If the administration has resolved that no individual shall be appointed to any office as a reward for any real or imaginary service to the Whig cause as a partizan editor, and that the holding of office under the Federal Government and the editing of a partizan newspaper at the same time are incompatible, we do not hesitate to say that it has made a wise and beneficent decision.By 1849 he had so far modified this view that he wrote (May 5): “We trust editors will not come to regard office as a goal and recompense for their labors, but that they will not, on the other hand, be deemed ineligible by reason of their calling.” Then he
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seemed to justify Garrison in characterizing him as “the worst of all counselors, the most unsteady of all leaders, the most pliant of all compromisers in times of great public emergency.”
To understand clearly Greeley's conduct during Lincoln's administration it is necessary to retrace our steps in presenting the narrative of his career.
What might be called the foundation principle of Greeley's early idea of journalism was independence of thought, and in the Log Cabin he laid down this very correct view of editorial office-holding:
New York, D. Appleton and Company, March 1903.
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