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

[78] and his observations among the city poor during the hard times of 1837 enlisted his sympathies in behalf of all who live by labor. When, therefore, he found himself in control of a daily newspaper, he would not have been Horace Greeley if he had not been ready to make a “most self-sacrificing defiance” of public opinion in behalf of doctrines which he considered right.

What seemed to his fellow Whig leaders, in the early years of the Tribune, vagaries — his advocacy of Fourierism, extreme temperence legislation, etc.-gave them much annoyance, as likely to hurt the political cause with which Greeley's name and paper were associated, and they often labored with him on the subject. In minor points they met with some success, but when his mind was once made up, expediency was a futile argument with which to approach him. In a letter to Weed, dated February, 1842, after describing a sleepless night he had passed because of some of Weed's criticisms, he made this declaration of personal independence:

You have pleased, on several occasions, to take me to task for differing from you, however reluctantly and temperately, as though such conditions were an evidence, not merely of weakness on my part, but of some