about him to have been high-minded men who thought they were doing for
the best in a situation unparalleled and beset with perplexity. What
they did tends to show that men will do for party and in concert
what the same men never would be willing to do each on his own
responsibility. In his "Life of Samuel J. Tilden," John Bigelow says:

"Why persons occupying the most exalted positions should have ventured
to compromise their reputations by this deliberate consummation of a
series of crimes which struck at the very foundations of the republic is
a question which still puzzles many of all parties who have no charity
for the crimes themselves. I have already referred to the terrors and
desperation with which the prospect of Tilden's election inspired the
great army of office-holders at the close of Grant's administration.
That army, numerous and formidable as it was, was comparatively
limited. There was a much larger and justly influential class who were
apprehensive that the return of the Democratic party to power threatened
a reactionary policy at Washington, to the undoing of some or all the
important results of the war. These apprehensions were inflamed by
the party press until they were confined to no class, but more or less
pervaded all the Northern States. The Electoral Tribunal, consisting
mainly of men appointed to their positions by Republican Presidents
or elected from strong Republican States, felt the pressure of this
feeling, and from motives compounded in more or less varying proportions
of dread of the Democrats, personal ambition, zeal for their party
and respect for their constituents, reached the conclusion that the
exclusion of Tilden from the White House was an end which justified
whatever means were necessary to accomplish it. They regarded it, like
the emancipation of the slaves, as a war measure."

IV

The nomination of Horace Greeley in 1872 and the overwhelming defeat
that followed left the Democratic party in an abyss of despair. The old
Whig party, after the disaster that overtook it in 1852, had been not
more demoralized. Yet in the general elections of 1874 the Democrats
swept the country, carrying many Northern States and sending a great
majority to the Forty-fourth Congress.

Reconstruction was breaking down of its very weight and rottenness. The
panic of 1873 reacted against the party in power. Dissatisfaction with
Grant, which had not sufficed two years before to displace him,