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

[187] its pleasure than one stave could secede from a cask, but that, if eight or ten States wanted to go, he would say, “There's the door, go.” Still, if the seceding States began fighting while the Union was not yet dissolved, “I guess they will have to be made to behave themselves.” The one thing he would object to would be “another nasty compromise.” No more arguments in favor of secession appeared in the Tribune, and in January, 1861, Greeley wrote, “I deny to one State, or to a dozen different States, the right to dissolve this Union. It can only be legally dissolved as it was formed-by the free consent of all the parties concerned.” Aside from its support of Greeley's schemes for meddling, and its hostility to Lincoln, the Tribune vigorously supported the Union cause during the war, and so concentrated on itself the hatred of the Southern sympathizers in New York city that, during the draft riots in 1863, its building was attacked by the mob.¹

When Lincoln's first call for troops came, and war was actually begun, the nation had had no experience in warfare for fifty years. It had to rely, too, not on an organized force,