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

[201] rebels' terms; that these men made their assaults under cover of hostility to the administration, and that “the renomination of Mr. Lincoln will inevitably intensify their efforts, and rebarb their arrows. .. . We believe the rebellion would have lost something of its cohesion and venom from the hour in which it was known that a new President would surely be inaugurated on the fourth of March next; and that hostility in the loyal States to the national cause must have sensibly abated, or been deprived of its most dangerous weapons, from the moment that all were brought to realize that the President, having no more to expect or hope, could henceforth be influenced by no conceivable motive but a desire to serve and save his country, and thus win for himself an enviable and enduring fame.” In the light of what we now know of Lincoln's part and Greeley's part in pushing the great struggle for the preservation of the nation to a successful end, it is unnecessary to comment on this proposal to surrender Lincoln as a sop to Northern “Copperheads,” or on this stab at the motives of the man who was wearing his heart out in the nation's behalf.

Greeley's hostility to Lincoln did not cease with the action of the National Republican Convention. The summer of 1864 was