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

“ [203] in private letters, and in the columns of the Tribune, he repeatedly placed before the President with that vigor of expression in which he was unrivaled the complaints and the discontents of a considerable body of devoted, if not altogether reasonable, Union men,” thus drawing around him “a certain number of adventurers and busybodies, who fluttered between the two great parties, and were glad to occupy the attention of prominent men on either side with schemes whose only real object was some slight gain or questionable notoriety for themselves.” ¹ One of these adventurers who gained Greeley's ear was William Cornell Jewett, “of Colorado,” who had been an interminable epistolary adviser of the President. In July, 1864, he wrote Greeley from Niagara Falls that two Confederate ambassadors were then in Canada, with “full and complete powers for a peace,” and urging Greeley to go on at once for the purpose of a private interview, or to obtain the President's protection, that they might meet Greeley in the United States.

This proposition so impressed Greeley that he wrote to the President, reminding him that “our bleeding, bankrupt country also ”