In 1880 Charles Francis Adams, Jr., reflected publicly on the nine presidential elections in which he had been actively involved since his youthful participation in antislavery parties. “I think, of the whole nine, there was but one, that of 1852, which at the time was not emphatically pronounced to be the most important election in its consequences ever held,” he mused. “The issues at stake were always too tremendous to be calmly contemplated; and if the day was lost now it was lost forever.” Of all those elections, he had come to believe, only one, “so far as the grand results were concerned, was really important … that of 1864, when we were in the midst of the Rebellion.” He advised his audience that the time was overripe to put aside disputes “over the possession of a little temporal political authority,” and his explanation provided a classic formulation of nineteenth-century liberalism: