CHAPTER XX
GREELEY AND THE TRIBUNE
Reasons for the Tribune—Greeley's early life—Through Pennsylvania—Morning Post—Thurlow Weed—Seward, Weed & Greeley partnership—Description of Weed—Log Cabin and Harrison campaign—Tribune open for liberal ideas—Hard times in New York—Free soil party encouraged.
Nominally, the New York Tribune was brought out as a protest against the sensational journalism that Bennett was offering in the Herald. There were also political reasons, the principal one being that the Whigs desired a paper that would appeal to the laboring classes, who were unable to get a Whig paper for a penny.
"I had been incited to this enterprise," Greeley relates, "by several Whig friends, who deemed a cheap daily, addressed more especially to the laboring class, eminently needed in our city, where the only two cheap journals then and still existing—the Sun and the Herald—were in decided, though unavowed, and therefore more effective, sympathy and affiliation with the Democratic party.
"My leading idea was the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other. Party spirit is so fierce and intolerant in this country that the editor of a non-partisan sheet is restrained from saying what he thinks and feels on the most vital, imminent topics; while, on the other hand, a Democrat, Whig, or Republican journal is generally expected to praise or blame,
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