WI: Adams instead of Greeley 1872

Let me repost an old soc.history.what-if post of mine on "Liberal Republican Alternatives to Greeley in 1872":

***

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.
http://books.google.com/books?id=IT96Z6T1aTIC&pg=PA51&sig=82-RcygSlBtYHKZuuWyj59AAW3U

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
grāce 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
mamangers--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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