The Golden Age. Campaign Tracts. The Philadelphia Failure, A Review of Grant’s Renomination. [cover title]

“The Successful Failure at Philadelphia”

---

Scarce throwaway polemical campaign literature from the 1872 presidential election with the intent to discredit the Republican nominee and sitting-president, Ulysses S. Grant, and promote the candidacy of Liberal Republican Horace Greeley.

Includes observations on the political rights of African Americans and references to the13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, granting blacks citizenship & due process, and (for black men) the right to vote.

The pamphlet was issued in the aftermath of the June 1872 party’s national convention held in Philadelphia, hence the reference to “The Philadelphia Failure.” It reprints noted newspaper editor and abolitionist Theodore Tilton’s article of the same title that first appeared in The Golden Age, a New York weekly literary and political publication.

Tilton attacks “Grant’s offences against the laws” and opines that Grant was more deserving of impeachment than President Andrew Johnson. This is interesting comment since Tilton was one of the first to call publicly for Johnson’s impeachment. Grant’s re-nomination, according to Tilton, is disastrous; the country remains divided:

War against the south—not of bayonets, but of passions—yet none the less war—is the necessary result of Grant’s renomination. Senator [Oliver P.] Morton struck the key-note of the Grant campaign when he said, “It is the old battle over again between the boys in blue and the boys in gray.” Gerrit Smith had previously said the same thing in another form, “The anti-slavery battle is not yet fought out.” So the re-nomination of the man who uttered the maxim, “Let us have peace,” is to serve as the basis of a renewal of war. ... Such is the moral of Philadelphia. (p7)

Tilton continues, turning to the issue of civil rights for blacks:

Not such, to our minds, is the true philosophy of the hour. We believe thehat the anti-slavery battle has been fought out. Slavery is abolished; and the Thirteenth Amendment makes its re-enactment impossible. ... Legally the negro stands exactly where the white man does. Socially whatever stigma rests upon him is far more oppressive in the north than in the south. Mr. [Senator Charles] Sumner’s civil rights bill is more needed here than there. For instance, a Methodist bishop, only a week or two ago, protested in the Tribune against the exclusion of a colored Methodist preacher from the common wayfarer’s privilege of refreshment at the Dorlon Tavern in Fulton Market. That same bishop, and the entire General Conference of that same denomination, was then sitting in the churchliest city of the north, in whose public schools colored children and white are forbidden to associate! (pp7–8)

Tilton bluntly summarizes the effect of President Grant’s re-nomination and contrasts the Philadelphia Convention with the Cincinnati Convention of Liberal Republicans who nominated Horace Greeley for president:

In other words, in the city of brotherly love the Philadelphia Convention inaugurated a policy of unfraternal strife. ... Cincinnati proposes to unite the North and the South on the basis of liberty, equality, and fraternity… Cincinnati is for peace; Philadelphia for war. Fellow countrymen, choose between them! (pp9–10)

An interesting Reconstruction-era U.S. presidential political pamphlet discussing black civil rights.

Sold