ances under which they first came into existence as an organized group dedicated specifically to defeating Grant in 1872 through the Liberal Republican Party. Grant's suspension of habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties in 1871 marked a singular display of peacetime presidential power, and in Benedict's words, " The effect was electric. Reformers lamented the sacrifice of 'real' issues, such as the tariff and civil-service reform, to the 'dead' one symbolized by the 'bloody shirt'...and the use of federal troops (in the South) as gross violations of civil liberty, but they were also forced at last to give up their open hostility to equal rights and black suffrage. Announcing a "new departure," they promised to accept the finality of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. The new departure enabled Democrats, reform Republicans, and some Republican politicians who had lost power in their party to unite against Grant's reelection. Calling themselves Liberal republicans, the dissident Republicans met...(in 1872 ) to name a candidate whom the Democrats would endorse". The administration's success that led to the "new departure" was one of President Grant's crowning achievements, but Grant would pay dearly for it in history. Having lost their old focus and finding themselves desperately in need of a new one, the Liberal Republican movement began to focus upon what they questionably termed corruption. Both the birth and the survival of Grant's enemies as a group specifically "focused on Grant himself and the new politics of the Gilded Age" was deeply intertwined with Grant's dedication to Reconstruction. "(Liberal reform had come to view Reconstruction as an expression of all the real and imagined evils of the Gilded Age," Historian Eric Foner asserted, and "the rise of (pro-Grant) Stalwarts did less to undermine Republican Southern policy than the emergence of an influential group of party reformers whose revolt against ...
