July 10, 1872: The Democratic National Convention is held at Ford's Grand Opera House in Baltimore. It was owned by John T. Ford, who also owned and operated Ford;s Theatre in Washington. Not a good sign for the President of the United States, of someone who aspires to that office.
President Ulysses S. Grant had been nominated for a 2nd term at the Republican National Convention, on June 6 at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. In spite of the scandals surrounding his Administration, Grant himself was never implicated. And, still stuck with the tagline, referring to the Civil War, "Not every Democrat was a Confederate, but every Confederate was a Democrat," the Democratic Party had trouble finding a willing candidate.
Governors of big States would seem to be potential candidates. But John T. Hoffman, to this day the last Mayor of New York to be elected to any higher office, was tarred by scandal, associated with the State's imprisoned Democratic boss, William Tweed. And most other big-State Governors were then Republicans: John W. Geary of Pennsylvania, William B. Washburn of Massachusetts, Edward F. Noyes of Ohio, and Conrad Baker of Indiana.
Looking to previous nominees was a bad idea: Former Governor Horatio Seymour of New York had been clobbered by Grant in 1868, and former General George McClellan's name was mud as a result of his failures both on the battlefield and at the ballot box.
And looking to past Democratic Administrations was no good: Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, both now dead, were Presidents even the Democrats wanted to forget; and the last successful Democratic President, James K. Polk, from Tennessee, was so far back that any major figure from his Administration was either dead, too old, or too Southern to appeal to the nation at large.
It should have been easy to find a successful General to be the nominee. The Democrats had already nominated Andrew Jackson (lost, then won twice) and Pierce (won); and would later nominated Winfield Scott Hancock (lost). But most of the Union heroes were Republicans. Former General William B. Franklin was asked to run, but declined.
Jeremiah S. Black had been Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, then Buchanan's Attorney General, then his Secretary of State. But his role as defense attorney for President Andrew Johnson in his 1868 impeachment trial hurt him. Former Representative William Groesbeck of Ohio had also defended Johnson. Former Senator James Bayard of Delaware had voted to acquit Johnson, and was implicated, though never charged, in the Crédit Mobilier scandal that had gotten some Grant Administration figures in trouble. All 3 had their names placed in nomination, but none seemed capable of winning the nomination, much less beating Grant.
It was suggested that the Democrats simply accept the nominee of a breakaway group, calling themselves the Liberal Republican Party, who, angry over the Grant Administration scandals, had met in Cincinnati on May 3, and had nominated Horace Greeley for President and Governor and former Senator Benjamin G. Brown of Missouri for Vice President.
On the 1st ballot, Greeley got 686 votes, Black 21, Bayard 15, and Groesbeck 2, with 8 delegates casting no votes. So the Democratic Party nominated Horace Greeley for President of the United States.
And who was Horace Greeley? The last man who a politically aware American in 1872 would have been expected to be nominated by the Democrats. He was born on February 3, 1811 on a farm in Amherst, New Hampshire. At the age of 15, he apprenticed to a printer, and worked for newspapers. He went to New York City in 1831, and in 1834, he published a literary magazine named The New-Yorker. This was not the magazine of the same title that began publishing in 1925: This one went under in the depression that began with the Panic of 1837.
Most people blamed the Democratic Party and President Martin Van Buren for that. Greeley got back on his feet, and his publishings supported the main opposition party of that era, the Whig Party, which was pro-business, and pro-expansion.
One of the positions taken by The New-Yorker was that the unemployed of the cities should seek lives in the developing American West -- at the time, what would now be considered the Midwest, since the Rocky Mountains, the Southwest, and the West Coast were not yet American territory. In 1837, Greeley wrote: "Fly, scatter through the country, go to the Great West, anything rather than remain here... The West is the true destination." In 1838, he wrote, "Go to the West: there your capabilities are sure to be appreciated and your energy and industry rewarded."
Today, Greeley is best remembered for a variation on those words: "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country!" He was happy to popularize the slogan in an 1865 editorial. But he didn't come up with those exact words himself. It has been alleged that John Babson Lane Soule first used them, in the Terre Haute Express in Indiana in 1851. But this might not be correct, either. We might never know the truth, but it definitely didn't start with Greeley.
In 1841, Greeley founded the New York Tribune, which merged in 1924 with the New York Herald, and formed one of America's best-written newspapers, until it folded in 1966. Greeley used his paper to advocate for liberal causes, including the abolition of slavery. In 1848, he was elected to fill the brief, unexpired term of a Congressman from New York, as a Whig. That party splintered over the issue of slavery, and, like Abraham Lincoln and William Seward, he left it and became one of the founders of the Republican Party in 1854.
From that point onward, including during the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865, Greeley produced editorials denouncing the South, slavery, and the Democratic Party which dominated the South and seemed to be upholding slavery. Indeed, in 1860, just as the Republicans would do in 1872, the Democrats had split conventions, 3 of them, 2 nominating slavery-supporting candidates, 1 nominating an abolitionist.
That split led directly to the election of Abraham Lincoln. During the war, Lincoln wrote of Greeley and his Tribune editorials, "Having him firmly behind me will be as helpful to me as an army of one hundred thousand men."
By 1872, with the Civil War won and slavery abolished, Greeley was 61 years old, and was one of the most admired men in the country. Nominating him for President seemed a logical choice for the Liberal Republicans. It seemed like a lazy choice for the Democrats: It would be like if, in 2020, Rupert Murdoch had broken with Donald Trump and the Democrats had nominated him. But nominating anyone else would have split the anti-Grant vote, and would have assured Grant's victory.
The Greeley nomination was a disaster, anyway: Every accusation he had ever hurled at the Democrats was hurled back at him. Greeley resigned as editor of the Tribune for the campaign, and, unusually for the time, embarked on a speaking tour to bring his message to the people. As it was then customary for candidates for major office not to actively campaign, because ambition was seen as a flaw, he was attacked as a seeker after office. Grant wrote of Greeley, "He is a genius without common sense."
Thomas Nast, the nation's leading cartoonist, whose drawings had helped Lincoln, and had helped bring down Boss Tweed, showed Greeley giving bail money for Jefferson Davis, throwing mud on Grant, and shaking hands with John Wilkes Booth across Lincoln's grave.
To make matters worse, Greeley's wife Mary got sick. On October 12, he stopped campaigning to return to her side. She died on October 30, just 6 days before the election. He was emotionally broken, and soon began to break down physically as well.
President Ulysses S. Grant is re-elected, defeating Horace Greeley, with 55 percent of the vote to 43, and 286 Electoral Votes to 66. Greeley won only 6 States, all formerly slaveholding States: Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri and Texas.
Just 24 days after the election, on November 29, 1872, he died, before the 66 Electoral Votes he had earned could even be officially counted. They were distributed among other men, including his running mate, Governor Brown, who lived on until 1885.
Harper's Weekly, which had printed Nast's cartoons, wrote, "Since the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, the death of no American has been so sincerely deplored as that of Horace Greeley; and its tragical circumstances have given a peculiarly affectionate pathos to all that has been said of him."
The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the nation's leading clergyman at the time, had been a fellow former abolitionist. But his reputation also took a hit in the Autumn of 1872, due to one of America's earliest sex scandals, inadvertently having an effect on the election, through the candidacy of the first female candidate for President, Victoria Woodhull, like Greeley a publisher, who had exposed the married Beecher's affair with another man's wife 3 days before the election. (It didn't help her.) Upon hearing of Greeley's death, Beecher said, "When Horace Greeley died, unjust and hard judgment of him died also."
Unlike Beecher's, Greeley's reputation recovered even faster than it was ruined -- but that did him no good.
Statues of Greeley were placed in New York's City Hall Park and in Greeley Square, the southern end of Herald Square, as a monument to his Tribune and the paper with which it merged. The town of Greeley, Colorado was named for him.
Other candidates for President have lost by wider margins, but no Presidential candidate ever lost as much as Horace Greeley, who never even wanted to be President.
*
