Ulysses S. Grant hadn't been President long before a new word entered the English language: "Grantism." It was not a compliment. It meant nepotism, the spoils system, and corruption in high office. Grant was personally honest, but he appointed so many friends and relatives to office that one Senator said the country was suffering from "a dropsical nepotism swollen to elephantiasis." Grant's appointments to his Cabinet and to other positions in the federal government were also misguided; some of his appointees turned out to be hopelessly incompetent and others shockingly corrupt. "It looks at this distance as though the Republican party were going to the dogs ..." complained Senator James Grimes of Iowa. "Like all parties that have an undisturbed power for a long time, it has become corrupt, and I believe that it is today the [most] corrupt and debauched political party that has ever existed."

As early as 1870 some of the Republican party's most distinguished members had become disaffected with Grant's administration and were hoping to dump him and his policies in 1872. Calling themselves Liberal Republicans, the reformers in Grant's party demanded a thorough reform of the civil service; they also urged ending Radical Reconstruction and withdrawing all federal troops from the South. Some of them, too, favored a reduction in the high tariff that had lingered from the Civil War. The Liberal Republicans were a varied group. Among them were Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln's minister to England, Carl Schurz, U.S. Senator from Missouri, Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Horace Greeley, celebrated editor of the New York Tribune. In January 1872, Missouri liberals led by Carl Schurz held a meeting in Jefferson City, called for an "uprising of' honest citizens" against the spoils system, and scheduled a national convention for May 1 in Cincinnati.

The Cincinnati conclave was crowded and clamorous. "A livelier and more variegated omnium gatherum was never assembled," reported the Louisville Courier-Journal's editor Henry Watterson. "There were longhaired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spiced by stumpy and short-haired emissaries from New York ... There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis ... There were a few rather overdressed persons from New Orleans ... and a motley array of Southerners of every sort."' The platform, shaped by Schurz, denounced the "notoriously corrupt and unworthy men in places of power" and asked for civil-service reform. It also called for an end to military reconstruction, while endorsing "equal and exact justice for all, of whatever nativity, race, color, or persuasion, religious or political." Since the new party contained both protectionists and free traders, the platform left the tariff question "to the people in their congressional districts and the decision of Congress thereon."' There were several excellent choices (including Adams and Chase) for the presidential nomination, but for various reasons, including personal and political jealousies, none of them was able to win a majority of the delegates' votes. On the sixth ballot the convention suddenly stampeded to Horace Greeley; and then chose Governor Benjamin Gartz-Brown of Missouri for second place.

The Greeley choice came as a shock to many people. Greeley, for all his intelligence, sincerity, idealism, and journalistic aplomb, was erratic, crochety, unpredictable, and thoroughly incompetent in the art of politics. About all one could say of him as a candidate was that he was a national celebrity. With his cherubic face, big blue eyes, pilgarlic pate, steel-rimmed glasses, and shuffling gait, he looked more like a character out of a Dickens novel than a presidential hopeful, and he was an easy target for cartoonists and caricaturists. Serious reformers were thunderstruck by the nomination. The Nation said it was the biggest disappointment since news of the first battle of Bull Run; Lyman Trumbull feared the nomination would be drowned in a wave of laughter; the Illinois State journal called it a huge joke on the nation; and the New York Times declared that if "any one man could send a great nation to the dogs, that man is Mr. Greeley." One reporter thought there had been "too much brains and not enough whiskey" at the Cincinnati convention.

A month after the Greeley nomination, the regular Republicans met in Philadelphia, chose Grant by acclamation for re-election on the first ballot, and adopted a platform paying lip service to civil-service reform and equivocating on the tariff issue, but taking a strong stand in favor of political and civil rights for all citizens in every part of the country. For second place the delegates chose Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson, "the cobbler of Natick," who was friendly to labor.

When the Democrats held their convention in Baltimore a few weeks later, they were so eager to support "anybody to beat Grant," that in a meeting lasting only six hours they voted to accept both the platform and the candidate of the Liberal Republicans. Some Democrats thought it a grievous error. The choice between Grant and Greeley, moaned Georgia's Alexander Stephens, was a choice between "hemlock and strychnine."' Greeley had castigated the Democratic party for years, complained an Indiana Congressman; for the Democrats to support him was like having "the disciples of the Christian religion" abandon their faith to "worship Mahomet as the prophet of God. But the Governor of North Carolina defended fusion. "If the Baltimore Convention puts Greeley in our hymnbook," he said, "we will sing him through if it kills us."

Given the two candidates-a "man of no ideas," as someone put it, versus a "man of too many"-the campaign was predictable." it reduced itself to what the New York Sun called "a shower of mud," Republican derision of Greeley-who at one time or another had favored vegetarianism, abolitionism, brown bread, free-thinking, socialism, and spiritualism-was biting and cruel. In Harper's Weekly, cartoonist Thomas Nast (who created the elephant as the Republican symbol) had a field day with "Honest Old Horace." Picturing the Tribune editor as a hopelessly near-sighted and pumpkin-headed clown, he did a savage takeoff on Greeley's pamphlet, "What I Know About Farming," in a series of cartoons labeled, "What I Know About Stooping To Conquer," "What I Know About Honesty" (shaking hands with Tammany Boss Tweed), "What I Know About Bailing Out" (a reference to the bail Greeley had helped provide for Jefferson Davis in 1867), "What I Know About Eating My Own Words," "What I Know About Bolting," and "What I Know About Running for the Presidency." In a savage ridicule of Greeley's appeal in his acceptance letter for North and South to "clasp their hands across the bloody chasm," Nast showed Greeley shaking hands with a rebel who had just shot a Union soldier, stretching out his hand to John Wilkes Booth across Lincoln's grave, and turning a defenseless black over to a member of the Ku Klux Klan who has just lynched a black man and knifed a black mother and her child. "I have been assailed so bitterly," wailed Greeley at the end of the campaign, "that I hardly knew whether I was running for the Presidency or the penitentiary." But he hit the road in September (though it was still considered unseemly for presidential candidates to take to the stump) and in a series of impromptu speeches denounced the Republicans for "waving the bloody shirt" and called for a "New Departure," involving conciliation in the Northern treatment of the South. Some observers, previously hostile, were impressed with Greeley's oratory. "THE VOICE OF A STATESMAN," reluctantly conceded the New York Sun. "Magnificent Speeches of Dr. Horace Greeley." Others thought Uncle Horace would have done better to keep quiet like Grant. In the politically inept remarks he made from time to time he managed to antagonize both veterans and black voters.

Grant of course received his share of the campaign abuse. All the old charges of 1868 were revived and he was attacked as a crook, drunkard, ignoramus, dictator, swindler, and "utterly depraved horse jockey". But with Greeley in the running, he was unbeatable. With the support of Northern businessmen and bankers, Republican regulars, Union veterans, and blacks (and with the help of Democratic abstainers), Grant won an easy victory in November. He carried 31 states (all but six), took 286 of the 349 electoral votes, and won a popular majority of 763,000 votes over Greeley (3,597,132 to 2,834,125). "I was the worst beaten man who ever ran for high office," said Greeley ruefully after the election. This was an overstatement; he did better than Seymour had done in 1868 and about as well as Clay in 1832, Harrison in 1836, and Van Buren in 1840. But the denouement was dolorous. Shortly before the election his wife died and he confessed to a friend: "I am not dead, but I wish I were." Right after the election he wrote: "Utterly ruined beyond hope, I desire, before the night closes its jaws on me forever, to say that, though my running for President has placed me where I am, it is not the cause of my ruin." Shortly afterwards he was placed in a private sanitorium for mental patients and died there three weeks later. At the electoral counting in February, the Democratic electors gave Greeley's votes to Gartz-Brown and several other Democrats.

Source: Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 127-29.