A far less sound view was taken by the _Tribune_, so long the most influential Republican newspaper of the nation. Horace Greeley is often represented as declaring flatly that the South should be allowed to depart in peace. His opinion, while not much more defensible, was decidedly different. Greeley wished to make sure that it was the will of the Southern majority to secede, and not the mere whim of fire-eating leaders. “I have said repeatedly, and here repeat,” he wrote in the _Tribune_ of Jan. 14, “that, if the people of the Slave States, or of the Cotton States alone, really wish to get out of the Union, I am in favor of letting them out so soon as that result can be peacefully and constitutionally attained.... If they will ... take first deliberately by fair vote a ballot of their own citizens, none being coerced nor intimidated, and that vote shall indicate a settled resolve to get out of the Union, I will do all I can to help them out at an early day. I want no States kept in the Union by coercion; but I insist that none shall be coerced out of it....”
But James Gordon Bennett’s _Herald_, James Brooks’s _Express_, Gerard Hallock’s _Journal of Commerce_, and several minor journals, as the _Daily News_ and _Day Book_, were frankly in favor of letting the secessionists proceed without any restraint from the Federal Government. The _Herald_ was much the most important, although the _World_ sneeringly said that every new subscriber meant two cents and a little more contempt for Bennett. It was read everywhere about New York for its full news and its smartness; the caustic observations of Dickens and William H. Russell upon New York journalism were founded principally upon it; and Administration leaders at Washington found its comprehensive dispatches invaluable throughout the war. Maintaining its old levity of tone, the _Herald_ used at this period to speak of the _World_, _Tribune_, and _Times_ as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. It remarked that Lincoln had once split rails and now he was splitting the Union. It called Greeley “the Hon. Massa Greeley,” and it probably refrained only by a supreme effort from nicknaming Bryant. One of its cardinal tenets was that slavery was really unobjectionable. As the two sections drew near war, it printed a description of slum life in Liverpool, remarking that compared with the English laborer, “the slave lives like a prince.” He had his cabin, neat, clean, and weatherproof; he had his own garden patch, over which he was lord paramount; he was well-fed, well-lodged, well-clothed, and rarely overworked; sleek, happy, contented, enjoying his many holidays with gusto, he lived to a great age. Before the New Year, the _Herald_ had spoken out plainly against coercion. It would bring on “a fratricidal conflict, which will destroy the industrial interests of all sections, and put us back at least a hundred years in the estimation of the civilized world.”