James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[179] to be regarded as a gentleman; and if so, there was hardly an escape from a bloody conclusion after Mr. Graves had once consented, however unconsciously, to bear the note of Col. Webb. Each of the parties, doubtless, acted as he considered due to his own character; each was right in the view of the duelist's code of honor, but fearfully wrong in the eye of reason, of morality, of humanity, and the imperative laws of man and of God. Of the principals, one sleeps cold and stiff beneath the icy pall of winter and the clods of the valley; the other—far more to be pitied—lives to execrate through years of anguish and remorse the hour when he was impelled to imbrue his hands in the blood of a fellow-being.

Mr. Graves we know personally, and a milder and more amiable gentleman is rarely to be met with. He has for the last two years been a Representative from the Louisville District, Kentucky, and is universally esteemed and beloved. Mr. Cilley was a young man of one of the best families in New Hampshire; his grandfather was a Colonel and afterwards a General of the Revolution. His brother was a Captain in the last War with Great Britain, and leader of the desperate bayonet charge at Bridgewater. Mr. Cilley himself, though quite a young man, has been for two years Speaker of the House of Representatives of Maine, and was last year elected to Congress from the Lincoln District, which is decidedly opposed to him in politics, and which recently gave 1,200 majority for the other side. Young as he was, he had acquired a wide popularity and influence in his own State, and was laying the foundations of a brilliant career in the National Councils. And this man, with so many ties to bind him to life, with the sky of his future bright with hope, without an enemy on earth, and with a wife and thee children of tender age whom his death must drive to the verge of madness—has perished miserably in a combat forbidden by God, growing out of a difference so pitiful in itself, so direful in its consequences.

Could we add anything to render the moral more terribly impressive?

The year of the Jeffersonian was a most laborious and harassing one. No one but a Greeley would or could have endured such continuous and distracting toils. He had two papers to provide for; papers diverse in character, papers published a hundred and fifty miles apart, papers to which expectant thousands looked for their weekly supply of mental pabulum. As soon as the agony of getting the New Yorker to press was over, and copy for the outside of the next number given out, away rushed the editor to the Albany boat; and after a night of battle with the bed-bugs of the cabin, or the politicians of the hurricane-deck, he hurried off to new duties at the office of the Jeffersonian. The Albany boat of 1838 was a very different style of conveyance from the Albany boat of the present