In Louisiana, under the leadership of the brilliant young adventurer, Henry C. Warmoth of Illinois, the financial history of the "State" was even more scandalous. During the four years of Warmoth's governorship, from 1868 to 1872, the average annual expenditure of the "State" government was about six millions of dollars, when, measured by the previous experiences of the "State," six hundred thousand dollars would have been ample to defray all legitimate expenses. At the beginning of Warmoth's administration the debt of the "State" was between six and seven millions of dollars, with more than enough assets to extinguish it. At the end of the four years of his power, in 1872, the debt was nearly fifty millions of dollars, the assets had all disappeared, and there was nothing worth mentioning to show for the one or the other. In the counties and municipalities of both "States" the corruption was equally rampant, shameless, and vulgar. It is impossible to obtain exact figures in regard to it, or to estimate with any degree of exactness, or even probability, the amounts stolen and made away with. In the other reconstructed "States" where the adventurers and the negroes held sway, the "State" governments worked along the same lines, though not to the same appalling extent. It was the most soul-sickening spectacle that Americans had ever been called upon to behold. Every principle of the old American polity was here reversed. In place of government by the most intelligent and {264} virtuous part of the people for the benefit of the governed, here was government by the most ignorant and vicious part of the population for the benefit, the vulgar, materialistic, brutal benefit of the governing set. [Sidenote: The revolt in the Republican party.] It is no subject of surprise or wonder that, confronted with these frightful results of radical Republican policy and administration in the South, such Republicans as Horace Greeley, Charles Francis Adams, Lyman Trumbull, David Davis, Carl Schurz, Gratz Brown, Stanley Matthews, George Hoadly, J. R. Spaulding, George W. Julian, Horace White, David A. Wells, and the like, turned with disgust from the nauseating transactions and resolved to do what was in their power to put an end to it all. Even the radical, but honest, Sumner gave his adherence to the movement for a change of the Administration, as the only way to check the terrible corruption which was creeping over the land. Sumner, it is true, had been made to feel personally the heavy hand of the Administration. He had been dropped, the preceding year, from the chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Relations at the requirement of the Administration, because he had so strongly and successfully opposed the Santo Domingo policy of the President and his "aide-de-camp." But he had opposed that because he saw in it corruption, robbery and bloodshed. [Sidenote: The Liberal Republican convention of 1872.]