Each annual session of the National Labor Union faithfully reaffirmed the decision to "cut loose" from the old parties. But such a vast undertaking demanded time. It was not until 1872 that the National Labor Union met as a political convention to nominate a national ticket. From the first the stars were inauspicious. Charges were made that political aspirants sought to control the convention in order to influence nominations by the Republican and Democratic parties. A "greenback" platform was adopted as a matter of course and the new party was christened the National Labor and Reform Party. On the first formal ballot for nomination for President, Judge David Davis of Illinois, a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, received 88 votes, Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist, 52, and the remainder scattered. On the third ballot Davis was nominated. Governor J. Parker of New Jersey was nominated for Vice-President. At first Judge Davis accepted the nomination, but resigned after the Democrats had nominated Horace Greeley. The loss of the candidate spelled the death of the party. The National Labor Union itself had been only an empty shell since 1870, when the national trade unions, disaffected with the turn towards politics, withdrew. Now, its pet project a failure, it, too, broke up. In 1873, on the eve of the financial panic, the national trade unions attempted to reconstruct a national labor federation on a purely trade-union basis in the form of a National Industrial Congress. But the economic disaster of the panic nipped it in the bud just as it cut off the life of the overwhelming majority of the existing labor organizations. Another attempt to get together on a national basis was made in the National Labor Congress at Pittsburgh in 1876. But those who responded were not interested in trade unionism and, mirroring the prevailing labor sentiment during the long years of depressions, had only politics on their mind, greenback or socialist. As neither greenbacker nor socialist would meet the other half-way, the attempt naturally came to naught. Greenbackism was popular with the working people during the depressed seventies because it now meant to them primarily currency inflation and a rise of prices and, consequently, industrial prosperity--not the phantastic scheme of the National Labor Union. Yet in the Presidential election of 1876 the Greenback party candidate, Peter Cooper, the well known manufacturer and philanthropist, drew only a poor 100,000, which came practically from the rural districts only. It was not until the great strikes of 1877 had brought in their train a political labor upheaval that the greenback movement assumed a formidable form.