most "newspaper made," for the leading figures included many of the famous editors of the North. In every northern state there was opposition within the Republican party to the administration of Grant, and Schouler in the Cincinnati Commercial, Medill in the Chicago Tribune and Greeley in the New York Tribune, all helped to fan the flames.
The national convention of the Liberal Republicans, called by the Liberals of Missouri, was held at Cincinnati in May, 1872. Among the leaders of the convention were Colonel A. K. McClure, editor of the Philadelphia Times, Carl Schurz and Joseph Pulitzer of Missouri, and Horace White, one of the owners of the Chicago Tribune.
The politicians who had gone to the convention with the intention of controlling the nominations, viewed the result of the balloting with disappointment and surprise—Horace Greeley was nominated. The Free Trade Liberals in New York, at a meeting presided over by William Cullen Bryant, at once disowned the new Liberal party and its candidate.
Friends had told Greeley that it would be impossible for the Democrats to support him for the Presidency. His reply to this shows the same weakness that he had exhibited in similar circumstances in an interview with Thurlow Weed for the governorship of New York. He immediately suggested that if he were not an available candidate for President, he hoped he would be considered acceptable for the second place on the ticket.[1]
His nomination put no heart into the men who had to make the fight for him. Even the state of New Hampshire, in which he had spent his boyhood, rebelled against his nomination and, in the October elections, the Republicans won in a landslide. He made a sturdy,
- ↑ McClure, 301.
