On Saturday, the tenth day of April instant, the subscriber will
publish the first number of a new morning journal of politics, literature
and general intelligence. The Tribune, as its name imports, will labor
to advance the interests of the people, and to promote their moral, social
and political wellbeing. The immoral and degrading police reports, ad-
vertisements and other matter which have been allowed to disgrace the
columns of our leading penny papers will be carefully excluded from
this, and no exertion spared to render it worthy of the hearty approval
of the virtuous and refined, and a welcome visitant at the family fire-
side. Earnestly believing that the political revolution which has called
William Henry Harrison to the Chief Magistracy of the nation was a
triumph of right reason and public good over error and sinister am-
bition, The Tribune will give to the new administration a frank and can-
did, but manly and independent, support, judging it always by its
acts, and commending these only so far as they shall seem calculated
to subserve the great end of all government the welfare of the people.
The success of The Tribune was immediate. The editor's per- sonal and political friends had secured subscribers by the hun- dreds before the first issue of five thousand copies was printed. Though started as a penny paper, The Tribune began its second volume on April 11, 1842, at the increased price of nine cents a week, or two cents a copy. The New Yorker and The Log Cabin Greeley merged into The Weekly Tribune. The Tribune under Greeley's editorship has been commonly classed as a party organ, but he was fairly successful in his determination to " remove it from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other"; no better illustration of this fact is found than his own words, "The Tribune will accept the party nominee but will spit upon the platform." Though The Tribune continued to be a pulpit from which Greeley preached daily the partisan gospel, according to St. Horace, it was also a platform for the early appearance of such distinguished jour- nalists and publicists as Charles Anderson Dana, Henry Jar vis Raymond, George William Curtis, Carl Schurz, John Hay, Whitelaw Reid, Henry James, William Dean Ho wells, Bayard Taylor, George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Grant White, Richard Hildreth, John Russell Young, Sidney Howard Gay, etc.
