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The Liberal Republicans are often blamed for their folly in nominating Horace Greeley in 1872. But would any of the other candidates have been preferable? In fact, it is quite understandable why none of his competitors was chosen:

(1) Charles Francis Adams was considered too much of an Anglophile for the Irish vote, and too much of an aloof aristocrat for the West. It's not even just a matter of his being aloof from politics--he positively disliked it and did not wish, as he put it, to be blackened by the "dirt of electioneering for place." David M. Tucker, *Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age,* p. 51. https://books.google.com/books?id=IT96Z6T1aTIC&pg=PA51 Basically, he wanted the nomination to be handed to him, and people who think that way rarely get a nomination. Besides, he was Carl Schurz's candidate, and Schurz had many opponents in the party, most notably his fellow Missourian Governor Gratz Brown.

(2) David Davis, Adams's leading rival, had problems of his own:

(a) On the Supreme Court he had offended hard-money men by voting to uphold the legality of the greenbacks. (Of course this very decision had made him the favorite of some labor reformers, who didn't realize that Davis really did not care for their financial program, and was just using them politically; he voted to sustain the Legal Tender Act in order to uphold the memory of the Lincoln administration, not out of any love for the "rag baby.")

(b) By upholding a Missouri test law, he had also alienated Liberals who wanted a broad amnesty.

(c) Because he was favored by a coterie of Congressional Democrats, some Liberals suspected him of really being a Democrat in disguise.

(d) There was a question whether Davis would command the Republican support necessary to defeat Grant in November.

(e) Eastern Democrats were suspicious of Midwesterners, whether Democrats or Liberals like Davis. (This is related to (a)--doubts about Midwestern "soundness" on the money question.)

The denial of the nomination to Davis is usually blamed on a "quartet" of editors, Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican (MA), Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Horace White of the Chicago Tribune who conspired to deny Davis the nomination by each attacking him editorially from different angles. The "quartet" however succeeded largely because it was able to point to real weaknesses in Davis, which IMO would make his nomination questionable in any event. In any event, "The boozy, boisterous, brazen behavior of Davis's own campaign workers at the convention was the coup de grace to his candidacy." http://elections.harpweek.com/1872/Overview-1872-1.htm

Those were the main candidates. Lyman Trumbull was another possibility, but was seen as rather colorless and unenthusiastic about running for president. Gratz Brown (who was to be Greeley's running mate) was Missouri's favorite son, but as the historian William Gillette once wrote, he was "always under the influence of either a newly discovered theory or a newly found bottle." (During the campaign he gave a drunken speech at Yale, where he said that colleges were better in the West than in the effete East and wondered how he had ever managed to graduate from Yale. No doubt some of his listeners were asking themselves the same question...) Chase was too ill--though he did outlive Greeley! Charles Sumner had taken himself out of the running, and Schurz was of course ineligible because of his foreign birth.

All in all, the nomination of Greeley should not have come as that much of a surprise. He had some support in the New York delegation from the beginning; he was the second choice of many delegates; and his campaign manangers--Whitelaw Reid, Theodore Tilton, and William Dorsheimer--manuevered skillfully for him.

Nor am I that certain that despite Greeley's obvious vulnerabilities--a protectionist in a largely free-trade party, a man with a long record of support for eccentric causes, etc.--another candidate would have done much better. Grant looks to me to be very difficult to beat in 1872. The country was generally prosperous in those pre-Panic of 1873 days; and some of the worst scandals in the Grant administration didn't become evident until Grant's *second* term. No doubt there were some die-hard Democrats who refused to vote for Greeley--this happened more in the North than in the South because for the most part southern Democrats would support *anyone* who promised to withdraw federal troops--and some of them would have voted for Davis or Adams. But there were probably some Irish-American voters who would not have supported Adams, some Northeasterners who would not have supported Davis, etc.

Perhaps if the Panic of 1873 and ensuing depression had started a year earlier, the Liberal Republicans would have had a chance. But even then their hard-money orthodoxy (as I mentioned, even Davis is not really an exception) might make it difficult for them to exploit popular discontent. (Greeley's "The way to resume [specie payments] is to resume" was pretty typical of the Liberals.)
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