That his warmest support should have come from the South seems incredible and was a priceless fact.

His martyrdom shortened the distance across the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly filled it.
The candidacy of Charles Francis Adams or of Lyman Trumbull meant a mathematical formula, with no solution of the problem and as certain defeat at the end of it.

His candidacy threw a flood of light and warmth into the arena of deadly strife; it made a more equal and reasonable division of parties possible; it put the Southern half of the country in a position to plead its own case by showing the Northern half that it was not wholly recalcitrant or reactionary; and it made way for real issues of pith and moment relating to the time instead of pigments of bellicose passion and scraps of ante-bellum controversy.
In a word Greeley did more by his death to complete the work of Lincoln than he could have done by a triumph at the polls and the term in the White House he so much desired.

Though but sixty-one years of age, his race was run.

Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life full of inspiration to his countrymen and died not in vain, "our later Franklin" fittingly inscribed upon his tomb..