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

[125] of hostile criticism or the effect of such association on his personal welfare, it seems somewhat curious that we do not find him enrolled in the ranks of the early Abolitionists. He says that one of the incidents of his sojourn in East Poultney, Vt., which made a great impression on him, was the rescue of a slave who had fled there from New York State, and who, under the law of that State, was beholden to his master until he was twenty-eight years old. “Our people hated injustice and oppression,” was the only explanation he thought it necessary to give of their action. The early Abolitionists, too, were in sympathy with him on many subjects. E. Rogers, in the Herald of Freedom, said: “Abolitionists are generally as crazy in regard to rum and tobacco as in regard to slavery. Some of them refrain from eating flesh and drinking tea and coffee. . . . They do not embrace these newfangled notions as Abolitionists, but their one fanaticism leads to another, and they are getting to be monomaniacs, as the Rev. Brother Purchard calls us, on every subject.”

But Greeley was naturally a politician, and his early editorial career educated him in the belief that, in a republic, political parties must be the means through which political