It is true that its espousal of many causes raised up a host of enemies for the Tribune, and no other newspaper in the United States was looked on as so dangerous by those who did not agree with it. Nevertheless, the champion whose sword was naked for an attack on any worthy foe was an intellectual hero in thousands of eyes, and when Raymond started the Times in 1852 to supply a journal of political views similar to those advocated by the Tribune without the Tribune's “vagaries,” the new enterprise succeeded, but it made no serious inroads on the circulation of the older one.1 Greeley came to be a sort of general counsel for many people, some of whom could undoubtedly be classified among that “fringe of the unreasonable and half-cracked, with whom,” Higginson says, “it is the tendency of every reform to surround itself.” Before the Tribune was a year old its editor told his readers, “We have a number of requests to blow up all sorts of ”
