Monday, September 19, 2016

Horace Greeley to James S. Pike, May 2, 1850

New York, May 2, 1850.

Friend Pike: I beg you not to be diffident. I know how common the fault is among Washington writers, and how hard to be overcome, but I beseech you, as Mrs. Chick would say, “to make an effort.” You don't know what may come of it.

Mr. Snow of ours will hand you this letter. He goes on to discover, with your help, that genius of an “inventive turn of mind,” who knows just what mansion great men retire to when they don't retire at all. Good boy, that — we must hire his imagination.

I like your letters, and if you won't call Foote and Butler “Democrats” in such sense as to imply that I am something else, I don't think I shall ever take liberties with your letters, except it may be the liberty of dissenting from some of their positions.

Yours,
Horace Greeley.
J. S. Pike, Esq.

SOURCE: James Shepherd Pike, First Blows of the Civil War: The Ten Years of Preliminary Conflict in the United States from 1850 to 1860, p. 50

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