The Meaning of Liberal Republicanism: The Case of Ohio

THE MEANING OF LIBERAL REPUBLICANISM: THE CASE OF OHIO Michael E. McGerr A common theme unites most interpretations of the Liberal Republican movement of 1872. Whether historians praise or condemn the Republicans who bolted their party rather than support the re-election of President Grant, they generally agree that the Liberals typified the "Best Men"—the genteel elite of the late nineteenth century. Liberal Republicanism, those historians believe, was the ineffectual protest of a declining social class against a society increasingly dominated by nouveau riche industrial capitalists. Like the Mugwumps of 1884, the Liberals left their party because, as Eric Goldman writes, they felt "almost homeless in their own country."1 This characterization rests, with few exceptions, only on investigations of the handful of nationally prominent Liberal Republicans.2 An examination of the Liberals of one major northern state suggests a different view. By no means the futile gesture of a displaced upper class, the Ohio Liberal Republican movement represented a phase in the realignment of political leaders divided over economic questions. The Liberal Republicans of Ohio came mainly from the wealthy elite of professionals and businessmen involved in the development of industrial capitalism. Little different in their social and economic background from the men who guided the Ohio Republican party, the Liberals did not think of themselves as a distinct class confronting mortal antagonists. Ideological incompatibility and waning influence in the party, not lost social status and economic power, drove them from the Republican 1 Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (rev. ed., New York, 1956), p. 9. The literature on Liberal Republicanism is usefully summarized in Richard Allan Gerber, "The Liberal Republicans of 1872 in Historiographical Perspective," Journal of American History 62 (June 1975):40-73. 2 Local studies include Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert, "Some Aspects of Ohio's Part in the Liberal Republican Movement," Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 13 (July 1955): 191-202; Theodore S. Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 1865-1871 (Columbia, Mo., 1926); Jacqueline Balk and Ari Hoogenboom, "The Origins of Border State Liberal Republicanism," in Richard O. Curry, ed., Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States During Reconstruction (Baltimore, 1969), pp. 220-44. Civil War History, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4 Copyright® 1982by The Kent State University Press 0009-8078/82/2804-0002 $01.00/0 308CIVIL WAR HISTORY ranks. Fundamentally, their revolt sprang from the Republicans' antebellum origins as a coalition embracing both Democrats and Whigs. Notable for the number of former Democrats among them, the Ohio Liberals espoused Jacksonian anti-monopoly ideas and condemned the dominance of protectionist Whiggery in the Republican party. They favored civil service reform, opposed temperance laws, and demanded an end to radical reconstruction, but their principal policy was reduction of the nation's high protective tariff. Although the Ohio Liberal movement proved an electoral failure, it facilitated the passage of many of these neo-Jacksonian tariff reformers into the Democratic party where they found a congenial ideologicalhome and important leadership positions . The Liberal Republicans' conversion, prompted by a disagreement among the wealthy over the best means of industrializing the nation, revealed that old economic questions would define party politics once again as the issues of slavery and civil war subsided in the Gilded Age. Across Ohio in April, 1872, groups of Republicans gathered to declare their opposition to the renomination of President Grant. Styling themselves "Liberal Republicans," they chose delegates to the national Liberal Republican convention beginning May 1 in Cincinnati. That convention, they hoped, would select a presidential ticket appealing enough to compel the regular Republican convention in June to follow their lead. The Liberal Republican meetings, however, did not mark a popular uprising against the president. In most towns and cities there were no more than twenty-five Liberals; in many, Liberals were so few that they held no public meetings. Hardly apparent in the countryside, Ohio Liberal Republicanism was primarily an urban phenomenon.3 In most respects, the Liberals differed little from the well-to-do Republicans who figured largely in local politics and dominated the state organization. Nearly all of the Liberal organizers in Columbus and Dayton, for instance, belonged to the...