Purchased with funds provided by Henry Francis du Pont, the work is held in the permanent collection of the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.

The painting depicts grassroots democratic participation in the early Republic, with a raucous crowd gathered outside Independence Hall to celebrate and engage in electoral politics.

[1] In 1887, Lawson's daughter Mary donated the unfinished copperplate to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which made prints based on it.

[3] Highlights include a parade towing an election float shaped like a longboat, a man pasting flyers on a wall, a brawl spilling out of a tavern, a drunk sprawled in the gutter, children and dogs playing in the street, and many groups of men and women in animated discussion.

"[5] Ross Barrett has criticized this "misreading" that "elided the democratic crowd at the picture’s center" and reflected the "politicized foci and blind spots that republican aesthetics inscribed into the visual field of early American art.