The racial dispute mapped onto foreign policy alliances

Evidence

Assimilationists like Douglass encouraged American expansion, while segregationists and antiracists discouraged it, bringing the ongoing racial dispute into foreign policy. The US Senate voted down the annexation treaty in June 1871. Tired of Grant’s preoccupation with annexation, and his openness to using federal power to protect southern Black lives, Republican dissidents broke away. In May 1872, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley and Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, central forces in the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, headlined an assembly of “Liberal Republicans” in Cincinnati. “Reconstruction and slavery we have done with,” declared E. L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation, speaking for the Liberal Republicans. They pledged amnesty and voting rights for ex-Confederates, the end of federal southern intervention, welfare for the rich in the form of tax breaks, and nothing for the poor. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 671

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader study of how political factions realign around race — Greeley’s reversal mirrors modern examples of party realignment driven by racial policy.