ABSTRACT
Cleveland’s leadership had a significantly different quality from Tilden’s. In a real sense, Cleveland was to be a Liberal-Democratic leader more in the Gladstonian and Jeffersonian tradition, for he was fundamentally a moralist. Cleveland accepted completely the Jacksonian economic analysis and held the same image of the economic enemy, but “selfishness” and “sordidness” were the key words in his vocabulary, not mechanistic metaphors like Tilden’s machinery of trade or “flow of currency.” His upward course began when an awakening of the civic conscience in Buffalo against a local system of malodorous corruption led to his being elected mayor in 1881. The adhesion of the Independent Republicans—the Mugwumps, as they came to be called for obscure reasons—to the Cleveland Democrats was an event of major importance, not only in United States affairs, but also within the larger framework of Anglo-American politics.
