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THE HUMOR AND TRAGEDY OF
THE GREELEY CAMPAIGN
BY HENRY WATTERSON
II
JOHNSON had made a bungling attempt to carry out the policies of
Lincoln and had gone down in the strife. The Democratic party had
reached the ebb-tide of its disastrous fortunes. It seemed the merest
reactionary. A group of influential Republicans, for one cause or
another dissatisfied with Grant, held a caucus and issued a call for
what they described as a Liberal Republican Convention to
assemble in Cincinnati, May 1, 1872.[1]
A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by
inheritance and conviction, I had been making in Kentucky an
unequal fight for the acceptance of the inevitable. The line of
cleavage between the old and the new South I had placed upon the
last three amendments to the Constitution, naming them the Treaty
of Peace between the sections. The negro must be invested with the
rights conferred upon him by these amendments, however mistaken
and injudicious the South might think them. The obsolete black laws
instituted during the slave régime must be removed from the statute-
books. The negro, like Mohammed’s coffin, swung in mid-air. He was
neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring. For our own sake
we must habilitate him, educate and elevate him, make him, if
possible, a contented and useful citizen. Failing of this, free
government itself might be imperiled.
I had behind me the intelligence of the Confederate soldiers
almost to a man. They, at least, were tired of futile fighting, and to
them the war was over. But there was an element, especially in
Kentucky, which wanted to fight when it was much too late—old
Union Democrats and Union Whigs—who clung to the hull of slavery
when the kernel was gone, and proposed to win in politics what had
been lost in battle.
The leaders of this belated element were in complete control of
the political machinery of the State. They regarded me as an
impudent upstart, since I had come to Kentucky from Tennessee as
little better than a carpet-bagger, and had done their uttermost to put
me down and drive me out.
I was a young fellow of two and thirty, of boundless optimism and
with my full share of self-confidence, no end of physical endurance
and mental vitality, and having some political as well as newspaper
experience. It never crossed my fancy that I could fail. I met
resistance with aggression, answered attempts at bullying with
scorn, generally irradiated by laughter. Yet I was not wholly blind to
consequences and the admonitions of prudence, and when the call
for a Liberal Republican Convention appeared, I realized that,
interested as I was in what might come of it, if I expected to remain a
Democrat in a Democratic community, and to influence and lead a
Democratic following, I must proceed with caution. Though many of
those proposing the new movement were familiar acquaintances,
some of them personal friends, the scheme was, as it were, in the
air. Its three newspaper bell-wethers, Samuel Bowles of the
Springfield “Republican,” Horace White of the Chicago “Tribune,” and
Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati “Commercial,” were specially well
known to me; so were Horace Greeley, Carl Schurz, and Charles
Sumner. Stanley Matthews was my kinsman; George Hoadley and
Cassius M. Clay were next-door neighbors. But they were not the
men I had trained with—not my “crowd,”—and it was a question how
far I might be able to reconcile myself, not to mention my political
associates, to such company, even conceding that they proceeded
under good fortune with a good plan, offering the South extrication
from its woes and the Democratic party an entering wedge into a
solid and hitherto irresistible Republicanism.
From a photograph taken about 1872, owned
by Mr. F. H. Meserve
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to
have a look at the stalking-horse there to be offered, free to take it or
leave it, as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication still open
and intact.
III
IV