As late as the first Grant
presidential campaign, Elder Evans, inviting him to make an address
before the Shaker community at Harvard, Mass., asked him to please bring
"the old white coat, that our folk may know it is you, for sure."
It is possible there may have been some little feeling of resentment
against this sort of patronage expressed in the dragging on of the old
white coat with the sleeves awry and the collar turned under, but I am
sure that as a rule Mr. Greeley gave very little thought as to
wherewithal he would be clothed.
Horace Greeley never had half a chance to develop the finer qualities of
his nature--and he knew it. He was a tremendous worker and as an
aggressive editor, an ambitious politician and an ardent reformer,
driven like a steam engine, he could give little heed to the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune, but he was sensitive as a girl to rebuffs
bringing to mind what might have been. Among friends with whom he felt
at home and in really congenial company, he was a different being from
the hard hitting fighter and eccentric philosopher known to the public.
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