The crank convention had builded wiser than it knew. That the Democratic party could ever have been brought to the support of Horace Greeley for President of the United States reads even now like a page out of a nonsense-book. That his warmest support should have come from the South seems an incredible, and was a priceless, fact. His martyrdom shortened the distance across the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly filled it. The candidacy of Charles Francis Adams or of Lyman Trumbull would have meant a mathematical formula, with no solution of the problem, and as certain defeat at the end of it. Greeley’s candidacy threw a flood of light and warmth into the arena of deadly strife; it made a more equal and reasonable division of parties possible; it put the Southern half of the country in a position to plead its own case by showing the Northern half that it was not wholly recalcitrant, and it made way for real issues of pith and moment relating to the time instead of pigments of bellicose passion and scraps of ante bellum controversy.
In a word, Greeley did more by his death to complete the work of Lincoln than he could have done by a triumph at the polls and the term in the White House he so much desired. Though only sixty years of age, his race was run. Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life full of inspiration to his countrymen, and died not in vain, “our later Franklin” fittingly inscribed upon his tomb.
[1] Dissatisfaction with the administration of General Grant led a number of distinguished Republicans to unite in a call for what they named a Liberal Republican Convention to assemble in Cincinnati the first of May, 1872. Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull, and Carl Schurz were foremost among these Republicans. Mr. Schurz was chosen permanent chairman of the convention and delivered a striking key-note speech. Stanley Matthews, afterward a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, served as temporary chairman.
The free-trade and civil-service reform elements were largely represented under the leadership of David A. Wells, George Hoadley, and Horace White. Charles Francis Adams was the choice of these for the Presidential nomination. The opposition to Mr. Adams was divided at the outset between Justice David Davis of the Supreme Court, ex-Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and Governor B. Gratz Brown of Missouri, with a strong undercurrent for Horace Greeley. The arrival upon the scene at the opportune moment of Governor Brown, accompanied by General Francis P. Blair, turned the tide from both Adams and Davis, and, Brown withdrawing and throwing his strength to Greeley, secured on the sixth ballot the nomination of the famous editor of the New York “Tribune,” Brown himself taking second place on the ticket.
In the platform that was adopted the free-trade issue, in deference to Mr. Greeley’s Protectionist antecedents and sentiments, was “relegated to the congressional districts.”
The result at Cincinnati was received with mingled ridicule and applause. Many Liberal Republicans refused to accept Mr. Greeley and fell back within the lines of the regular Republican party. A sub-convention, called the Fifth Avenue Conference, was required to hold others of them, including Carl Schurz. Finally, the Democratic National Convention, which met at Baltimore in July, ratified the Greeley and Brown ticket.
During the midsummer there were high hopes of its election; but as the canvass advanced, its prospects steadily declined. Early in October Mr. Greeley made a tour from New England westward as far as Indiana and Ohio, delivering a series of speeches in persuasive eloquence regarded as unexampled in the political annals of the country. But nothing sufficed to stay overwhelming defeat, the portion fate seemed to have allotted Mr. Greeley on several occasions, in 1861 as a candidate for the Senate, in 1869 as a candidate for Controller of New York, and in 1870 as a representative in Congress, to which he had been sent in 1848–9.
During his absence from home his wife had fallen ill. He returned to find her condition desperate. She died and was buried amid the closing scenes of the disastrous campaign. Mr. Greeley had for years suffered from insomnia. His vigil by the bedside of his dying wife had quite exhausted him. Inflammation of the brain ensued; he remained sleepless, delirium set in, and he died November 29, 1872. General Grant and his Cabinet, with most of the officials of Congress and the Government, attended his funeral, the tragic circumstances of his death wholly obliterating partizan feeling and arousing general sympathy among all classes of the people.
COMMENTS ON COLONEL WATTERSON’S PAPER
THE foregoing was written in the south of France to help while away a winter vacation. I was not willing to give it to the public without the “visé” of my surviving colleagues, Whitelaw Reid and Horace White, to each of whom I sent a copy. At first I thought of recasting my matter to meet their objections. But, on second thought, it seems best to “let the hide go with the tallow,” as it were, their comments not only illuminating my narrative, but throwing on it the side lights of their differing points of view. No one holds in higher respect than I the noble aims and great sacrifices made by the Liberal Republicans.