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

[126] reforms must be accomplished. His one political idol, Henry Clay, was a slaveholder, and his zeal in Clay's behalf, while the Kentuckian was a presidential possibility, as well as his devotion to a protective tariff, assisted in securing his acceptance of slavery as it existed, so long as the South was not actively striving to extend the slave power.

Moreover, Greeley classed himself as a conservative, and some of his definitions of that term further explain his attitude toward the Abolitionists. Defining in his autobiography Clay's position as a slaveholder, he wrote: “He was a conservative in the true sense of that word-satisfied to hold by the present until he could see clearly how to exchange it for the better.” “Radicalism,” he said in a lecture, “is the tornado, the earthquake, which comes, acts, and is gone for a century. Conservatism is the granite, which may be chipped away here and there to build a new house or let a railroad pass, but which will substantially abide forever.” The Abolitionists, of whom Garrison was the leading exponent, were radicals of the most ultra type. Not only did they demand the immediate emancipation of all slaves, but they pronounced the compact between North and South which countenanced slavery, “a covenant ”