William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[252] found to be. But all such calculations have to reckon with U. S. Grant. Unfortunate as he was in many of the incidents of his first term administration, in the popular eye he was the general whose persistency and faith in the final result-whose generalship --had crushed the rebellion. He might lack experience in choosing civil officers. He might stand up too firmly for his friends. He might give Federal support to unworthy Republicans in the South. He might, in a word, be attacked on this ground and on that. But so had been the early fathers of the republic, whose names were now enshrined in the list of national heroes. To elect Greeley, to elect Adams, it was necessary to defeat Grant, and that was as hard a task in civil as in military movements.

Greeley counted on the support of that large body of men whom he had so long addressed with his pen, and especially of the agricultural classes. But he had been addressing these men in defense of principles which had, for almost twenty years, been identical with the Republican party. The men who admired him as the opponent of slavery extension, as the defender of home productions, as the teacher of temperance, as the spokesman for the farmer, had followed