The Portland daily press., 1872-06-19
Peace and War Candidates.

From the New York Evening Post.)
A Greeley organ of the northwes carries
on the campaign after this fashion: i
During the.war Greeley made patriots and
enlisted troops; Grant led them to death or vic
tory. Greeley, with his pen, called volunteers
from the hillside and the vale; Grant planted
them IN the Wilderness, on the James, and be-
fore Petersburg"
Whatever we may think and say of Grant
as civilian, we are free to remember his SER
vices as a soldier, and to protest against this
method of conducting a campaign against
him. We are among those who have a strong
faith In the common sense of the people and
in their love ofjustice, and we are firmly per-
suaded that newspapers resorting to covert
attacks of this sort to belittle Grant the sold
ier are doing more to re-elect him to the Pres
idency than his warmest friends could ask.
He had earned and he deserved the gratitude
OF the people for his services as a soldier, and
so far as human foresight could predict there
would be at this moment two separate gov
ernments within the present limits of the
United States, with chattel slavery as the dis
tinguishing characteristic of one of them, had
not General Grant made an advance upon
Richmond when he did and as he did, and
finished the war by the capture of Lees ar
my. There was not another general in the
Union service, probably, who would not have
believed himself whipped on any of the first
threedays of that campaign andha acted ac-
cordingly ;and humanity speaking, the want of
success that summer would have been the
end of the war, the destruction of the Union
and the triumph of the Confederacy. Had
Grant been content to remain satisfied with
the laurels gained in that and previous CAM
paigns he would have gone into history as one
of the great captains of the age; and it will
not ha ffo1 10 10 ft,..z
American people if they forget the debt of
gratitude they owe him as a soldier, because
there did not happen to be in him, also, the
stuff wherewith to make good President.
Equally untrue with the implied base re-
Election in this northwest organ upon Grant
as soldier is the praise OF Greeley as a pa
triot. Ii the campaign is to be fought on
the issue of conduct during the war. we know
OF nobody, this side of Mason and Dixon's
iine, on whom poorer fight can be made
tnah horace Greeley. We assert, without
tne sLghtest fear of successful contradiction,
that Greeley never made patriot in any
such sense as is here meant: never enlisted
single man for the war; never called single
volunteer "from the hillside and vale" unless
it was to serve in the rebel army. This sort
OF stuff NAV do in the rural districts of the
far West, where the Cardiff Giant and Hor-
ace Greeley are still believed in as among the
wonders of the age, but no respectable news
paper in this part of the country would so
venture to presume upon the credulity of its
readers.
The cowardly assertion by Mr.. Greeley of
the right of secession, before the war broke
out, encouraged the rebels to enter upon the
war, if we may believe the testimony of some
of the most upright and clear-minded among
them. No sooner was the first ill-judged and
hasty blow struck on our side at Bull Run
blow which his own paper did its best to
precipitate-than Greeley turned upon Mr..
Lincoln to induce, and, so far as his infiu-
ence went, to constrain him to give up the
contest then and there. He used every per-
sonal appeal he could urge, and all the power
OF the public confidence he was supposed to
command, to persuade the President that that
was the only course that was left him. Not
less frantic nor less pusillanimous was the ap-
peal he addressed to Mr.. Lincoln when he is
sued his first proclamation for three hundred