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This chapter examines the defeat of the Liberal Republicans in 1872, looking at opportunities and difficulties of third parties. The disadvantages of a third party took their toll on the Liberal Republicans, eventually leading to their defeat in November 1872. Internal divisions distracted them for the first crucial months of the campaign, when they had the initiative, and eventually robbed them of many of their original leaders. The Republicans learned how to enjoy the benefits of being an established, entrenched party by appropriating the Liberal Republicans' issues and bludgeoning them with money, power, and patronage. Despite orders and pleas from their national leaders, Democratic voters refused to support a long-time political enemy. As the November results came in, Greeley lamented to a friend that he was the worst beaten man that ever ran for high office.

Northern newspapers used the Klan to talk about the nature of citizenship, the expansion of the state, and their anxieties that the individual was subject to manipulation by an increasingly robust and centralized government and centralized newspaper press. The national conversation about the Klan largely occurred during two periods—the first from early 1868 through early 1869, the second from late 1870 through 1872—and the nature of the discussion differed dramatically between those two periods, revealing changing approaches to Klan violence. Throughout, it is striking how few articles on the Klan include descriptions and mentions of actual Klan attacks on freedpeople and their white allies. Rather, northern newspaper articles on the Klan became a way to reflect on broader issues. By the 1871 and 1872, northern newspapers had adopted a strikingly sympathetic posture to Ku-Klux, who they increasingly portrayed as victims of federal aggression rather than as perpetrators of attacks on freedpeople.

At the end of 1861, rain storms caused flooding in Los Angeles that wrought havoc over private and public property leaving behind plenty of financial and emotional distress. During the following summer, the flood waters gave way to drought. This chapter examines how these ecological events affected the social, political, cultural, and spatial equality that existed in Los Angeles from that time to the 1872 election. By 1872, a steady rise in immigration from the United States had tipped the demographic balance, supplementing the spatial advantages ensured by the skewed ward system. With the privilege of hindsight, there is temptation to view the 1872 election as a moment of local realignment after which Mexican Angelenos faced significant obstacles in negotiating their place in the city and in shaping the city's future.

Klan denial remained remarkably persistent throughout and after the Klan period. As reams of testimony and massive stores of physical evidence of Klan violence poured into Washington, D.C., not only Democrats but sometimes even Republicans expressed regular doubt about its authenticity. Yet this was a period of great growth in professional journalism, and the reports newspapers were providing were of unprecedented quality and detail. Federal and state governments’ information-gathering mechanisms likewise expanded during this period, partly in order to deal with the challenge of proving the existence of the Klan. The image of the Klan as at once apparent and invisible, and the status of Klan accounts as detailed and rigorously documented yet also incredible, was a productive feature of Klan discourse. The very ambiguity of the Klan’s status played an important role in the reconciliation of North and South.

The sixth chapter shows northern evangelicals preoccupied during Grant’s presidency with managing various cultural, social, and political forces centrifugally threatening the Union. Their larger vision for national Christian oneness continued to subsume the ex-slaves. This was evident in several ways: first, many looked to the cohesive, homogenizing power that evangelicalism promised to provide the large and growing republic; second, predisposed to see Reconstruction end, particularly following the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, northern evangelicals were convinced that they had one of their own in the White House and thus supported Grant during the 1872 election against Liberal Republicans; and third, they regarded him as an ally when it came to addressing the potential threat offered by Native Americans and Roman Catholics. By the end of Grant’s presidency, the Union appeared restored, the nation had just celebrated its centennial, prosperity and oneness seemed to abound, and Americans felt at peace.

This chapter examines black participation in state level elections from the late 1860s and concludes with the controversies surrounding the 1872 presidential election. During these elections, African Americans increasingly questioned their electoral loyalty to the Republican Party and discussed potential alternatives.