[210] like it in history. It must result in disaster, or all experience is delusive ....In case peace can not now be made, consent to an armistice for one year, each party to retain, unmolested, all it now holds, but the rebel ports to be open. Meantime, let a national convention be held, and there will surely be no war, at all events.
Greeley, in closing this correspondence, insisted that all or none of it should be published. “This was accepted by Mr. Lincoln,” say his biographers, “as a veto upon its publication. He could not afford, for the sake of vindicating his own action, to reveal to the country the despondency-one might almost say the desperation — of one so prominent in Republican circles as the editor of the Tribune.” The correspondence did not appear until Messrs. Nicolay and Hay laid it before their readers in 1890.
One illustration of Greeley's feeling toward Lincoln remains to be cited. On the day that Lincoln was shot Greeley had written an editorial, “a brutal, bitter, sarcastic personal attack” on the President. When the proof of this article reached the hands of the managing editor, Sidney Howard Gay, in the evening, Mr. Lincoln was dying from his wound. Gay suppressed the editorial, telling
