I have already referred to the terrors and desperation with which the prospect of Tilden's election inspired the great army of office-holders at the close of Grant's administration.
That army, numerous and formidable as it was, was comparatively limited.

There was a much larger and justly influential class who were apprehensive that the return of the Democratic party to power threatened a reactionary policy at Washington, to the undoing of some or all the important results of the war.

These apprehensions were inflamed by the party press until they were confined to no class, but more or less pervaded all the Northern States.

The Electoral Tribunal, consisting mainly of men appointed to their positions by Republican Presidents or elected from strong Republican States, felt the pressure of this feeling, and from motives compounded in more or less varying proportions of dread of the Democrats, personal ambition, zeal for their party and respect for their constituents, reached the conclusion that the exclusion of Tilden from the White House was an end which justified whatever means were necessary to accomplish it.

They regarded it, like the emancipation of the slaves, as a war measure." IV The nomination of Horace Greeley in 1872 and the overwhelming defeat that followed left the Democratic party in an abyss of despair.