,
was incompatible with peace and good will throughout the Union.(1)

With Grant and Greeley fairly in the field, the country entered upon a
remarkable canvass. At the beginning of the picturesque and emotional
"log cabin canvass of 1840," Mr. Van Buren, with his keen insight into
popular movements, had said, in somewhat mixed metaphor, that it would
be "either a farce or a tornado." The present canvass gave promise on
different grounds of similar alternatives. General Grant had been
tried, and with him the country knew what to expect. Mr. Greeley had
not been tried, and though the best known man in his own field of
journalism, he was the least known and most doubted in the field of
Governmental administration. No other candidate could have presented
such an antithesis of strength and of weakness. He was the ablest
polemic this country has ever produced. His command of strong,
idiomatic, controversial English was unrivaled. His faculty of lucid
statement and compact reasoning has never been surpassed. Without the
graces of fancy or the arts of rhetoric, he was incomparable in direct,
pungent, forceful discussion. A keen observer and an omnivorous
reader, he had acquired an immense fund of varied knowledge, and he
marshaled facts with singular skill and aptness.

In an era remarkable for strong editors in the New-York Press,--embracing
Raymond of the _Times_, the elder Bennett of the _Herald_, Watson
Webb of the _Courier-Enquirer_, William Cullen Bryant of the
_Evening Post_, with Thurlow Weed and Edwin Crosswell in the rival
journals at Albany,--Mr. Greeley easily surpassed them all. His mind
was original, creative, incessantly active. His industry was as
unwearying as his fertility was inexhaustible. Great as was his
intellectual power, his chief strength came from the depth and
earnestness of his moral convictions. In the long and arduous battle
against the aggressions of Slavery, he had been sleepless and untiring
in rousing and quickening the public conscience. He was keenly alive
to the distinctions of right and wrong, and his philanthropy responded
to every call of humanity. His sympathies were equally touched by the
sufferings of the famine-stricken Irish and by the wrongs of the
plundered Indians. Next to Henry Clay, whose ardent disciple he was,
he had done more than any other man to educate his countrymen in the
American system of protection to home industry. He had on all
occasions zealous