Liberal Republican Party (United States)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Liberal Republican Party convened in Cincinnati in May 1872. Its purpose was to remove Ulysses S. Grant from the White House. By the time the election was over, Grant had won 286 of the 352 electoral votes and the party had ceased to exist. Its presidential nominee, Horace Greeley, died before the presidential electors had even gathered to cast their votes. The movement that drew some of the most accomplished reformers of the Civil War era collapsed in under a year. The questions worth examining are not simply why the Liberal Republicans lost so badly. They are why a party founded by men who fought against slavery came to champion amnesty for ex-Confederates. And why it found itself unable to attract the votes of the people it most claimed to be helping. Both answers begin in Missouri, where the party first took shape.

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• 2. Missouri Roots

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  Carl Schurz launched the Liberal Republican movement in Missouri in 1870. He was a former Civil War general, former ambassador, and sitting senator who had emigrated from Germany. The movement found early allies among some of the most powerful newspaper editors of the era. Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial backed it, as did Horace White of the Chicago Tribune. Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal lent his support, along with Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican. Most influential of all was Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune, where both Greeley and his colleague Whitelaw Reid championed the cause. This press network gave the emerging party an unusual national reach before it held a single convention.

  The party platform demanded 'the immediate and absolute removal of all disabilities imposed on account of the rebellion'. It also called for local self-government in southern states. Underlying these demands was a shared reading of what Reconstruction had accomplished: the destruction of slavery, and the destruction of Confederate nationalism. With those aims met, Liberal Republicans argued that federal troops had no business propping up what they called corrupt Republican regimes in the South. Civil service reform was described in the platform as one of 'the most pressing necessities of the hour'. Many Liberal Republicans also wanted lower tariffs, believing powerful industries had won unfair federal protections.

  Lyman Trumbull of Illinois had authored the Thirteenth Amendment, the law that formally abolished slavery. He was one of several prominent founding figures who had been central to both the Republican Party and the Civil War era. Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts, the son of President John Quincy Adams, was another. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had been a towering figure in the antislavery Senate, and Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky was among the oldest voices for emancipation. Many of these men had previously been Democrats or members of the Free Soil Party before joining the Republican Party in the 1850s. Historian Eric Foner noted that all four of the Republican senators who had voted to acquit Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial had joined the Liberal Republicans by 1872.

  Schurz himself had been born in Germany, which meant he was constitutionally ineligible for the presidency. He would need to find someone else to carry the party's banner at the national convention.

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• 3. The Cincinnati Convention

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  Led by Schurz as chairman, the 1872 Liberal Republican convention drew delegates with varied motivations. All were united in opposition to Grant. In Missouri, the Liberal Republicans had already built a functioning party organization; most other state delegations were little more than self-appointed committees with no formal structure behind them.

  Supreme Court Justice David Davis arrived with perhaps the strongest pre-convention backing of any candidate. He was one of three major contenders, along with Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois and Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts. Schurz privately favored Adams but, as chairman, chose to appear impartial and declined to campaign openly for him. Davis's candidacy was damaged during convention week by unfavorable coverage from newspapers aligned with the Liberal Republican movement. Greeley built support among delegates who had initially backed Davis, despite some concern about his skepticism toward tariff reduction.

  On the first ballot, Adams and Greeley emerged as the two strongest candidates. Trumbull retained significant support but did not gain ground. On the sixth and final ballot, Greeley accumulated just enough support to claim the nomination. Historian Downey later described the outcome as a crass political bargain imposed against the will of delegates who genuinely wanted Adams. Men like Schurz were, in Downey's account, political idealists who lacked the professional instincts of career politicians. They failed to act as a bloc, especially after Davis's support collapsed. That collapse, Downey argued, was engineered by a group of leading reformist newspaper editors.

  Missouri Governor Benjamin Gratz Brown was then chosen as the vice presidential nominee. Brown had backed Greeley partly to consolidate his own position within the Missouri state party, at Schurz's expense. The Democrats had already promised Liberal Republican leaders they would endorse whatever ticket emerged. They were about to learn exactly what that promise would cost them.

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• 4. The Impossible Coalition

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  At the July 1872 Democratic National Convention, delegates voted by a wide margin to endorse the Liberal Republican ticket. They also accepted the Liberal Republican platform without modification. This was not a decision Democrats arrived at easily. For decades, Greeley had used his newspaper to attack the Democratic Party, and party leaders in the Northeast held particular resentment toward him. Every state Democratic convention except Delaware's ultimately endorsed the ticket, though most did so after considerable internal debate. A group of disaffected Democrats led by Blanton Duncan formed the Straight-Out Democratic Party and nominated Charles O'Conor and John Quincy Adams II on a separate ticket. Both men refused the nomination and neither campaigned.

  Frederick Douglass organized Black voters behind Grant, and his efforts proved effective. Historian Eric Foner observed that Black voters held deep distrust of Greeley, despite Greeley's long personal history of opposing slavery. The decisive factor was the present coalition: the Liberal Republican ticket ran with Democratic endorsement, and most Black voters saw the Democratic Party as hostile to their civil and political interests. Foner also noted that civil service reform, if enacted, would effectively bar what he described as 'the whole colored population' from public office. For many Black voters, the party's reform program was not a benefit but a threat.

  Greeley favored protectionism and chose not to emphasize civil service reform. Both positions conflicted with the core concerns of the party's founders. His past associations with Republican leaders also weakened his case against Grant's alleged corruption. Grant's campaign drew on the financial resources of figures like Jay Cooke and deployed veterans' organizations across the country. Liberal Republicans argued they sought North-South reconciliation and an end to radical Reconstruction policies. Grant's backers accused them of trying to undo the results of the Civil War. Charles Sumner and Schurz campaigned actively for Greeley despite these headwinds. Many inside and outside the coalition believed the race was genuinely competitive. The outcome remained in doubt until October.

  When the votes were tallied, Greeley had won 43.8% of the popular vote and only 66 of the 352 electoral votes. Greeley died on the 29th of November 1872, five days before the presidential electors gathered to cast their votes. His electors could not coordinate in time, though the result made no difference given the scale of Grant's victory. The party was already gone before those electors convened. Several of its members, however, still held seats in Congress, and the causes it had championed were far from finished.

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• 5. Scattered Seeds

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  Several Liberal Republican members of Congress remained in office after the 1872 elections. Members of the House were permitted to keep their committee assignments. Liberal Republican senators, however, became de facto independents and were given inferior assignments. Most eventually joined the Democratic Party. Outside the South, some former Liberal Republicans attempted to build new third-party structures, but these efforts failed. Even Wisconsin's Reform Party, which achieved a degree of success, eventually collapsed as the Democrats became the primary opposition to the Republicans.

  Rutherford B. Hayes was nominated and elected in 1876 with the backing of Reform Republicans who had drawn on the Liberal Republican legacy. Hayes ended Reconstruction and removed several of Grant's appointments. Carl Schurz, who had actively campaigned for Hayes, became the Secretary of the Interior. The civil service reform that Liberal Republicans had described as a pressing necessity was eventually enacted during the presidency of Chester Arthur. Greeley's showing, however, had also closed a door: he had fared worse in the popular vote than Horatio Seymour had in 1868, and that result effectively ended the Democratic experiment with fusion tickets for a generation.

  Democrats won substantial congressional gains in the 1874 elections, aided by continued dissatisfaction with Grant and by the defection of former Liberal Republicans. Both major parties actively courted former Liberal Republican leaders in the 1876 elections, and former party supporters split roughly evenly between the two candidates that year.

  In the 1880s, many former Liberal Republicans joined the Mugwump movement in opposition to Republican presidential nominee James G. Blaine. Others found common ground with the Greenback Party, which pursued inflationary monetary policies and labor reforms. By breaking liberal elements loose from the Republican Party, the Liberal Republican movement cleared a path. A generation of reformers would eventually find their home in the Democratic Party.

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• 6. Competing Interpretations

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  Historian Richard Gerber observed that most authors have treated the Liberal Republicans as an aberration in American political history. He grouped historical interpretations into two main categories. One emphasizes the Liberal Republican push for re-establishing self-government in the South and for restoring national unity. The other sees the party as primarily motivated by opposition to Grant's corruption and by a desire for lower tariffs.

  Historian James McPherson calculated that roughly three-quarters of former abolitionists backed Grant in 1872. He found this striking, given that prominent antislavery figures had lined up behind the Liberal Republican ticket. McPherson's explanation was direct: abolitionists believed that true equality required not goodwill but relentless law enforcement. Greeley's formula of amnesty for ex-Confederates and a hands-off approach to the South struck most of them as incompatible with protecting African Americans.

  Historian Lunde framed the conflict in terms of two competing visions of what the Civil War had meant. Grant's supporters celebrated the war as a great national triumph that had bound the country together through shared sentiment and an expanding railroad network. Democrats and Liberal Republicans, by contrast, saw the war as a tragedy and sought to recover what they considered the purity of prewar political life through reconciliation and respect for state autonomy. In Lunde's framing, Greeley's vision of national benevolence was defeated by Grant's centralizing 'blood and iron' concept.

  Andrew Slap, writing in 2006, offered a defense of the Liberal Republicans against characterizations that had built up over generations. Earlier scholars had described the party as opportunistic, elitist, and tainted by racism. Slap's defense engaged three specific critiques by name: Ari Hoogenboom's characterization of opportunism, John G. Sproat's charge of elitism, and what Slap called the neoabolitionist characterization of racism. Joining historians Heather Cox Richardson and David Quigley, Slap concluded that Reconstruction ended not because of organized political violence in the South but because Northern opinion had decided the war's goals were met. To continue federal army rule in the South, they argued, would have violated republican principles. Greeley lost the election, but the argument he carried into it proved more durable than the party that sent him.

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