Material Interests
MATERIAL INTERESTS
CHAPTER VIII
FINANCIAL INTEGRITY
During the period of political reconstruction occurred in 1868 the fourth presidential campaign of the Republican party, with new issues before the nation. The vagaries of President Johnson had completely alienated himself from the party which had four years before elected him to the Vice-Presidency and had so discredited him that the Democratic party did not regard him as an available candidate. He received a few votes in the Democratic convention but that body, after a long contest, finally nominated Horatio Seymour who had been Governor of New York during the latter part of the Civil War and had won unenviable notoriety by regarding the war as a failure and by cringing and catering to the criminal mobs which in New York City sought by rioting and arson to hamper the national government in its prosecution of the war. The platform was largely devoted to railing against the Republican party for its reconstruction measures in the South, declaring them to be "unconstitutional, revolutionary. and void,” and demanded the taxation of government bonds in violation of the terms on which they were issued and the regulation of the elective franchise by the states so that the former slave states would be able perpetually to exclude the negroes from the polls.
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