The Democratic Party endorsed third-party candidate Horace Greeley in 1872, hoping to peel off GOP support and beat President Grant. It was a spectacular failure.
who called out corruption in the Grant administration and advocated for pulling U.S. troops out of the South, arguing that Black citizens now had political and civil rights. The party nominated Greeley, who according to Williams had “broad national appeal,” for president at its convention in Cincinnati in May 1872.
Two months later, the Democrats met in Baltimore and made the calculation that their best bet in knocking off Grant was to back the Liberal Republican Party ticket of Greeley and his running mate, Missouri Gov. Benjamin G. Brown. It remains the only time a major party has endorsed a third-party candidate for president.
“With many expressions of extreme disgust, with some weak and vain attempts to like the dose, the Democracy have swallowed Greeley, Brown and the Cincinnati platform,” the New York Times reported. “From first to last this affair has been the ghastliest of political shows.”, spread out over two days. Greeley wasn’t in Baltimore for it but accepted the nomination.
“All his life, Greeley had thundered against the Democrats for their corrupt ways,” wrote Williams, the Greeley biographer. “… In retrospect, Greeley came off as an opportunist, rather than the man of principle he had claimed to be.”The 1872 election, just the second presidential race since the end of the Civil War, came at a time when the country was still wrestling with Reconstruction and stitching the nation back together.
The Democrats’ decision to back a third-party candidate wasn’t the campaign’s only oddity. It also featured a female candidate, Victoria Woodhull, even though women couldn’t vote yet. Woodhull ran as the Equal Rights Party nominee, and a