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

“ [212] and leaving for the capital early in the morning, with few but themselves cognizant of the fact. The important events around Petersburg and Richmond followed shortly afterward, and those events were probably the subject of their conference.” This story is inherently improbable, and I have the most competent authority for saying that it belongs in the list of romances which include another recently published story that Lincoln once went secretly to pass a night in prayer with Henry Ward Beecher.

Greeley furnished his own comment on his estimate and treatment of Lincoln during the period of the war. One of his best pieces of literary work is an address on Lincoln, which he wrote in 1868. In this he reviewed Lincoln's entire career, pointing out mistakes with which he credited him, and summing up his estimate of the man in these words:

Never before did one so constantly and visibly grow under the discipline of incessant cares, anxieties, and trials. The Lincoln of 1862 was plainly a larger, broader, better man than he had been in 1861; while 1863 and 1864 worked his continued and unabated growth in mental and moral stature. Few have been more receptive, more sympathetic, and (within reasonable limits) more plastic than he.