“Which of the two has changed?”
The newspaper edited by Frederick Douglass asked a pointed question in the summer of 1872.
The African-American abolitionist – and countless others – watched in astonishment and dismay as Horace Greeley, the greatest newspaperman of the nineteenth century, joined his one-time enemies to mount a long-shot presidential campaign against President Ulysses S. Grant.
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A silhouette of Horace Greeley. Library of Congress.
Greeley’s New York Tribune did more to shape Northern public opinion in 1850s and 1860s than many politicians and any other newspaper. Through its weekly edition, which circulated widely across the Midwest and the Great Plains, the Tribune magnified its influence and became a truly national institution.
It used its enormous power to oppose the spread of slavery into the territories and support the new Republican Party. The Tribune denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” advanced by Democratic Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas. After Lincoln took office, the masthead of the Tribune declared “in a standing banner line at its masthead,” according to Greeley biographer William Harlan Hale, “NO COMPROMISE! NO CONCESSIONS TO TRAITORS!”
When Greeley published his famous open letter to President Abraham Lincoln in August 1862 urging aggressive enforcement of the Confiscation Act to free slaves and hasten the end of the rebellion, Lincoln was forced to respond – and did so, Hale notes, with a “shrewdly conceived and masterfully executed” letter of his own.
But a little more than seven years after the surrender at Appomattox, Greeley was put forward as the candidate of dissident “Liberal Republicans” and Democrats to challenge the general who had led Northern forces to victory and the party that was protecting the rights of newly freed slaves.
Douglass was appalled.
“There was a time, and that time not long ago, when Mr. Greeley had nothing in common with the Democratic party,” the New National Era noted in a July 18 editorial. “But that day has past, and the two are no longer twain, but one. Now, which of the two has changed?”
The answer was clear. It was Greeley, for whom consistency was never a watchword, who had made the biggest – and most ill-advised – political leap of his career. The Democratic platform pledged support for the post-war constitutional amendments designed to protect the citizenship and voting rights of newly freed slaves but also called for an end to Reconstruction and declared the belief that “Local self-government, with impartial suffrage, will guard the rights of all citizens more securely than any centralized power.”
With the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist groups on the march across the defeated South, such declarations represented either willful ignorance or indifference to the violence faced by newly freed slaves. But Greeley was not alone. A significant number of disaffected Republicans – and newspaper editors – joined forces under the “Liberal Republican” banner. Corruption and sectional reconciliation, rather than support for the political and economic rights of former slaves, were the paramount issues for men like Greeley, fellow editor Horace White of the Chicago Tribune, and Sen. Carl Schurz of Missouri.
“Fundamentally, reformers believed, Southern violence arose from the same cause as political corruption: the exclusion from office of men of ‘intelligence and culture,’” Eric Foner has written. Liberal reformers “had come to view Reconstruction as an expression of all the real and imagined evils of the Gilded Age.”
The rumpled Greeley’s quixotic campaign against Grant – in which the issue of corruption played a major role – was the backdrop against which the New York Sun published its revelations about the Credit Mobilier scandal on Sept. 4, 1872.
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The New York Sun, Sept. 4, 1872.
In a major scoop, the Sun reported that a number of prominent members of Congress bought stock in the construction subsidiary of the Union Pacific from Representative Oakes Ames of Massachusetts, a major backer of the Union Pacific. In letters written to a fellow Credit Mobilier investor (who ended up suing Ames for more shares) the Massachusetts lawmaker confided he was placing the stock with colleagues in the belief that the profitable shares would make them more likely to support the interests of the railroad on Capitol Hill.
Unlike many of the charges and counter-charges of corruption that flew through the air during the presidential campaign, the revelations published in the Sun offered legitimate and serious evidence of corruption.
Greeley’s role in the political drama surrounding the Credit Mobilier revelations was relatively small. But for one of the figures identified by the Sun it proved to be critical.
Unlike most presidential candidates of the nineteenth century, Greeley eschewed the “front-porch” approach to campaigning in which supporters would trek to a candidate’s home for a speech or other words of wisdom. He addressed rallies across New England and in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.
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Schuyler Colfax. Library of Congress.
In Indianapolis, Greeley baited Vice President Schuyler Colfax, one of the Credit Mobilier purchasers identified by the Sun, with a call for “purification” of corruption from high places. Colfax, who as a newspaperman himself before he entered Congress wrote for the Tribune, could not ignore the challenge from his one-time mentor and responded several days later in a speech in South Bend.
It had been a difficult summer for the amiable Hoosier nicknamed “Smiler.” There had been loose talk in the spring that he might replace Grant at the top of the Republican ticket. Not only did that not take place, he was dumped as Grant’s running mate in favor of Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts (also implicated by the Sun in the Credit Mobilier stock scandal). On top of everything else, his mother passed away in August.
Greeley’s comments about Credit Mobilier may have been the last straw. He vehemently denied buying Credit Mobilier stock and insisted that he didn’t need any incentives to support the construction of a transcontinental railway – “you might as well say a Methodist would have to be bribed to advocate Methodism.”
In the coming months, Colfax stuck to his denial but as the evidence against him accumulated it was seen as increasingly implausible. In February 1873, the Tribune concluded archly that if Colfax was telling the truth “he is the victim of a train of circumstantial evidence almost unparalleled in judicial history.”
By then, though, the man who provoked Colfax had been dead for two and half months. Greeley died on November 29, 1872, heartbroken at the passing of his wife and crushed by the lopsided defeat he suffered at the hands of Grant.
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The Chicago Tribune, Nov. 30 1872, with news of the death of Horace Greeley at the top of Page 1.
Greeley’s late apostasy was forgiven. New York Republican powerbroker Thurlow Weed, once an ally of Greeley’s and later a rival, served as a pallbearer, and the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut attended the funeral, Hale notes.
“At noon the funeral procession formed and policemen lined the crowded streets,” Hale writes in the closing lines of his marvelous biography. “City churches rang their chimes and all business stopped as the cortege passed down Fifth Avenue, heading for Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. On Madison Square the people of New York stood twenty deep to watch Horace Greeley go by. The New York Police Band played the Dead March from Saul. In the first carriage following the family mourners rode Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States.”
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Note to readers: after taking a couple of months off from the “King of Frauds” blog I’ve decided to return with a slightly different focus. I want to use this space as time permits to write about the personalities and issues involved in the Credit Mobilier scandal rather than just the scandal itself. This is the first installment. Over the coming months I expect you’ll see posts about a variety of other figures and issues. You might also see links to posts I write as an occasional contributor to the Retropolis blog of The Washington Post. Thank you for your indulgence and interest. And don’t forget: Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal is on sale at amazon.com
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