intense than [it was] throughout the country.”  The experienced denizens of the large Northern cities read in a critical temper the tirades of journalist critics, who assumed to know everything.  The population of the small towns and the village neighborhoods, though a little bewildered by the echoes of denunciation which reached them from the national capital, yet by instinct, or by a divine guidance, held fast to their faith in their President.  Thus the rank and file of the Republican party refused to follow the field officers in a revolt against the general.  No better fortune ever befell this very fortunate nation.  If the anti-slavery extremists had been able to reinforce their own pressure by the ponderous impact of the popular will, and so had pushed the President from his “border-state policy” and from his general scheme of advancing only very cautiously along the anti-slavery line, it is hardly conceivable either that the Union would have been saved or that slavery would have been destroyed.

On August 19, 1862, the good, impulsive, impractical Horace Greeley published in his newspaper, the New York “Tribune,” an address to the President, to which he gave an awe-inspiring title, “The Prayer of 20,000,000 of People.”  It was an extremely foolish paper, and its title, like other parts of it, was false.  Only those persons who were agitators for immediate emancipation could say amen to this mad prayer, and they were far from being even a large percentage of “20,000,000 of people.”  Yet these men, being active missionaries and loud preachers in behalf of a measure in which they had perfect faith, made a show and exerted an influence disproportioned to their numbers.  Therefore their prayer,[34] though laden with blunders of fact and reasoning, fairly expressed malcontent Republicanism.  Moreover, multitudes who could not quite join in the prayer would read it and would be moved by it.  The influence of the “Tribune” was enormous.  Colonel McClure truly says that by means of it Mr. Greeley “reached the very heart of the Republican party in every State in the Union;” and perhaps he does not greatly exaggerate when he adds that through this same line of connection the great Republican editor “was in closer touch with the active loyal sentiment of the people than [was] even the President himself.”  For these reasons it seemed to Mr. Lincoln worth while to make a response to an assault which, if left unanswered, must seriously embarrass the administration.  He therefore wrote:—­

“DEAR SIR,—­I have just read yours of the 19th instant, addressed to myself through the New York ‘Tribune.’

“If there be in it any statements or assumptions of fact which I may know to be erroneous, I do not now and here controvert them.

“If there be any inferences which I believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here argue against them.

“If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.