Your political cartoon would want to show recognizable delegates of the American colonies -- men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, etc. The leaders of the Revolution, who sought to establish a new nation, independent of British control, would have been convicted of high treason against the British crown. Under the law of Great Britain, it was considered high treason "if a man do levy war against our Lord the King in his realm" -- which is exactly what the revolutionaries had done. The punishment for high treason, under British law, was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. That's the usual way it's stated, but the actual order of events is drawn, hanged and quartered. A traitor would be tied to a horse and drawn (that is, dragged) to the execution site, where he would be hanged. Before the hanging killed the person, they'd cut him down mutilate him -- things such as disemboweling and castrating the victim. Then they'd quarter him, which meant tying him to four horses which would pull in four different directions to rip the man's body apart.
So, depending on how gruesome and gory you want to draw your political cartoon, there's plenty of awful stuff that might have happened to the delegates of the new nation, the United States, had they failed to win independence from Great Britain.
