Poor Horace Greeley

We take a break from the regularly scheduled work I'm supposed to be doing to present you with the sad tale of Horace Greeley's campaign for president in 1872. Greeley, a prominent newspaper editor who spent most of the Civil War denouncing Democrats as traitors and secessionists, was chosen by a splinter group of Republicans to run against Republican President Ulysses S. Grant. Surprisingly, the Democrats backed Greeley too, as their main objective was to get Grant out of office.

Grant didn't take part in much stump-speaking (politicians at the time still thought it degrading to beg for votes), but his campaign managers and other Republicans systematically destroyed the aging curmudgeon Greeley. Political cartoonist Thomas Nast lampooned Greeley as a hopeless incompetent, a pumpkin-headed and nearsighted clown. His cartoons depicted Greeley shaking hands with a rebel who has just shot a Union soldier, shaking hands with John Wilkes Booth across Lincoln's grave, and turning over weeping black children to KKK riders after a lynching.

Even Livingston, of Stanley and Livingston fame, got in on the action. Stanley, filling Livingston in on what he had missed while wandering in Africa, told him about Greeley's Democratic support, to which Livingston replied, "You have told me stupendous things, and with a confiding simplicity I was swallowing them peacefully down; but there is a limit to all things, and when you tell me that Horace Greeley is become a Democratic candidate I will be hanged if I believe it."

At first Greeley kept up his good spirits, saying "While there are doubts as to my fitness for president, nobody seems to deny that I would make a capital beaten candidate." But his wife died just before the election, and Greeley said "I am not dead, but I wish I were." When he lost in a landslide, he said "I was the worst beaten man who ever ran for high office."

"Utterly ruined beyond hope, I desire, before the night closes its jaws on me forever, to say that, though my running for president has placed me where I am, it is not the cause for my ruin."

(Source: Paul S. Boller, Presidential Campaigns, 1985.)