Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/309

Rh paper, a journal that would appeal to those who thought Greeley extreme and Bennett impossible. His political associates, Weed and Seward, also saw that a conservative paper, at a popular price, would tend to bring into the Whig party a conservative element that had not hitherto been attracted. Weed, the practical man, saw that there were business men who could be brought into the party, if some of the radicalism could be curbed.

The Times entered the field at a time when the anti-slave forces in the east needed such an organ. The success of Seward was the success of the new party, and Weed and Seward needed just such a paper. The years between 1850 and 1860 were filled with cross currents; the wisest men declared that they were unable to foretell the future, although it was only those who were called "hotheads" who realized the truth that lay in Seward's words,—that a conflict was inevitable. No one could foresee that Greeley, Seward, Weed, and Raymond, the four men who had made the Republican party possible, would quarrel among themselves, over a mere matter of patronage, to the discomfiture of all of them, but to the benefit of the nation.

Nor would the boldest prophet have suggested that the introduction of penny journalism, producing such pro-slavery journals as the New York Sun and the New York Herald, would ever be considered as one of the important steps that led to the spread of journalism among the masses, and eventually made the question of slavery the one that held the North as a political unit. Had the question of secession come before the country disassociated from slavery, it is difficult to conceive that Lincoln would have received the support that he did. Strong abolitionist as he was, Greeley was one of those in favor of allowing the South to take her slaves