Ulysses S. Grant, the taciturn Civil War hero, unified the various elements in the Republican Party and triumphed in the 1868 presidential campaign. Since his views were unknown, spoils politicians, patrician reformers, merchants, manufacturers, and farmers—all with their differing interests—could hope and even surmise that he would be sympathetic to issues close to their hearts. Perhaps no group surmised more optimistically than the liberal reformers who had embraced a cluster of beliefs, including CIVIL SERVICE REEORM, free trade, the gold standard, reconciliation with the South, and anti-iMPERlALlSM. Their ideal was a laissez-faire government staffed by experts, rather than political operatives, and headed by a first-rate administrator and leader who could achieve their goals. Grant, who as a general had picked able subordinates, seemed to liberal reformers to be superbly equipped for the presidency.
Grant, however, disappointed reformers. His cabinet included some reformers but also some spoils politicians, some cronies, and some wealthy men who had entertained Grant. Disappointment turned to disillusionment when his appointments to office favored the candidates of party leaders in the Senate and House, who almost invariably strengthened their political organizations and slighted the cultivated gentlemen of distinguished families who belonged to the reform wing of the party. Grant proved to be a passive leader and a weak administrator who neither dominated his cabinet nor led CONGRESS.
Worse, when he did become involved, he either was duped into supporting a scheme to corner the gold market or became obsessed with the idea of annexing Santo Domingo. For his part, Grant was not only infuriated by the reform opposition to annexation but also by the willingness of liberal reformers, despite increasing violence against blacks in the South, to ally themselves with exConfederates and overthrow regular Republicans in border states like Missouri. By 1871 Grant—appreciating party regularity more than independence—eliminated liberal reformers from his cabinet and their sympathizers from the civil service, allied himself with Senate spoilsmen like ROSCOE CONKLING and called for tough Ku Klux Klan legislation to protect southern black Republicans.
The Liberal Republicans—strongly supported by major urban newspapers and the intelligentsia, but also joined by a number of disgruntled spoils politicians whom Grant had ignored and alienated—moved to form their own party and to nominate a candidate acceptable to the Democrats for 1872. Meeting in Cincinnati, the Liberal Republican convention, with Carl ScHURZ presiding, endorsed civil service reform and attempted to attract white southerners and Democrats by attacking Radical Reconstruction, but did not take a strong stand on the TARIEE ISSUE.
Schurz and other reformers, along with their newspaper allies, had expected to nominate Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of presidents and the distinguished minister to England during the Civil War, but to their dismay the convention was stampeded into nominating Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. That nomination was ludicrous, since Greeley was hostile to civil service reform, favored a protective tariff, and was easily lampooned as the advocate of a variety of reforms, causes, and fads, ranging from abolition and utopian socialism to spiritualism and vegetarianism. Rather than support Greeley, some liberal reformers voted for Grant, others supported neither, while still others like Schurz, after much anguish, campaigned for Greeley. The Democrats “swallowed” Greeley, whom for decades they had despised, but many of them stayed home on election day. Greeley broke with tradition and spoke effectively as he campaigned vigorously, but his words could not dispel the unmerciful caricatures of Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly. Grant decisively defeated Greeley who, brokenhearted by that loss and the recent death of his wife, died within a month of the election. With its members divided and demoralized, the Liberal Republican Party evaporated.
Further reading: Earle Dudley Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970); John G. Sproat, “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).
World History
