Horace Greeley, writing in 1872 about the…

Horace Greeley, writing in 1872 about the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, says, “by our money system we have nationalized a system of oppression not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.”

In Reconstruction, Greeley has taken an erratic course, mostly favoring the Radicals and opposing president Andrew Johnson in 1865–66.

In 1867, Greeley had been one of twenty-one men who had signed a one hundred thousand dollar bond for the release of former president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis.

The move had been controversial, and many Northerners thought Greeley a traitor and had canceled subscriptions to the Weekly Tribune by the thousands.

In 1869, he had run on the Republican ticket for New York State Comptroller but was defeated by the incumbent Democrat, William F. Allen.

After supporting Ulysses Grant in the 1868 election, Greeley had broken from Grant and the Radicals.

Opposing Grant's re-election bid, he has joined the Liberal Republican Party, which had been organized in Missouri in 1870 under the leadership of Carl Schurz.

The party has has spread nationwide with strong support from powerful Republican newspaper editors such as Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, Horace White of the Chicago Tribune, Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican and especially Whitelaw Reid and Greeley of the New York Tribune.

The Liberal Republicans think that the Grant Administration, and the president personally, are fully corrupt.

More important, they think that the goals of Reconstruction have been achieved.

These goals were first the destruction of slavery and second the destruction of Confederate nationalism.

With these goals achieved, the tenets of republicanism demand that federal military troops be removed from the South, where they are propping up allegedly corrupt Republican regimes.

A key Radical goal had been to oust the ex-Confederates from power as a worthwhile goal for Reconstruction.

Now, say the Liberal Republicans, it is time for "amnesty", which means restoring the right to vote and hold office to ex-Confederates.

To everyone’s astonishment, this new party had nominated Greeley as their presidential candidate at their convention in Cincinnati in May 1872.

Even more surprisingly, he has been officially endorsed by the Democrats, whose party he has denounced for decades.

Many of the original founders of the Republican party and leaders of the Civil War have joined the movement, including its nominee Greeley, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky, and Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts.

The party platform demands "the immediate and absolute removal of all disabilities imposed on account of the rebellion" and local self-government for the southern states.

It regards "a thorough reform of the civil service as one of the most pressing necessities of the hour." (Ross, Earle Dudley. The Liberal Republican Movement (1910) full text online.)