The Fox girls have became famous and their public séances in New York in 1850 attract notable people including William Cullen Bryant, George Bancroft, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Horace Greeley, Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison.

They also attract imitators; during the following few years, hundreds of people will claim the ability to communicate with spirits.

Kate and Margaret Fox have become well-known mediums, giving séances for hundreds of people.

Many of these early séances are entirely frivolous, where sitters seek insight into "the state of railway stocks or the issue of love affairs," but the religious significance of communication with the deceased soon becomes apparent.

Horace Greeley, the prominent publisher and politician, has become a kind of protector for them, enabling their movement in higher social circles, but the lack of parental supervision is pernicious, as both of the young women have begun to drink wine.

The cracking of joints is the theory scientists and skeptics most favor to explain the rappings, a theory dating to 1850.

The physician E. P. Longworthy investigates the sisters and notes how the knockings or raps always come from under their feet or when their dresses are in contact with the table.

He concludes that Margaret and Kate have produced the noises themselves.

John W. Hurn, who publishes articles in the New-York Tribune, also comes to a similar conclusion of fraud.

The Reverend John M. Austin will later claim the noises can be made by cracking toe joints.

The Reverend D. Potts demonstrates to an audience that the raps can be made by this method.

Karl Marx begins contributing articles to the New York Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley.

Peter Cooper establishes the Cooper Union in New York City on April 13, 1859, as a college devoted to free adult-education in art, science and technology.

Originally intended to be called simply "the Union," the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art begins with adult education in night classes on the subjects of applied sciences and architectural drawing, as well as day classes for women on the subjects of photography, telegraphy, typewriting and shorthand (in what is called the College's Female School of Design).

Discrimination based on race, religion, or sex is expressly prohibited.

Early board members include New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley and American romantic poet, journalist, political adviser, and homeopath William Cullen Bryant.

Cooper, a workingman's son who had had less than a year of formal schooling, is a principal investor and first president of the New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph Co., which undertakes one of the nineteenth century's monumental technical enterprises—laying the first Atlantic cable.

Cooper has also invented instant gelatin, derived from the bones of geese, with help from his wife, Sarah, who adds fruit to what the world will come to know as Jello.

The man’s three-piece lounge suit, with a jacket instead of a tailcoat, is introduced in 1860 for informal occasions.

Long trousers and a waistcoat, or vest (often elaborately decorated) complete the ensemble.

Like the Earl of Derby, such prominent New Yorkers as newspaper editor Horace Greeley and American inventor, manufacturer, and philanthropist Peter Cooper keep their faces clean shaven but allow the hair on the neck to grow into a luxuriant ruff.

Although these men will retain the style as they age, younger men had abandoned the look by the beginning of the 1860s.

At the 1860 Democratic National Convention, a split within the Democratic Party resulted in the advancement of two candidates for president, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas (clean-shaven, side-whiskered, hair somewhat long) and Vice President John C. Breckinridge, which opens the way for the election of the still-beardless Illinois Republican Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860.

President Lincoln signs a bill into law on May 15, 1862, creating the U.S. Bureau of Agriculture (later renamed U.S. Department of Agriculture), to be headed by a commissioner without Cabinet status, and the agriculturalist Isaac Newton is appointed to be the first such commissioner.

Lincoln calls it the "people's department".

The "yeoman farmer" ideal of Jeffersonian democracy was still a powerful influence in American politics during the 1840–1850s, with many politicians believing a homestead act would help increase the number of "virtuous yeomen".

The Free Soil Party of 1848–52, and the new Republican Party after 1854, had demanded that the new lands opening up in the west be made available to independent farmers, rather than wealthy planters who would develop it with the use of slaves forcing the yeomen farmers onto marginal lands.

Southern Democrats had continually fought (and defeated) previous homestead law proposals, as they feared free land would attract European immigrants and poor Southern whites to the west.

After the South seceded and their delegates left Congress in 1861, the Republicans and other supporters from the upper South had passed a homestead act.

The intent of the first Homestead Act, passed in 1862, is to liberalize the homesteading requirements of the Preemption Act of 1841.

Its leading advocates are Andrew Johnson, Horace Greeley, and the late George Henry Evans.

The homestead is an area of public land in the West (usually one hundred and sixty acres acres or sixty-five hectares) granted to any U.S. citizen willing to settle on and farm the land.

The law (and those following it) requires a three-step procedure: file an application, improve the land, and file for the patent (deed).

Any citizen who has never taken up arms against the U.S. government (including freed slaves after the fourteenth amendment) and is at least twenty-one years old or the head of a household, can file an application to claim a federal land grant.

Women are eligible.

The occupant has to reside on the land for five years, and show evidence of having made improvements.

The process has to be complete within seven years.
 
Between 1844 and 1862, Congress has received petitions signed by fifty-five thousand Americans calling for free public lands for homesteaders.

Newspaper editor Horace Greeley, who had increasingly lost control of the Tribune’s operations after 1860 and has written fewer editorials since, now expresses defeatism regarding Lincoln’s chances of reelection in 1864, an attitude that is echoed across the country when his editorials are reprinted.

Oddly, he had also pursued a peace policy in 1863–64 that had involved discussions with Copperheads and had opened the possibility of a compromise with the Confederacy.

Lincoln had been aghast, but had outsmarted Greeley by appointing him to a peace commission he knew the Confederates would repudiate.

Horace Greeley, writing in 1872 about the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, says, “by our money system we have nationalized a system of oppression not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.”

In Reconstruction, Greeley has taken an erratic course, mostly favoring the Radicals and opposing president Andrew Johnson in 1865–66.

In 1867, Greeley had been one of twenty-one men who had signed a one hundred thousand dollar bond for the release of former president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis.

The move had been controversial, and many Northerners thought Greeley a traitor and had canceled subscriptions to the Weekly Tribune by the thousands.

In 1869, he had run on the Republican ticket for New York State Comptroller but was defeated by the incumbent Democrat, William F. Allen.

After supporting Ulysses Grant in the 1868 election, Greeley had broken from Grant and the Radicals.

Opposing Grant's re-election bid, he has joined the Liberal Republican Party, which had been organized in Missouri in 1870 under the leadership of Carl Schurz.

The party has has spread nationwide with strong support from powerful Republican newspaper editors such as Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, Horace White of the Chicago Tribune, Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican and especially Whitelaw Reid and Greeley of the New York Tribune.

The Liberal Republicans think that the Grant Administration, and the president personally, are fully corrupt.

More important, they think that the goals of Reconstruction have been achieved.

These goals were first the destruction of slavery and second the destruction of Confederate nationalism.

With these goals achieved, the tenets of republicanism demand that federal military troops be removed from the South, where they are propping up allegedly corrupt Republican regimes.

A key Radical goal had been to oust the ex-Confederates from power as a worthwhile goal for Reconstruction.

Now, say the Liberal Republicans, it is time for "amnesty", which means restoring the right to vote and hold office to ex-Confederates.

To everyone’s astonishment, this new party had nominated Greeley as their presidential candidate at their convention in Cincinnati in May 1872.

Even more surprisingly, he has been officially endorsed by the Democrats, whose party he has denounced for decades.

Many of the original founders of the Republican party and leaders of the Civil War have joined the movement, including its nominee Greeley, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky, and Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts.

The party platform demands "the immediate and absolute removal of all disabilities imposed on account of the rebellion" and local self-government for the southern states.

It regards "a thorough reform of the civil service as one of the most pressing necessities of the hour." (Ross, Earle Dudley. The Liberal Republican Movement (1910) full text online.)

Ulysses S. Grant runs against Horace Greeley and five other Democratic candidates in the presidential election of November 5, 1872.

In a campaign marked by protests against corruption in Washington, proposals of liberal reform, and confusion about treatment of the South, Grants wins reelection by carrying every Northern state, as well as a few in the South.

Greeley wins six states.

Grant's margin is more comfortable than it was in 1868: 55.5% to Greeley's 43.8% in the popular vote, and 286 electoral votes.

The Liberal Republican Party had fused with the Democratic Party in all states except for Louisiana and Texas.

In many states, such as Ohio, the two parties had nominated half of the slate of candidates.

Some Democrats had supported Charles O'Conor, who had run for President on the Straight-Out Democratic ticket.

However, in the state elections held in the fall prior to the presidential election, the LR-D fusion tickets had been easily defeated by the Republicans.

Greeley dies on November 29, 1872, before the presidential electors meet on December 4 to cast the electoral votes.

The Greeley electors are not able to coordinate their votes before meeting, but their action makes no difference in the face of Grant's electoral college landslide.

Although the Liberal Republican Party does not survive Greeley's death, several of its reforms will materialize in the following decade.

Reform Republicans will accomplish the nomination and then election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, who will bring Reconstruction to an end and remove some of the more offensive of Grant's appointments.

The Liberal Republican call for civil service reform will be passed during the administration of President Chester Arthur.