"Boss" Tweed : the story of a grim generation / by Denis Tilden Lynch.

242 "Boss" Tweed
knowing it to be false. Now we have the very best authority,
and we are ready to prove it, that at the crisis in question,
Greeley had a secession flag hung up in his editorial sanctum.
Will he dare to deny this? He was then, as he has been ever
since, in favor of letting the South go according to the principles of the Declaration of Independence."
A few days later-some three weeks prior to the Draft Riots
-Bennett wrote that The Independent was authority for the
announcement that spiritualists had been in communication with
the ghost of Stonewall Jackson, and that the great hero and
warrior-evangelist of the South had become a strong antislavery man since he departed this earthly sphere. Bennett
also informed his readers (many thousands of whom took it
for Gospel truth) that he had it from the same source that
Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher "will be Union men within
five years after they are hanged in 1865 by the Democratic
administration." Here were two good reasons why the Republicans should be defeated. But they were not new, as the hanging of Beecher and Greeley was proposed in and out of the
Houses of Congress. There were places in New York where
it would not be safe for either of them to venture alone-or
together. The Independent was then being run by Beecher and
his friend-then-Theodore Tilton. These three —Tilton,
Beecher, and Greeley —frequently foregathered at this time
at Tilton's home in Brooklyn, which was a rendezvous for the
leading exponents of woman suffrage, free love, and other fads
of the day. At these gatherings extreme Republicans and
Southern sympathizers met on common ground. The misrepresentations and violence of the editorial sanctum and the rostrum were forgotten in this sanctuary.
There was a strong pro-South sentiment among the prominent men of the city which became intensified as the war
approached the end of the second year. Numerous meetings
of protest were held by the Democrats. The most important
of these was held on February 5, 1863, at Delmonico's. Samuel
F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, presided. Before
adjourning, the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge was formed. The Republicans looked upon this body as