ll events believe that my opposition to
Governor Seward's nomination was impelled by personal considerations;
and among these I should expect to find the Hon. Henry J. Raymond.
With these I have no time for controversy; in their eyes I desire no
vindication. But there is another and far larger class who will
realise that the obstacles to Governor Seward's election were in no
degree of my creation, and that their removal was utterly beyond my
powers. The whole course of the _Tribune_ has tended to facilitate the
elevation to the Presidency of a statesman cherishing the pronounced
anti-slavery views of Governor Seward; it is only on questions of
finance and public economy that there has been any perceptible
divergence between us. Those anti-democratic voters of Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois, who could not be induced to vote
for Governor Seward, have derived their notions of him in some measure
from the _Times_, but in no measure from the _Tribune_. The
delegations from those States, with the candidates for governor in
Pennsylvania and Indiana, whose representations and remonstrances
rendered the nomination of Governor Seward, in the eyes of all
intelligent, impartial observers, a clear act of political suicide,
were nowise instructed or impelled by me. They acted on views
deliberately formed long before they came to Chicago. It is not my
part to vindicate them; but whoever says they were influenced by me,
other than I was by them, does them the grossest injustice.

"I wished first of all to succeed; next, to strengthen and establish
our struggling brethren in the border slave States. If it had seemed
to me possible to obtain one more vote in the doubtful States for
Governor Seward than for any one else, I should have struggled for him
as ardently as I did against him, even though I had known that the
Raymonds who hang about our party were to be his trusted counsellors
and I inflexibly shut out from his confidence and favour. If there be
any who do not believe this, I neither desire their friendship nor
deprecate their hostility."[573]

[Footnote 573: New York _Tribune_, June 2, 1860.]

Greeley's demand for his letter did not meet with swift response. It
was made on June 2. When Seward passed through New York on his way to
Washington on the 8th, a friend of Greeley waited upon him, but he had
nothing for the _Tribune_. Days multiplied into a week, and still
nothing came. Finally, on June 13, Greeley re