The 1872 Liberal Republican convention nominated a ticket consisting of Horace Greeley, longtime publisher of the New-York Tribune, and Missouri Governor Benjamin Gratz Brown.

Greeley received 44% of the popular vote, winning the states of Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Maryland.

[2][page needed] It had strong support from powerful Republican newspaper editors such as Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, Horace White of the Chicago Tribune, Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican and especially Whitelaw Reid and Horace Greeley of the New-York Tribune.

The party platform demanded "the immediate and absolute removal of all disabilities imposed on account of the rebellion" and local self-government for the southern states.

Many Liberal Republicans also sought a downward revision of the tariff, believing that powerful industries had unfairly won the protection of certain goods.

[7] Many of the Liberal Republicans, including Trumbull, had opposed the impeachment of Andrew Johnson and were wary of an upset of the traditional constitutional balance of power.

[8] Led by Schurz, judge Stanley Matthews and editor William Grosvenor, the Liberal Republican Party organized a national convention in Cincinnati in May 1872.

[10] Entering the convention, Supreme Court Justice David Davis, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois and former Congressman Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts were among the major candidates for the presidential nomination.

Davis entered the week of the convention with perhaps the strongest backing, but saw his candidacy damaged by unfavorable coverage from newspapers aligned with the Liberal Republican movement.

By a wide margin, the July 1872 Democratic National Convention voted to endorse the Liberal Republican ticket and accept the party's platform without modification.

[18] Nonetheless, Liberal Republican leaders like Schurz and Sumner coalesced behind Greeley and most actively campaigned for the party's nominee.

Liberal Republicans argued that they sought reconciliation of North and South and that the time had come to end radical Reconstruction policies.

[22] However, the Republicans utilized superior organization, the backing of financiers like Jay Cooke and lingering Democratic doubts about Greeley to win most contests throughout the country.

[23] Foner writes that in spite of Greeley's personal record of advocating civil rights, blacks held a sharp distrust due to his association in the election cycle with the Democratic Party, and furthermore recognized that civil service reform would inhibit their social and economic progress by effectively barring "the whole colored population" from public office.

Reform Republicans accomplished the nomination and then election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, who brought Reconstruction to an end and removed some of Grant's appointments.

[16][page needed] However, Greeley's relatively poor performance (he fared worse than Horatio Seymour had in 1868) also put an end to the Democratic experiment with fusion tickets.

[26] Democrats won several seats in Congress and numerous other offices in the 1874 elections, aided by dissatisfaction with Grant and the defection of former Liberal Republicans.

The second interpretation sees the Liberal Republicans as primarily motivated by opposition to the corruption of the Grant administration and support for lower tariffs.

[28] Downey argues Greeley was nominated as a result of a crass political bargain imposed against the will of a convention that really wanted Charles Francis Adams.

The shift of particular votes to Greeley was not decisive, but the feeling of the delegates that Adams could not win support among Irish workers, the Western masses, or Democratic voters.

The Democrats and their Liberal Republican allies thought the war was a tragedy, recoiled against centralization and sought to recapture the purity of prewar days through reconciliation and respect for the autonomy of the states.

Focused on the welfare of the freedmen, abolitionists were appalled by Greeley's formula for cooperation with "better class" southern whites by granting amnesty to all Confederates and adopting a hands-off policy toward the South.