ome insight into the seemingly
mysterious power he held for so many years, when it was known that so
great was his thirst for knowledge that he was glad to wrap bits of a
rag carpet about his feet and thus shod walk through the snow two miles
to borrow a history of the French Revolution, which he mastered at
night, stretched before 'the sap bush fire.'

The more one investigates the character and lives of those men whom we
so often envy, the more we are forced to see that it was will-power
rightly directed that overcame all obstacles. Certain it is to this that
Thurlow Weed owes his everlasting fame as the 'American Warwick'; for
knowledge is power. He first left the farm work as a cabin boy on a
Hudson river steamboat bound for New York, but being born a journalist
he soon drifted into a printing office where he became a good
journeyman.

When the second war with Great Britain broke out he enlisted, and served
on the Northern frontier, where by faithfulness he became Quartermaster
Sergeant. When the war was over he returned to the printing office,
being at one time in the same establishment with the late James Harper.
Finally he started a paper at Oxford, New York, in 1818. He afterward
became connected with the _Onondaga Times_, which he finally changed to
the _Republican_. For the next few years he is connected with several
different papers until we find him in Rochester at the head of the
_Anti-Masonic Enquirer_.

About this time the body of a man who had drowned in Lake Ontario was
found, and it was claimed that his name was Morgan; if so, he was a
renegade mason. A question of identity was raised, but as his murder was
boldly asserted to have been the work of Masonry, it caused a great
excitement for the time being. This excitement divided the political
parties into Mason and Anti-Mason factions. Anti-Masonry was the
political fertilizer which produced the astonishing growth of the
assiduous Weed, he being sent to the Assembly twice, mainly on that
issue. While at Albany his ability as a party leader becoming so
apparent he was decided upon as the proper person to assume the party
leadership against the obnoxious 'Albany Regency,' the great Democratic
power in New York State at the time. He accordingly moved to Albany and
assumed the editorship of the _Albany Evening Journal_. Weed was one of
the men who consolidated the Anti-Jackson, Anti-Mason and old Federal
factions into the Whig party. The 'Regency' with w