use the abuse it aimed at was so flagrant. But the
ostracism of the entire official class of the old South was growingly
recognized as a grievance and a wrong. It was the spirit of proscription
that brought on the political crisis of 1872. That proscriptive spirit
broke up the Republican party in Missouri; the liberal element, led by
Carl Schurz and B. Gratz Brown, held a State convention. Their movement
fell in with a strong rising tide of opposition to Grant's
administration within the Republican party. Its grounds were
various,--chiefly, a protest against wide and gross maladministration, a
demand for a reformed and scientific civil-service, opposition to the
high tariff, and the desire for a more generous and reconciling policy
toward the South. The movement was especially prompted by a group of
leading independent journals conducted by very able men,--the New York
_Evening Post_, under William Cullen Bryant; the _Nation_, edited by E.
L. Godkin; the Cincinnati _Commercial_ of Murat Halstead; the
Louisville _Courier-Journal_ of Henry Watterson; the Springfield
_Republican_ of Samuel Bowles. Sympathetic in the main was Horace
Greeley's New York _Tribune_. In more or less close alliance were a few
of the congressional leaders, notably Sumner, who had quarreled bitterly
with Grant over the proposed annexation of San Domingo; Trumbull, who
was never in close touch with his old party after the impeachment trial;
and Carl Schurz, who was now in the Senate.

A national convention was held at Cincinnati, in May, 1872. The
Democrats had so little hope of separate success that they stood ready
to fall in with the new departure, and this gave greater importance to
its action. For its Presidential candidate, the foremost name had been
that of the elder Charles Francis Adams. Of the most distinguished
family in the country's political annals; one of the founders of the
Free Soil party; a conservative but resolute Republican; minister to
England through the war, and most serviceable there by his firmness and
wisdom; eminent by character, experience, and mental equipment; so
indifferent to office that he almost openly scorned the proffered
honor,--he seemed to the reformers a nearly ideal candidate, however
much his reserved and distant manners might handicap him before a
popular constituency.

But the spite of a disappointed aspirant, B. Gratz Brown, and the
caprice of the convention, turned its choice by a sudden impulse to
Ho