A group of influential Republicans, dissatisfied for one cause and another with Grant, held a caucus and issued a call for what they described as a Liberal Republican Convention to assemble in Cincinnati May 1, 1872.
A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by conviction and inheritance, I had been making in Kentucky an uphill fight for the acceptance of the inevitable.

The line of cleavage between the old and the new South I had placed upon the last three amendments to the Constitution, naming them the Treaty of Peace between the Sections.
The negro must be invested with the rights conferred upon him by these amendments, however mistaken and injudicious the South might think them.

The obsolete Black Laws instituted during the slave regime must be removed from the statute books.

The negro, like Mohammed's coffin, swung in midair.

He was neither fish, flesh nor fowl, nor good red herring.
For our own sake we must habilitate him, educate and elevate him, make him, if possible, a contented and useful citizen.