November 5, 1872: Greeley vs. Grant, and Beecher vs. Woodhull

Victoria Claflin Woodhull

November 5, 1872: President Ulysses S. Grant is re-elected, defeating Horace Greeley, with 55 percent of the vote to 43, and 286 Electoral Votes to 66.

This was a weird election. The Republican Party was split over the corruption in the Grant Administration, though Grant himself has never been accused of wrongdoing. A group of "Liberal Republicans" nominated Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, formerly one of the nation's leading voices against slavery, briefly a Congressman in 1848-49, and one of the Party's founders in 1854.

Ulysses S. Grant

Greeley favored Western expansionism, popularizing the slogan, "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country!" But he didn't come up with the words himself: John Babson Lane Soule first used it in the Terre Haute Express in Indiana in 1851.

Greeley had long lambasted the Democratic Party as the party of slavery, but, not wanting to divide the opposition to the Republicans, the Democrats swallowed their pride, and also nominated Greeley. (This is not quite like today's Democratic Party nominating Bernie Sanders. More like if they nominated George Will. Certainly, not Pat Buchanan.) As a result, just 7 1/2 years after the American Civil War ended, and with Reconstruction still in progress, pretty much every attack that Greeley had hurled at the Democrats for a quarter of a century was hurled back at him, including that he supported racist policies, even the nascent Ku Klux Klan.

Horace Greeley

In addition, his wife Mary got sick, and on October 12, he effectively stopped campaigning to be by her side. She died 5 days before the election, and he won only 6 States, all formerly slaveholding States: Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri and Texas.

All this took a terrible toll on his own health, and he died at age 61 on November 29, before the Electoral Votes could be cast -- thus becoming the only person ever entitled to receive Electoral Votes for President, but unable to receive them.

Did I say the election was weird? It was so weird. (How weird was it?) Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull voted -- Anthony for Grant, Woodhull for herself, the 1st woman known to have gotten on any ballot as a candidate for President.

Susan B. Anthony

Even if the million-to-one shot came in, and she won, she couldn't have served at first, anyway: She didn't reach the minimum age of 35 until September 23, 1873, over 6 months into the term. Her Vice Presidential nominee would have had to serve as President from March 4 to September 23. That was writer and former abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the most famous black person in America at the time.

Frederick Douglass. It's a real photograph, but colorized.

Both Anthony and Woodhull were arrested on Election Day. Voting was then illegal for a woman, and that's what Anthony was arrested for. But that's not what Woodhull was arrested for. She was arrested for obscenity, for printing, in a magazine she and her sister Tennessee Claflin ran, the story of the marital infidelity of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, yet another former abolitionist, and yet another founder of the Republican Party.

The Claflin sisters were the 1st women in America to publish a magazine. They were also the 1st women ever to run a Wall Street brokerage firm.

Ironically, Beecher had supported women's right to vote, but, though apparently a practitioner of free love, he denounced it in public, and denounced Woodhull in particular, from his pulpit. That's why Woodhull was charged with obscenity (the story was sexual in nature), not with libel (the story was true), and Beecher's reputation did not soon improve.

Henry Ward Beecher

Woodhull was held in jail for a month, and released. She ran for President again in 1884 and 1892, with almost no notice. She moved to England with her 3rd husband, and died there in 1927, and was buried there.

Beecher died in 1887. He and Greeley are both buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, along with several early baseball stars. Douglass died in 1895. Tennessee Claflin died in 1923, and Victoria Woodhull in 1927.

Susan B. Anthony died in 1906. In 1979, her face replaced Dwight D. Eisenhower on the $1.00 coin, or the "silver dollar," making her the 1st woman to appear on American coins, other than generic depictions of Lady Liberty. But the "Susie B" dollar coin proved unpopular.

It ran until 1999, and was replaced the next year by the "golden dollar," with a depiction of Sacagawea, the Native American guide of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark from 1804 to 1809. That lasted until 2009, and was replaced with the Presidential dollar, with each year presenting the public with 4 previously deceased Presidents.

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November 5, 1872 was a Tuesday. No games were played that day: Baseball season was over, football was in its infancy, hockey barely existed, and basketball hadn't been invented yet.