The 1872 presidential race provoked deep cleavages among abolitionists. When Sumner published an open letter to black voters, summoning them to abandon Grant, many erstwhile allies were speechless. “If the Devil himself were at the helm of the ship of state,” the abolitionist and women’s rights activist Lydia Maria Child responded, “my conscience would not allow me to aid in removing him to make room for the Democratic party.”97 She believed that when Liberal Republicans endorsed “state sovereignty,” it meant “when the Ku Klux renew their plans to exterminate Republicans, white and black, they
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