1872 U.S. presidential election

In 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant won a second term with 286 electoral votes and about 56 percent of the popular vote. His opponent, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, was nominated by the Liberal Republicans, a breakaway group of reformers, and then endorsed by the Democrats, who ran no candidate of their own. Greeley won about 44 percent and six states. He died on November 29, after the voting but before the electors met, so his 66 electors scattered their votes, 42 of them going to Thomas Hendricks of Indiana.¹

The Liberal Republicans were angry at corruption among Grant's appointees, wanted lower tariffs and civil service reform, and believed it was time to end federal intervention in the South. Greeley, a lifelong enemy of the Democrats, was an awkward choice for them, and cartoonist Thomas Nast mocked him relentlessly. In September the Credit Mobilier scandal broke, revealing that members of Congress had taken discounted stock in a company that skimmed profits from building the Union Pacific Railroad. Voters still backed Grant, but his second term was dominated by scandal, the depression after the Panic of 1873 and a fading Northern commitment to Reconstruction.