Recollections of a Busy Life

by Horace Greeley

(...)" OUR FOLKS AT LONDONDERRY.

THE current notion that the Puritans were a sour, morose, ascetic people — objecting, as Macaulay says, to bearbaiting, not that it gave pain to the bear, but that it gave pleasure to the spectator — is not justified by my recollections, nor by the traditions handed down through my mother. The pioneers of Londonderry were so thoroughly Puritan that, while their original framed and well-built meeting-house was finished and occupied in the third year of the settlement, when there were none other but log huts in the township, nearly a century elapsed before any other than a Presbyterian or Orthodox Congregational sermon was preached therein, and nobody that was anybody adhered to any rival(...)"

624 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Horace Greeley was an American editor of a leading newspaper, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer, and a politician. His New York Tribune was America's most influential newspaper from the 1840s to the 1870s and "established Greeley's reputation as the greatest editor of his day."[1] Greeley used it to promote the Whig and Republican parties, as well as opposition to slavery and a host of reforms. Crusading against the corruption of Ulysses S. Grant's Republican administration, he was the new Liberal Republican Party's candidate in the 1872 U.S. presidential election. Despite having the additional support of the Democratic Party, he lost in a landslide. He is currently the only presidential candidate who has died during the electoral process.