August Belmont - Postwar Political Career

Postwar Political Career

Remaining chairman of the Democratic National Committee after the war, Belmont presided over what he called “‘the most disastrous epoch in the annals of the Democratic Party.’” As early as 1862, Belmont and Samuel Tilden bought stock in the New York World in order to mold it into a major Democratic organ with the help of Manton M. Marble, its editor-in-chief. Seeking to capitalize on divisions in the Republican party at the war’s end, Belmont organized new party gatherings and promoted Salmon Chase for president in 1868, the candidate he viewed least vulnerable to charges of disloyalty to the party during the Republican Lincoln-Johnson administrations. Horatio Seymour’s electoral defeat in that year paled in comparison to liberal Republican Horace Greeley's disastrous 1872 presidential campaign. While the party chairman had promoted Charles Francis Adams for the nomination, Greeley’s nomination implied Democratic endorsement of a candidate who often had referred to Democrats as “‘slaveholders,’ ‘slave-whippers,’ ‘traitors,’ and ‘Copperheads’ and accused them of thievery, debauchery, corruption, and sin.” Although the election of 1872 prompted Belmont to resign his chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, he nevertheless continued to dabble in politics as a champion of US Senator Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware for the presidency, as a fierce critic of the process granting Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in 1877, and as an advocate of “hard money.”