The keener-sighted of the Northerners
began to suspect that Reconstruction in the South often amounted to
little more than the looting of the governments of the Southern States
by the greedy freedmen and the unscrupulous carpetbaggers, with the
troops of the United States standing by to protect the looters. In 1871,
under color of necessity arising from the intimidation of voters in a
few sections of the South, Congress passed a stringent act, empowering
the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and to use the
military at any time to suppress disturbances or attempts to intimidate
voters. This act, in the hands of radicals, gave the carpetbag
governments of the Southern States practically unlimited powers. Any
citizens who worked against the existing administrations, however
peacefully, might be charged with intimidation of voters and prosecuted
under the new act. Thus these radical governments were made practically
self-perpetuating. When their corruption, wastefulness, and inefficiency
became evident, many people in the North frankly condemned them and the
Federal Government which continued to support them.

This dissatisfaction with the Administration on the part of Republicans
and independents came to a head in 1872 in the Liberal-Republican
movement. As early as 1870 a group of Republicans in Missouri, disgusted
by the excesses of the radicals in that State in the proscription of
former Confederate sympathizers, had led a bolt from the party, had
nominated B. Gratz Brown for governor, and, with the assistance of the
Democrats, had won the election. The real leader of this movement was
Senator Carl Schurz, under whose influence the new party in Missouri
declared not only for the removal of political disabilities but also for
tariff revision and civil service reform and manifested opposition to
the alienation of the public domain to private corporations and to all
schemes for the repudiation of any part of the national debt. Similar
splits in the Republican party took place soon afterwards in other
States, and in 1872 the Missouri Liberals called a convention to meet at
Cincinnati for the purpose of nominating a candidate for the presidency.

The new party was a coalition of rather diverse elements. Prominent
tariff reformers, members of the Free Trade League, such as David A.
Wells and Edward L. Godkin of the Nation, advocates of civil service
reform, of whom Carl Schurz was a leading representative, and es