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

[185] eight contiguous States should secede from the Union he would not think it right to “stand up for coercion.” If Mayor Fernando Wood had not had free trade in view, Greeley might have joined him in his suggestion to the Common Council of New York city on January 6, 1861, that, if the Union, which, he held, could not be constitutionally kept together by force, was dissolved, the city should separate from the State and establish a “Free city,” which would have “cheap goods nearly free from duty.” A week later he declared that, if any six or more of the cotton States wanted to secede, “we will do our best to help them out, not that we want them to go, but that we loathe the idea of compelling them to stay.” The abstract right of a State to secede, under the Constitution, is upheld by some Republicans of prominence to-day. Without following their argument, it may be pointed out that what Washington had in view was an “inviolable Union,” that “indissoluble Union” which he recommended to the Governors of the States; and that John Quincy Adams, in 1828, declared that, while the people of a State, “by the primitive right of insurrection against oppression” might declare their State out of the Union, “they have delegated no such power to their legislators ”