hate and wrath engendered by a bloody civil war is as though you should
plant a colony on an iceberg which had somehow drifted into a tropical
ocean. I tell you here that out of a life earnestly devoted to the good
of human kind, your children will select my going to Richmond and
signing that bail bond as the wisest act of my life, and will feel that
it did more for freedom and humanity than all of you were competent to
do though you lived to the age of Methuselah. Understand, once for all,
that I dare you and defy you. So long as any man was seeking to
overthrow our government he was my enemy; from the hour when he laid
down his arms he was my formerly erring countryman."

In 1872, Greeley became the Republican who was a candidate of the
Democratic party for the presidency, and was defeated by Grant.
Doubtless he was actuated by the highest sense of duty. He took the
stump and spoke in every great city in the North and South, without
swerving a hair's breadth in his pacific attitude towards the South, or
in his championship of the coloured race. His great work, "The American
Conflict," on which he spent ten hours a day for many, many months, had
made Greeley a master of all the facts bearing upon the reconciliation
of the North and South. He showed almost superhuman endurance during
that intense campaign. But Grant had captured the imagination of the
people. The old soldiers voted as one solid band, the Republican party
was looked upon as the saviour of the nation, and the people doubted Mr.
Greeley's fitness for the presidency in a national crisis. He was
defeated in November, and went home to watch over his wife during her
illness and death. Just before she died, he wrote a friend saying: "I am
a broken old man; I have not slept one hour in twenty-four; if she
lasts, poor soul, another week, I shall go before her." Sleeplessness
brought on brain fever, his old enemy, and on November 29th, the
worn-out editor fell on sleep.