Abstract: LEGEND has it that when Henry M. Stanley discovered Dr. David L. Livingstone in darkest Africa, and reported the news that the Democrats had -named Horace Greeley for President, the explorer refused to accept the information. " 'You have told me stupendous things, and with a confiding simplicity I was swallowing them peacefully down,'" Livingstone is supposed to have remarked, "'but . . . when you tell me that Horace Greeley is become a Democratic candidate I will be hanged if I believe it.' "1 Livingstone had every reason to be skeptical, for the political circumstances of 1872 were as confusing as they were unlikely. Prominent Republicans, rejecting the course of American life under the direction of the party many of them had helped to sire and support, formed the Liberal Republican movement to deny a second presidential term to Ulysses S. Grant. Internally divided over ideological priorities and political strategy, factions of bolting Liberals struggled for power in the national convention at Cincinnati in early May 1872. Greeley, somehow, emerged as the presidential candidate of the third party, a choice which dismayed as many Liberal Republicans as it satisfied-and surprised them all. Grant's renomination by the regular Republican organization surprised no one. It arranged the stage for Democratic nomination of the anti-Democratic Tribune editor by his lifelong political enemies. These events, and the strange campaign which followed, made Grant's reelection success appear an anticlimax. The Liberal Republican party enjoys the distinction of being the only third party in American history with sufficient strength to compel one of the two major parties officially to endorse and nominate its candidate for President.