Counting the presidents of Harvard and Yale among their members, these prominent and highly educated urban intellectuals described themselves as the "best men" and denounced northern workers, Tammany-style demagogues, and railroad speculators as an "ignorant proletariat and a half-taught plutocracy." The liberal reformers also turned their verbal arsenal against Republican corruption in the South, where they found a parallel situation: the votes of a black underclass marshaled by "thieving carpetbaggers" who had taken over the state governments and were exploiting the South for financial gain.52
"They are fellows who crawled down South in the track of our armies, generally at a very safe distance in the rear," Greeley explained in a speech. "They got into the Legislatures; they went into issuing State bonds; they pretended to use them in aid of railroads and other improvements. But the improvements were not made, and the bonds stuck in the issuers' pockets. That is the pity of it." Most of the carpetbaggers were admirable, Greeley acknowledged, and risked their lives to help the former slaves and rebuild the South. The corrupt few, however, were enough to sow hatred against the Republican party.53
It was time for amnesty, said the liberal reformers, for their counterparts in the South—the "best men," as Greeley had pointedly called them—to resume their role as the "natural leaders" of the shattered region. This return to home rule would amount to white supremacy, but Greeley and Schurz both argued that blacks would be better off. Greeley envisioned an atmosphere of reconciliation in which moderate whites, former Whigs like himself, would join the southern Republican party, and the Klan would fade away.54
• • •
By 1871, the liberal reformers were looking to the following year's election and were using the term Grantism to pin a host of problems on the president. In the South, he was using "bayonet rule" to sustain corrupt "carpetbag-negro government." In the North, Grant took the blame for presiding over a Republican party that had once been animated by radical idealism and had devolved after the Civil War into a collection of state-party machines that existed for the purpose of funneling federal patronage jobs—the spoils of office—to their constituents.55
Grant s cabinet consisted of loyal cronies instead of experienced, influential political figures, and the administration had become mired in one scandal or debacle after another. The president's own political naivete led him to socialize with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, notorious speculators in gold and railroads who brought on the market crash of 1869 known as Black Friday. Grant also lent his support to land speculators lobbying for the annexation of Santo Domingo (today's Dominican Republic), and he allowed opponents in Congress to sabotage civil service reform, the introduction of a merit-based program of competitive exams intended to replace the spoils system.56
The liberal reformers initially hoped to take hold of the Republican party machinery and run their own presidential candidate in 1872, but recognizing Grant's strength and resilience, they made plans instead to splinter off and create a new party.57Greeley took note of the state races in Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri, where fusion tickets of reform Republicans and Democrats had won upset victories in 1870, and began to consider joining in the liberals' revolt.
In the Tribune, Greeley ran exposes of Grantism, from embezzlement at the New York Customs House to carpetbagger corruption, and exhorted regular Republicans to embrace reform before the scandals emanating from Washington ruined the party. At the same time, he struggled with the decision to bolt the party he had helped create and whose new breed of spoilsmen, the "Stalwarts," increasingly returned his scorn. In April 1871, Greeley finally cut the cord: The Fribune came out against Grant's reelection.58
In September, Carl Schurz made a speech in Nashville that marked the Liberal Republicans' entry into the presidential race as a full-fledged third party and announced their program of hard money, lower tariffs and taxes, civil service reform, ending land grants to railroads, and, above all, replacing Reconstruction in the South with "local self-government."* The party would hold its convention in Cincinnati the following May to choose a candidate. "Reconstruction and slavery we have done with;" wrote E. L. Godkin in the Nation, "for administrative and revenue reform we are eager."59
Tweed's downfall and the Orange riot had taken Governor Hoffman out of the running, and the New York Democrats lacked a presidential contender. Schurz, who could not be president because he was born abroad, contacted Democratic National Committee chairman August Belmont and secretly sounded him out on his party's support for a ticket consisting of the frosty and aristocratic diplomat Charles Francis Adams and the more fiery Senator Lyman Trumbull. However, by May 1872, when the Liberal Republicans convened in Cincinnati, various disgruntled founders of the regular party, including radicals like George Julian and Reuben Fenton as well as Lincoln's confidant, Judge David Davis, had joined the revolt, creating a long list of potential nominees.60
Greeley, who had been waiting decades for a political appointment and had served just one term in the House during his long career, also declared his availability in the customary way—by loudly denying any interest in the nomination. The daily and weekly editions of the Tribune, his speaking tours, and his antislavery activism made Greeley both well known and popular around the country; his support for protective tariffs, however, and his eccentric persona made him an unlikely pick for the genteel free-traders of the Liberal Republican party, who favored Adams. Nonetheless, Greeley's protege at the Tribune, Whitelaw Reid, went to Cincinnati and managed to get his boss's name in the running.
When the convention got under way, the prime contenders, Adams and Davis, reached a stalemate after five ballots; in the frenzied realignment of votes for the sixth round, Reid and his team worked the convention floor and gathered enough support to win Greeley the nomination, with Governor B. Gratz Brown of Missouri as his running mate. The news caused a stir in New York. A reporter from the Sun was interviewing Greeley in his office when the sound of cannon fire from City Hall Park thundered through the Tribune building. From his window, Greeley looked down at the smoke from the guns and the enormous crowd in front of the building. The sights and sounds were reminiscent of the draft riots, but now the guns were an official salute, and the people were cheering and shouting, "Go it, Uncle Horace!"61
Like other leaders of the Liberal movement, Schurz was shocked and disgusted by the outcome and asked Greeley to withdraw, but he refused. "That Grant is an Ass, no man can deny, but better an Ass than a mischievous Idiot," an Ohio Liberal complained of Greeley. William Cullen Bryant, Greeley's longtime competitor at the New York Evening Post, called the nomination "sheer insanity." Nonetheless, most Liberal Republicans reluctantly rallied behind him with a slogan that captured both their fervor and their ambivalence: "Anything to beat Grant !"62
When word of Greeley's nomination in Cincinnati reached Washington, Fernando Wood shared in the "loud and general guffaw" that "broke out all over the [Flouse] floor." It was hard to take Old White Coat seriously—with all his faddish enthusiasms and eccentricities—but even harder for Wood to support the man who had been his archenemy for the past forty years, opposing and harassing him on every issue: slavery, tariffs, the draft riots, the Irish, temperance, and Sabbath laws, among others.63
Nonetheless, Wood, like the rest of the northern Democratic party, saw no choice but to endorse him and ally with the Liberal Republicans, for lack of an alternative candidate, and because Greeley supported the working man, advocated a general amnesty for Confederates, and pushed for an end to military intervention in the South with federal troops. Thus developed the astonishing spectacle of Greeley also being nominated by the Democrats at their convention in July, after which the party took up the Liberals' slogan, "Anything to beat Grant." Northern Democrats tried to rally behind Greeley, who had once embodied wartime radical Republicanism and denounced them as treasonous Copperheads.64
Democratic politicians who wanted to move the party forward saw his former radicalism as an asset that would help them shed the
stigma of disloyalty. Although Marble detested Greeley personally, and would not support him, the World asserted that Greeley's nomination "cut the party loose from the dead issues of an effete past." Ever since their failure to block ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the Democrats had been toning down their overt racist rhetoric and focusing on their traditional message of fiscal conservatism and small government. Arch-Copperhead Clement Vallandigham's surprising conversion to the new party line made sense because the Democrats, despite their professions about accepting the consequences of the Civil War, remained firm in their opposition to federal enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments. Their "New Departure" rang hollow.65
Scouting the Democrats' motives, the pioneering abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned the Liberal Republican party as "simply a stool pigeon for the Democracy to capture the Presidency." Making a similar point, a Thomas Nast cartoon depicted Greeley as the captain of a pirate ship, concealing heavily armed Confederates belowdecks, ready to capture another vessel, the American government.66 The prominent feminist and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child declared she would prefer "the Devil himself " to the Democrats "at the helm of the ship of state."67
Indeed, since Greeley was at odds with Liberal Republicans on free trade, his campaign ended up focusing on the two issues that united the reformers and were also the Democrats' priorities: a general amnesty and home rule in the South. Since very few Confederate officials were still banned from voting and holding office, Republicans in Congress sought to eliminate the largely symbolic issue by immediately passing an amnesty law that embraced all but the most hard-core ex-rebels. However, black congressmen were outraged. Elected in the South after the new state constitutions of 1867-68 gave blacks the vote, they saw the bill as a harbinger of Reconstruction's total demise.69*
July 20, 1872, Vanity Fair cartoon of Greeley as a presidential candidate: "Anything to beat Grant."
Greeley provoked a storm of controversy when he declared his "confident trust that the masses of our countrymen . . . are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has too long divided them." The campaign degenerated into one of the most vicious presidential contests in American history. Nast lambasted Greeley with a series of cartoons that showed him shaking hands with rebels over the dead body of a Union soldier, across the Andersonville prison, over a black Klan victim, and even with John Wilkes Booth across Lincoln's grave.69
Even before the campaign, Greeley had shifted from a long career of speaking out for African Americans to criticizing them in the same harsh terms used by Democrats. In letters and speeches, Greeley declared that the former slaves should not be coddled by welfare agencies but left to their own devices; otherwise the innate laziness and weakness of their race would be encouraged. In 1872, the Tribune declared that the biracial Reconstruction governments, rife with "ignorance and degradation," should be supplanted by "local self-government."70
Greeley also became estranged at this time from the working class, for which he had such long-standing sympathy. In the spring and summer of 1872, an estimated one hundred thousand workers in New York launched a massive strike for the eight-hour day. Labor's growing organizational efforts frightened the managerial classes—sensitized by the draft riots, the Paris Commune, and the Orange riot—and they ultimately rejected this powerful bid for greater respect and more control in the workplace. After six tense weeks, employers closed ranks, and the strike finally collapsed. Greeley's absence from labor's side, on the campaign trail, was a symptom of the growing elitism, articulated by the Liberals, that would curb the aspirations of workers in the Gilded Age.71
Instead of sitting on the porch of his house in Chappaqua and playing the reluctant candidate, as the tradition of American presidential campaigns dictated and his doctor advised, Greeley embarked on a relentless whistle-stop tour across the country. In Indiana, he explained his abolitionist past as part of his struggle for the American worker: "I was in the days of slavery an enemy of slavery, because I thought slavery inconsistent with the rights, dignity and highest well-being of free labor . . . I was anxious first of all for labor—that the laboring class should everywhere be free men." He also spoke about the need for Americans to come together again as "one people." In Ohio, he asked farmers, "Shall ours be a Union cemented only by bayonets, or shall it be a Union of hearts and hopes and hands?"72
Blacks in the South stood by Grant, as did most northern Republicans, who, for the moment, were still more outraged by Klan violence than by Grant's exercise of bayonet rule.73Grant's political organization also wielded huge amounts of campaign money, much of it from railroad magnates and other corporate donors anxious to stop the liberal reformers in their tracks. Despite Greeley's strenuous efforts, his chances dwindled rapidly.74
Greeley was also worn out from years of overexertion on the lecture circuit and at the Tribune office. The punishing campaign schedule sapped his last reserves of strength. On the campaign trail in October, he received jolting news from his daughter Ida that his wife, Mary, already chronically ill with rheumatism and other complaints, was in failing health. Having neglected to stop at the farm in Chappaqua to check on her a month earlier, and perceiving the political defeat that loomed in November, Greeley was overcome with regret and canceled his tour. He brought Mary into the city, where she could receive the best medical care, but she died at the end of October.75
A week later, Grant beat Greeley in a landslide victory. Winning thirty-one of the thirty-seven states, Grant had lost only three southern states (Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas) and three border states (Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri). The Republicans also retained control of the House and Senate. Grant's crackdown on the Klan had produced a relatively peaceful day of voting across the South, marred only by violence in Georgia, where Democratic officials failed to protect blacks and other Republicans from attack. Despite narrow margins of victory in some states, Republicans hailed the overall result as proof that "home rule" in the South did not mean Democratic, white supremacy—if the whole population was permitted to vote without coercion and fear.
The Liberal Republican ticket suffered in part because many Democrats simply could not bring themselves to vote for Greeley and stayed away from the polls.76 Having lost his political career and his wife, Greeley not only was in mourning but soon suffered a nervous breakdown. He clung vainly to the Tribune, in which he had failed to amass a controlling share, being disorganized with his finances, overly generous, and chronically in debt.
The Tribunes publisher and business manager, Samuel Sinclair, owned 20 percent of its shares. He was corralling the other owners and scheming to sell off the Tribune to William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, who planned to install Greeley's nemesis from the regular Republican machine, Grant's conniving and corrupt former vice president, Schuyler ("Smiler") Colfax, as editor in chief. The infamous Jay Gould, who embodied the venality of the Gilded Age, also formed part of the wolf pack around the ailing Greeley, ready to buy out the troublesome, reformist newspaper. Greeley's handpicked successor, Whitelaw Reid, was to be ousted, but Greeley suspected him of treachery too and plunged into depression and a not unwarranted paranoia.77
Greeley took to his bed, where he scribbled hysterically, trying to write a will and to call in outstanding loans for the sake of his two daughters' inheritance. "Having done wrong to millions, while intending only good to hundreds, I pray God that he may quickly take me from a world where all I have done seems to have turned to evil," Greeley scrawled on Tribune notepaper. Rushed to a private mental hospital a few miles from Chappaqua, he was examined by renowned doctors, who diagnosed "nervous prostration," the Tribune reported. Greeley had bouts of delirium and soon slipped into a coma. He died on November 29 at the age of sixty-one.
"Plant me in my favorite pumpkin arbor, with a gooseberry bush for a footstone," Uncle Horace, the Sage of Chappaqua, had written, but his friends and colleagues would not hear of it. Clergymen, governors, and editors of all p
olitical stripes attended his stately funeral on Fifth Avenue, where even Greeley's various adversaries, including William Cullen Bryant and Manton Marble, delivered decorous eulogies. Across the country, and across the Atlantic, newspapers carried obituaries full of praise for Greeley and expressions of the public's "profound sorrow." Crowds of New Yorkers lined the avenue, church bells chimed, and the city stood still while the procession—with President Grant in a carriage near the front—took Greeley to Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery.79*
Marble's World described Greeley as "a great light of American journalism and perhaps the most remarkable American of his period." Bryant's Evening Post declared that in the fight to end slavery, "we doubt whether any single instrument used against the gigantic wrong was more effective in the work of its gradual overthrow than the press which [Greeley] managed with so much courage and determination." When Greeley began denouncing slavery, the paper reminded readers, "the prejudices of the public mind were so fierce that it was as much as one's life was worth to speak even timidly against the horrible wrong. The most gentle hint, the softest whisper of persuasion, was likely to provoke a mob."79
Summing up Greeley's rise from obscurity, the Evening Post concluded: "Mr. Greeley won his place of influence and distinction by the sheer force of his intellectual ability and the determination of his character. By good natural abilities, by industry, by temperance, by sympathy with what is noblest and best in human nature, and by earnest purpose, the ignorant, friendless, unknown printer's boy of a few years since became the powerful and famous journalist, whose words went to the ends of the earth, affecting the destinies of all mankind."80
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