Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet

T
 W
.
Who indeed has not heard of Thurlow Weed, "The king maker," born at
Cairo, Greene County, New York, November 15, 1797. His father was a
teamster and farmer. The reader can get some insight into the seemingly
mysterious power he held for so many years, when it was known that so
great was his thirst for knowledge that he was glad to wrap bits of a rag
carpet about his feet and thus shod walk through the snow two miles to
borrow a history of the French Revolution, which he mastered at night,
stretched before 'the sap bush fire.'
The more one investigates the character and lives of those men whom we
so often envy, the more we are forced to see that it was will-power rightly
directed that overcame all obstacles. Certain it is to this that Thurlow Weed
owes his everlasting fame as the 'American Warwick'; for knowledge is
power. He first left the farm work as a cabin boy on a Hudson river
steamboat bound for New York, but being born a journalist he soon drifted
into a printing office where he became a good journeyman.
When the second war with Great Britain broke out he enlisted, and served
on the Northern frontier, where by faithfulness he became Quartermaster
Sergeant. When the war was over he returned to the printing office, being at
one time in the same establishment with the late James Harper. Finally he
started a paper at Oxford, New York, in 1818. He afterward became
connected with the 
Onondaga Times
, which he finally changed to the
Republican
. For the next few years he is connected with several different
papers until we find him in Rochester at the head of the 
Anti-Masonic
Enquirer
.
About this time the body of a man who had drowned in Lake Ontario was
found, and it was claimed that his name was Morgan; if so, he was a
renegade mason. A question of identity was raised, but as his murder was
boldly asserted to have been the work of Masonry, it caused a great

---

excitement for the time being. This excitement divided the political parties
into Mason and Anti-Mason factions. Anti-Masonry was the political
fertilizer which produced the astonishing growth of the assiduous Weed, he
being sent to the Assembly twice, mainly on that issue. While at Albany his
ability as a party leader becoming so apparent he was decided upon as the
proper person to assume the party leadership against the obnoxious 'Albany
Regency,' the great Democratic power in New York State at the time. He
accordingly moved to Albany and assumed the editorship of the 
Albany
Evening Journal
. Weed was one of the men who consolidated the Anti-
Jackson, Anti-Mason and old Federal factions into the Whig party. The
'Regency' with which he had to deal consisted of such men as Martin Van
Buren, Silas Wright, Willian L. Marcy and others of equal ability. Such
were the men with whom he was pitted, but they soon found him in every
way worthy of their steel. No one, when speaking of this great political
warrior ever thought or spoke of him as a millionaire. Seemingly no one
cared how much he was worth; but what did worry them was,—what will
be the outcome of this secret conclave which we now suspect to be in
progress at the headquarters of the opposition of the 'Albany Regency.'
He went to battle fearlessly, and his terse pen dealt stinging blows straight
in the face of the opponent. Indeed, as an editor he has been rarely equaled.
While Greeley would devote a column to an article, he would take the same
subject and in a few words put the argument in such shape as to carry far
more conviction. His two terms in the State Assembly wound up his career
as a legislator, although he could have had any place within the gift of his