” The song supports the presidential candidacy of Democrat James Buchanan over Republican John C. Fremont in the 1856 election. Buchanan’s brother, Edward Buchanan, was married to Stephen and Morrison’s sister Ann Eliza. The lyrics of nine of the verses were published in the Pittsburgh Morning Post on September 26, 1856. 

Lyrics for ten verses appear in Foster’s sketchbook. They also appear with music in a letter from Foster to his brother William Foster, dated March 11, 1857. In the letter, Foster indicates that the last two verses (which appeared as verses 6 and 7 in the Pittsburgh Morning Post) “were written by Mit,” the family nickname for Morrison. 

The lyrics were written in response to the Republican parade and convention held in Pittsburgh on September 17, 1856. The Fosters’ friends Robert Peebles Nevin and Robert P. McDowell served as parade marshals. Nevertheless, the brothers ruthlessly mocked Republicans and abolitionists in the song. It was written to be performed by the Buchanan Glee Club, which the brothers co-founded and Stephen directed in musical performances in support of Democratic candidates that year.

According to an account in the Daily Pittsburgh Gazette on September 19, 1856, the parade included delegations from across western Pennsylvania and Ohio. They displayed banners in favor of emancipation and free labor. Some displays were more theatrical, enacting scenes in which Fremont freed enslaved people. In another scene, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and other tradesmen were shown as struggling under the regime of James Buchanan, who forced them to compete with unpaid laborers (i.e., enslaved people). Another scene mocked pro-slavery “border ruffians” who attacked free soilers who sought to establish Kansas as a free state.

In lampooning this anti-slavery parade, “The Abolition Show” clearly supports Buchanan’s alignment with enslavement and support for the idea that individual states had the right to choose to be slave states. Morrison voiced the opinion in one of his verses that abolition would lead to the dissolution of the United States by causing the fifteen slave states to secede from the union of what was then thirty-one states.