As we have contended all through this book, the moral issue lay with the people; it was hammered out by agents as blind and as grimy, politically, as the men who work before an actual furnace. The contentions and political maneuverings of these men were but the means to an end.
When Thurlow Weed, in 1848, wished to retire from the Albany Evening Journal, a banker of Albany, George Jones, (who afterwards became Raymond's partner,) offered the Journal to Raymond, but the negotiations fell through. Later Raymond began planning for a newspaper in New York. As interesting as was Bennett's visit to Greeley, to interest him in the Herald, is the fact that Raymond enlisted in his initial negotiations, Charles Anderson Dana, then of the Tribune.
Seward's son, at that time a writer on the Albany Journal, tells of a call made by Dana of the Tribune and Raymond of the Courier and Enquirer on Thurlow Weed, to seek his advice regarding plans for a new morning journal in New York. Ra3anond felt that somewhere between the Herald and the Tribune there was room in the city for a paper that would be conservative in politics, carefully accurate in its news, and without "reforms or sensations." Dana believed that Weed's short, crisp editorial articles, critical and humorous, were the kind that would be most popular.
Raymond spent the two years following Weed's offer in Albany, first as a member of the legislature, and then as Speaker of the Assembly. During those winters he had many conversations with George Jones; what finally led to the decision to undertake the paper was information received by Jones, to the effect that the Tribune had made a profit of $60,000 in one year.
The time selected for the introduction of a new paper was, as Raymond's associate and biographer has set forth,
