World's Famous Orations-Williams Jennings Bryan Editor

Horace Greeley - On Southern Reconstruction, 1872
It is certain that throughout the course of my life, as far as i have been connected with public affairs, i have struggled with such capacity as God has given me, for: first, impartial and universal liberty; secondly, for the unity and greatness of our common country; thirdly, and by no means last, when the former end was attained, for an early and hearty reconciliation and peace among our countrymen. For these great ends I have struggled, and I hope the issue is not doubtful.
Those adverse to me ask what pledges I have given to those lately hostile to the Union to secure their favor and support. I answer, no man or woman in all the South ever asked of me, directly or through another, any pledge than is given through all my acts and words. From the hour of Lee's surrender down to this moment, no Southern man has ever hinted to me an expectation, hope, or wish that the rebel debt, whether Confederate or State, should be assumed or paid by the Union, and no Southern man who could be elected to a legislature or made colonel of a militia regiment, has suggested the pension of the rebel soldiers, or any of them, even as a remote possibility.
All who nominated me were perfectly aware that I upheld and justified Federal legislation to repress Kuklux conspiracy and outrage, tho I have long ago insisted as strenuously as I do now that complete amnesty and general oblivion of the bloody and hateful past would do more for the suppression and utter extinction of such outrages than all the force bills and suspension of habeas corpus ever devised by man. Wrong and crime must be suppressed and punished, but far wiser and nobler is legislation, the policy, by which they are prevented.
From those who supprt me in the South I have heard but one one demand-justice, but one desire-reconciliation.
Horace Greeley - First Presidential Campaign speech 1872 given Portland Maine *Born 1811 died 1872; founded the New York Tribune in 1841, notable antislavery leader elected to congress in 1848, founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer, and a politician.