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9 The Lasting Effect of 1872 Campaign Rhetoric A fter rejoicing that ‘‘the elections in North Carolina, Vermont and Maine have decided the Greeley campaign two months in advance,’’ Boston Postmaster William Burt lamented that ‘‘if they would only be content to accept the result it would save us much later, and much disagreeable political talking and writing.’’ As Burt feared, the Liberal Republicans did not concede the election in September, and the campaign increasingly degenerated into virulent personal attacks. According to Earle Ross, ‘‘The campaign of 1872 was primarily one of personalities. Probably no previous campaign had been conducted so largely on the basis of personal abuse and misrepresentation.’’ The Republicans ridiculed Horace Greeley so much that at the end of the campaign he wailed to a friend, ‘‘I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly know whether I was running for President or the penitentiary.’’ Though the Republicans won in 1872, their attacks on Greeley oddly had less historical impact than the campaign rhetoric of the Liberal Republicans. During the campaign the new party repeatedly denounced Reconstruction, President Ulysses S. Grant, and the original members of the liberal republican movement who were opposed to Greeley. The attacks had special power because many members of the Liberal Republican Party had been Radical Republicans and leading advocates of Reconstruction in the late 1860s. Their 1872 campaign rhetoric helped create the lasting historical constructions of the ‘‘Tragic Era,’’ ‘‘Grantism,’’ and the ‘‘Best Men.’’1 The dynamics of the campaign dictated the focus of Liberal Republican rhetoric . At its inauguration in 1870, the national liberal republican movement had decided to devote its efforts to civil service reform and free trade. According to David M. Tucker, ‘‘None of the David Wells correspondents wrote of Reconstruction and African Americans; they were preoccupied with the troubles created by the war: tariff subsidies, greenbacks, and patronage. Corruption stemming from misguided government policy was their obsession.’’ The surprise nomination at Cincinnati of Horace Greeley, long apathetic about civil service reform and opposed to free trade, stripped the new party of its principles and drove away many of the movement’s most passionate members. As Carl Schurz recognized, ‘‘The difficulty really consists in there being no harmony between our candidates and the true spirit of the movement; and the 200 The Doom of Reconstruction worst of it is that this cannot be denied.’’ In a campaign speech for Greeley, one of the original liberal republicans confessed that ‘‘Mr. Greeley may be a protectionist, and one of the worst protectionists at that,’’ and that ‘‘the kind of civil service reform which . . . I am in favor of, will not be given us by Mr. Greeley.’’ The removal of civil service reform and free trade as issues forced the Liberal Republican Party to concentrate on Reconstruction, a secondary issue for many of the liberal republicans at the inception of their movement. The Nation remarked that ‘‘the prominence which the wants and woes of the South are taking in the Presidential canvas is exciting the surprise of a good many of those who remember that in the Liberal Republican movement, as first started, the Southern grievances occupied only a subordinate position.’’2 Throughout the campaign of 1872 the Cincinnati Commercial commented on how the Liberal Republican Party’s emphasis on Reconstruction had replaced the liberal republican movement’s primary interest in civil service reform and free trade. Early in the campaign, when still optimistic, the newspaper reported, ‘‘The Cincinnati movement has taken a shape, and has brought about results which its originators never contemplated. Its original purpose was mainly to take ground in favor of civil service reform and revenue reform, and against administrative corruption and incapacity. . . . These reforms have not been lost sight of, but Charles Sumner has probably hit the mark in saying that the watchword of the campaign is Reconciliation.’’ A month later the Commercial reiterated that ‘‘civil service reform was the original mainspring of the Liberal movement.’’ By the time the election had been decided and the need to attract white Southern votes had passed, it declared, ‘‘The Liberal Republican movement began with an effort to bring into conspicuity reforms in our tariff and civil service systems. A more liberal policy toward the States and people of the South were primarily incidental.’’ The willingness of the liberal republicans to publicly discuss the replacement of their original issues during the middle of a presidential campaign indicates their ambivalence in supporting Greeley, for such admissions could only hurt...

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