De Alexander

And, Governor Seward, I have made it, though it be conceited in me to say so.

No other name could have been put on the ticket so bitterly humbling to me as that which was selected.

And, though I should have been beaten in the canvass, I know that my running would have helped the ticket, and helped my paper.

I want to have my enemies all upon me at once; am tired of fighting them piecemeal.

I should have hated to serve as lieutenant-governor, but I should have gloried in running for the post.

At length I was nettled by his language--well intended, but very cutting as addressed by him to me--to say, in substance, 'Well, then, make Patterson governor, and try my name for lieutenant.

But had he and you been favourable, there would have been a party in the State ere this which could and would have elected me to any post, without injuring itself or endangering your re-election.

I am sure Weed did not mean to humiliate me; but he did it.

I told them I neither could nor would touch it; on the contrary, I loathed and repelled it.

But this last spring, after the Nebraska question had created a new state of things at the North, one or two personal friends, of no political consideration, suggested my name as a candidate for governor, and I did not discourage them.

I have referred also to Weed's reading me out of the Whig party--my crime being, in this as in some other things, that of doing to-day what more politic persons will not be ready to do till to-morrow.

I think you had a better occasion for the display of these qualities when Webb threw himself entirely upon you for a pardon which he had done all a man could do to demerit.

I think you exalted your own judicial sternness and fearlessness unduly at my expense.

I do not think you were at liberty to humiliate me in the eyes of my own and your public as you did.

I thought and still think this lecture needlessly cruel and mortifying.

In 1848 your star again rose, and my warmest hopes were realised in your election to the Senate.

When the Whig party under your rule had offices to give, my name was never thought of; but when in '42-'43, we were hopelessly out of power, I was honoured with the nomination for state printer.

I soon after started the Tribune, because I was urged to do so by certain of your friends, and because such a paper was needed here.

I asked nothing, expected nothing; but you, Governor Seward, ought to have asked that I be postmaster of New York.

It was work that made no figure and created no sensation; but I loved it and did it well.

It seems to me a fitting time to announce to you the dissolution of the political firm of Seward, Weed & Greeley, by the withdrawal of the junior partner--said withdrawal to take effect on the morning after the first Tuesday in February…

It is not my part to vindicate them; but whoever says they were influenced by me, other than I was by them, does them the grossest injustice.

Those anti-democratic voters of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois, who could not be induced to vote for Governor Seward, have derived their notions of him in some measure from the Times, but in no measure from the Tribune.

The whole course of the Tribune has tended to facilitate the elevation to the Presidency of a statesman cherishing the pronounced anti-slavery views of Governor Seward; it is only on questions of finance and public economy that there has…

But there is another and far larger class who will realise that the obstacles to Governor Seward's election were in no degree of my creation, and that their removal was utterly beyond my powers.