Page 41. With my intimate knowledge of Greeley at that period I should hardly have said he had a passion for office. What I did think was that he had a passion for recognition, and was very sore at being treated not as an equal and comrade, but as a convenience to the machine, by Seward and Thurlow Weed. It was less office he sought than an opportunity to teach those gentlemen their places and his. Certainly he never had a lifelong passion for office like Lincoln.

Page 41. We had no better politics during the campaign than in the management of the Fifth Avenue Conference. I remember that William Henry Hurlbert and some others who were doing their best then to defeat us did not wake up to the real significance of our attitude toward this conference until the morning it met. Then Hurlbert described the course of “The Tribune” as that of a court gallant, tiptoeing forward to bow the favorites to their places.

I always thought we had the country with us until after the North Carolina election, and believed we carried that. I am afraid it was our old friend Ned Webster who deliberately rushed down to steal it away from us, and that his very strong measures had pretty high sanction. Or was it in the Hayes-Tilden election that he came to the front? The truth is the North Carolina election was the turning-point. If the result had been left as we believed it to be for the first two or three days, I don’t think we should have had the October reaction, or that Nast’s cartoons could have had anything like the effect they did exert.

By the way, some of those cartoons could hardly have been tolerated at any other time in America, and would hardly have been tolerated in any other country at any time, such as the one depicting Greeley—Greeley of all living men!—as clasping hands with the ghost of Wilkes Booth across the grave of murdered Abraham Lincoln. I once told “Brooklyn” Joe Harper he ought to be ashamed of that, and begin every day of his life with a prayer for forgiveness for it. His reply was that we all of us had done something at some time in our lives that we ought to be ashamed of. He understood perfectly that I never resented in the least Nast’s caricatures of myself. In fact, I thought some of them extraordinarily clever, such as the one depicting me playing a hand-organ in front of the old Manhattan Club, with Greeley as the monkey holding out a hat for pennies, while on the end of the organ was the familiar quotation from “The Tribune” of those days, “This is not an organ.”

Page 42. You are perfectly right in praising Greeley’s hopeless campaign in the West. In fact, if I were writing, I should pitch the note a little higher. I remember Joseph H. Choate saying to a group, of which I was a member, one Saturday night at the Century Club during that campaign, “What extraordinarily good speeches Greeley is making out West!” To give that its full value, please remember that Choate was a partner of Evarts, who had nominated Seward, and that to that whole combination Greeley was anathema.

Page 42. My recollection is that Mrs. Greeley died in the interval after his return from the West, but before the election. I always attributed his sudden collapse after the election as much to his loss of sleep, while watching for a week at her bedside, as to disappointment over the result, and this opinion was somewhat confirmed by Dr. Choate (a brother of Joseph), to whose private sanatorium he was taken. I asked Choate what the real disease was, and he said, “If you want it in popular phrase, it is really an inflammation of the outer membrane of the brain, due to loss of sleep or extraordinary excitement.” Then I asked what his prognosis was, and he replied, “He will either be well in a week or dead.” This is of course not a description of insanity at all; and I always felt a cruel injustice was done his memory in describing him as going crazy over defeat—as cruel as it would be to say such a thing of a fever patient because he was in a temporary delirium.

I was never convinced that the “last words” you quote were ever uttered by him, “‘The Tribune’ is gone, and I am gone.” Dana was surrounded in those days by people who for one reason or another had grudges equal to his own against “The Tribune”—Amos Cummings, who had left us in a pet because of some rebuke from John Russell Young; Dr. Wood, whom Amos got away from us; and, above all, a man in the proof-room, who resented my criticisms of his proofreading and deserted us, taking with him the manuscript of one or two of Greeley’s unbalanced articles, which his brother-in-law, John Cleveland, had discovered and brought to me, and which I suppressed because they were obviously unbalanced. They reveled in these things; and it happened at that time to be all grist to Dana’s mill.

II—BY HORACE WHITE

I HAVE read “The Humor and Tragedy of the Greeley Campaign.” What I think of it depends upon the point of view from which I look at it. The only tragic thing in it is the death of Greeley. All the rest is comedy.

Regarded as such it has high merits. I can think of nothing political that is more mirth-provoking, unless it is Dickens’s description of Mr. Veneering’s campaign for a seat in Parliament with the help of Boots and Brewer riding about London in cabs and “bringing him in.”