been a blessed thing for the country if the editor of the Journal (Weed) had been impelled by the same passion. For avarice is more ignoble than ambition, and the craving for jobs has a more corrupting influence, alike on the individual and the public, than aspiration to office."[1]
He was a good hater, was Horace Greeley.
With so bitter a journalistic rival as Bennett on one side, such sharp and unrelenting party rivals as Weed and Raymond on another, and the anti-Union journals constituting a third point of attack, it was not surprising that, when the draft riots came, Greeley and his office were war centers. On July 13, 1863, the office of the Tribune was attacked; the rioters forced an entrance, threw books and papers out of the window and set fire to the place. The police charged, dispersing the mob with a number of cracked skulls, and managed to put out the fire.
One of Greeley's many enemies started the rumor that during the excitement he had sought refuge under a table in a restaurant. His reply to the slur was characteristic. He stated that, against the advice of many friends, who had warned him of the danger of attack and the peril of life in which he stood, he had gone as usual to his office. At the usual time for his evening meal he left his office by the main entrance, "went over to Windust's eating house for his dinner, passing through a howling mob for nearly the entire distance and was recognized by several of them." The next day he returned to the office, "now being armed," and was at his desk every day that week. And whoever "asserted that he at any time 'was hiding under Windust's table' was a branded liar and villain."
Near the completion of Lincoln's first term, when the time arrived for the nomination of his successor, it was
- ↑ New York Tribune, December 12, 1862.
