Horace Greeley

American journalist

• Born: February 3, 1811
• Birthplace: Amherst, New Hampshire
• Died: November 29, 1872
• Place of death: New York, New York

A daring journalist and lecturer, Greeley engaged himself personally with a wide range of social issues—labor rights, abolitionism, territorial expansion, women’s rights, and political reform—and his paper, the New York Tribune, became a medium for the best thought of his time. He also dabbled in politics and was the Democratic candidate for president of the United States shortly before he died.

Early Life

Among the founding families of New England, the first of Horace Greeley’s ancestors arrived in North America in 1640. Greeley himself was the third of seven children of Zaccheus and Mary (Woodburn) Greeley. As a boy, he was frail and uncoordinated and had a large head on a small frame. His mother was very protective of him, keeping him close as he was physically weak. She held great influence on him, and she urged him to read and study rather than risk injury in the rough-and-tumble world of children. Greeley could read at an early age, and with his delicate manners he became a favorite of teachers in Bedford, whose trustees were also impressed with the boy’s brilliance. Some influential citizens even offered to underwrite Greeley at Phillips Academy in nearby Exeter. His parents declined the offer, as hard times seemed continually to press them to move from farm to farm, from Connecticut to Massachusetts and on to Westhaven, Vermont, all before Horace was ten years old.

Greeley continued with his self-education, aided and watched over by his mother. His ungainly appearance and odd wardrobe of baggy short trousers and a coat topped by equally odd slouching hats and caps did little to mitigate the impression made by the high-pitched, whining voice that came from his large, moonlike head. Youngsters called him “the ghost,” and he became a subject for their merriment. Throughout his life he lacked social polish and a sense of dress.

At the age of fifteen, Greeley was apprenticed to a small newspaper, the Northern Spectator of East Poultney, Vermont; there, he learned the rudiments of what was to become his life’s work. He joined the local debating society, and, with his intense and serious attention to public affairs, he became a respected member of the community. The paper folded, however, and Greeley joined his family, who had moved to the Pennsylvania-New York border village of Erie, where his father had again taken up farming. There he helped with the farm and gained printing jobs in Erie, Jamestown, and Lodi, all towns in New York State. The struggle for existence, let alone success, in the dismal marginal area depressed him, and in 1831, with ten dollars, he set out on foot for New York City.

Life’s Work

Finding employment in New York was difficult, but Greeley was willing to take on a technically difficult job that no other printer would do: set up print for an edition of the New Testament with Greek references and supplementary notes on each book. This job, which strained Greeley’s already weak eyesight, brought him to the attention of other printers. He began work on William Leggett’s Evening Post, from which he was fired because he did not fit the model of “decent-looking men in the office.”

Greeley had been able to save some money and formed a partnership with Francis Vinton Story, and later, Jonas Winchester. They did job-printing as well as printing Bank Note Reporter (1832) and the Constitutionalist (1832), which dealt with popular lottery printing. They attempted a penny paper called the Morning Post using patronage investment by H. D. Shepard and supply credit from George Bruce, but a general lack of business acumen caused the venture to fail. With the failure of the penny daily, Greeley turned to putting out a successful weekly, the New-Yorker, which, coupled with his other publications, made the partnership now called Greeley and Company a success in journalism although not in the cash box. The habit of newspapers to extend credit rather than work on a cash basis was not to be changed until James Gordon Bennett’s Herald demanded it during the 1840’s. Greeley’s weekly was nonpartisan in politics, stimulating, well written, and well edited. Greeley also made extra money by selling his writing to other papers, such as the Daily Whig.

In 1836, Greeley married Mary Youngs Cheney, formerly of Cornwall, Connecticut, then a teacher in North Carolina. They had first met while virtual inmates of Sylvester Graham’s boardinghouse; Cheney was a devoted follower of the Grahamite cause, while Greeley was simply a teetotaling vegetarian satisfying his curiosity about Graham’s unique regimen for healthy living. They were an odd match. She was plain, dogmatic, humorless, supercilious, and uncommunicative; he was compassionate, outgoing, and egalitarian. From the first day of their marriage, on July 5, 1836, they did not get along.

As a matter of personal conscience, Greeley was never inclined to pyramid debt, and this contributed to the failure of his weekly. In addition, nonpartisanship was never Greeley’s strong suit. Opinionated, he found advocacy journalism more to his liking; therefore, he was more than willing to accommodate the proposition of Whig boss Thurlow Weed of Albany, New York, to put out a New York paper favoring the party. The result was the Jeffersonian , which brought Greeley a guaranteed salary of one thousand dollars per year and proved a success.

More important, Greeley was mixing in state and national political circles. In 1840, the Whigs encouraged Greeley to publish another weekly, called the Log Cabin ; because it had a guaranteed subscription list among the party faithful, the journal was an immediate success. Greeley edited the Log Cabin as well as his struggling New-Yorker until, on April 10, 1841, he combined the two publications using three thousand dollars, of which one-third was his cash, one-third was in supplies, and one-third was borrowed from James Coggeshall. The result was his New York Tribune . He had built a personal following through the political papers, and he now sought to capitalize on his name recognition.

As a conservative Whig daily, the New York Tribune was carefully structured, with sober news stories, minimal sensationalism, and a strong editorial section. Greeley turned over the business affairs to another partner, Thomas McElrath, while he concentrated on the journalism. Unlike Bennett, who was both a newsman and a businessperson, Greeley was a man to whom opinions came first. His work was like an ongoing feature article. His Puritan background encouraged him to seek redress for the social wrongs that he saw everywhere.

Greeley’s belief in the rectitude of his moral cause made him impregnable to criticism. The common denominator linking many of his positions was his advocacy of the downtrodden and the oppressed. He strongly opposed the death penalty, which he saw as a violation of life and also a violence done by society against the weakest elements, who did not have the wherewithal to defend themselves; he led the fight for the rights of women and laboring classes, took up the cause of temperance as early as 1824, and championed the farming classes and frontier development. The fact that he would join the cause against slavery was almost inevitable.

Greeley regarded both wage slavery and chattel slavery as outrages against humanity and admonished the press to be as “sensitive to oppression and degradation in the next street as if they were practiced in Brazil or Japan.” However, Greeley was an economic nationalist where foreign trade was concerned, pushing for protective tariffs.

In the matter of women’s rights, Greeley was not in favor of suffrage, but he championed virtually every other plea by the burgeoning women’s movement of the mid-nineteenth century. These causes, which promoted confidence in the people, brought enormous success to the New York Tribune, both critical and financial. Despite his success, Greeley was always financially hard-pressed. He never held controlling interest in the paper and was indifferent to that fact until his last years. By then it was too late, as the brilliant talents that he had recruited and cultivated had acquired dominant interest. His intuitive sense of talent brought the iconoclastic Margaret Fuller to the paper and even to live in his home for a time.

Charles A. Dana joined Greeley in 1847 and was followed by Bayard Taylor in the following year. George Ripley, in 1849, was given a free hand to develop the literary department. In a continual struggle with the Herald for circulation and dominance, the New York Tribune vigorously pursued talent to make the paper a complete publication. During the 1850’s came James S. Pike as Washington correspondent and editorial writer, F. J. Ottarson as city editor, W. H. Fry as music editor, Solon Robinson as agricultural editor, and then Fry and Richard Hildreth as byline reporters. The quality and intensity of the paper’s political reporting, though uneven, was unequaled in the Civil War years. The newspaper’s circulation under Greeley grew enormously, reaching well over a quarter million per week. This number is incredible in that the paper attracted subscribers only in areas outside the South.

Greeley’s paper took strong positions on virtually every topic. Though this might have doomed other newspapers, the compelling intelligence of Greeley and his staff kept the New York Tribune in the forefront. At first reserved in judgment, Greeley gained confidence as his paper matured. He opposed the Mexican War, supported the Wilmot Proviso limiting slavery, and reluctantly supported Zachary Taylor. Greeley was an avid abolitionist and, in 1850, during the course of the debate on the Compromise of 1850, he stated that rather than have slavery on free soil he would “let the Union be a thousand times shivered.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act infuriated him. He inveighed against its supporters and called upon antislavery forces to arm themselves and ensure that Kansas be without slavery.

Greeley considered himself an astute politician, but when he fell out with his influential friends William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed, he destroyed his chances for political success. He broke from Seward as a result of a dispute over the status of slavery in Kansas and from Weed because of the latter’s refusal to support him for governor of New York. Greeley had been a member of the House of Representatives for a brief three months in 1848-1849, and he enjoyed the excitement of political action. He failed reelection in 1850, however, and even failed in his attempt to gain the lieutenant governorship of New York in 1854. Greeley wanted Seward’s Senate seat in 1861 and attempted to gain nomination to the Senate again in 1863, but he was thwarted by Weed’s forces. He also failed to gain candidacy for the House in both 1868 and 1870 as well as the office of state comptroller in 1869. The Weed-controlled state machine was determined to force Greeley out of political life forever in retaliation for his attack on Seward’s presidential candidacy in 1860 in favor of Abraham Lincoln.

At the onset of the Civil War, Greeley was inconsistent. At first he was vehement in opposition to slavery, secession, and concessions on the expansion of slavery, but, shortly after, he suggested that secession might be allowed if a majority of Southerners wished it. In a return to his earlier position, Greeley’s paper took up the cry of “Forward to Richmond” in an article by Charles Dana that was often attributed to Greeley and that committed him to join the crusade. He allied himself with the Radical Republicans Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Salmon P. Chase and opposed all attempts by Lincoln to conciliate the South. His paper supported the John C. Frémont emancipation in Missouri and followed with an article, “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” on August 20, 1862, which attacked the administration on Confiscation Act manipulation, which favored Southern slaveholders.

Although Greeley rejoiced at the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, he worked to undercut Lincoln in 1864 by suggesting a new candidate. However, by September of that year his paper endorsed Lincoln’s reelection. He had, in the interim, suggested that to save the nation from ruin a one-year armistice be declared during which the blockade would be lifted and each side would hold on to what it had gained. As a result of that suggestion, his judgment was questioned; his influence waned even more with his pronouncements on Reconstruction.

Greeley advocated full equality of the freedmen while at the same time calling for a general amnesty for Southerners. At a time when most politicians were “waving the bloody shirt,” he signed the bail bond of Jefferson Davis in Richmond on May 13, 1867, and pushed for his freedom. Greeley’s reputation and his paper’s circulation both suffered. He supported the nomination of General Ulysses S. Grant but after two years turned against him. He committed himself to defeating Grant in 1872, determined to use both himself and his paper to develop an independent party. He feared the destruction of his paper, which by then was held by as many as twenty interests.

When the desperate Democrats made an alliance with liberal Republicans, Greeley was itching to become a presidential candidate. With enemies in all camps, he took up the crusade, which exhausted him physically and emotionally. He was pilloried by cartoonists, who mocked his odd build, his floppy hats and strange white duster fluttering in the wind as he waddled, and the chin whiskers circling his face. By October, it was clear that there was little prospect for victory or even a good showing. In the election, he carried only six border and southern states, suffering the worst defeat of any presidential candidate to that time.

Greeley’s wife, who had been ailing for years, died on October 30, 1872, five days before the disastrous election. His love for this irascible woman was enduring, and he felt totally alone. They had seen the death of five of their seven children, and now there were only the daughters Ida and Gabrielle to stand with him. He attempted to return to the New York Tribune, but it, too, rejected him and humiliated him. His mind snapped, and he was institutionalized in the home of Dr. George S. Choate of Pleasantville, New York, where he died on November 29. The death of this great public man was noted throughout the nation. After a monumental funeral, he was buried in Greenwood Cemetery. He was remembered by his printer union friends with a bust over his grave and other statues.

Significance

Horace Greeley was forever a child prodigy, a passionate friend of humankind, one who understood the uses of money but who held no commitment to either gaining it or keeping it, and one who was possessed of and by ideas and by any and all who harbored them. Politically, he was a vain naïf caught in a cynical world. He was a man who wanted greatness for his nation and for its people. He had a compelling need to communicate his ideas, and he attracted to his paper people who themselves had something to say. He loved to explain things to a nation that was moving too quickly to do its own thinking.

Whether the issue was corruption in politics, the plight of women, love and marriage, crime, the burdens of the laboring classes, or the complexities of socialism, Greeley had something to say about it in a way that common people could understand. The people were his true family, and his New York Tribune, his lectures, his books, and his essays were the instruments by which he instructed this family.

Bibliography

Baehr, Harry, Jr. The New York Tribune Since the Civil War. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936. A useful book, especially the first section, which has some good illustrations of personalities associated with Greeley.

Cross, Coy F., III. Go West Young Man! Horace Greeley’s Vision for America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Describes Greeley’s ideas about westward expansion and his promotion of an agrarian utopia. Cross examines Greeley’s efforts in support of land grant colleges, land reform, restricting slavery in western territories, and transcontinental railroads. Also discusses Greeley’s role in creating the utopian Union Colony that later became Greeley, Colorado.

Greeley, Horace. The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860-’65. 2 vols. Hartford, Conn.: O. D. Case, 1864-1866. This is an involved personal overview of the events leading to the Civil War, and the war itself, by a less than disinterested observer who nevertheless maintained a reasonable objectivity.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859. New York: C. M. Saxton Barker, 1860. This, along with Greeley’s other works, gives a sense of the charm and intelligence of the man.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Recollections of a Busy Life. New York: J. B. Ford, 1869. This book should be read by anyone who wants to know Greeley. He was such a public man that even academics presume to know him without reading what is an unsung but truly remarkable autobiography.

Hale, William Harlan. Horace Greeley: Voice of the People. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950. Shows Greeley’s intuitive understanding of the issues of his time.

Horner, Harlan Hoyt. Lincoln and Greeley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953. An examination of the curious relationship between Lincoln and the often presumptuous Greeley on issues of war and peace.

Isely, Jeter Allen. Horace Greeley and the Republican Party, 1853-61: A Study of the “New York Tribune.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947. This work is necessary to an understanding of the making of the Republican Party and the exploitation of the Greeley paper toward that end.

Maihafer, Harry J. The General and the Journalists: Ulysses S. Grant, Horace Greeley, and Charles Dana. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1998. Describes how Greeley and other journalists influenced the conduct of the Civil War and public opinion of Presidents Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Grant.

Seitz, Don C. Horace Greeley: Founder of the “New York Tribune.” Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926. Seitz provides a journalistic biography of Greeley with some useful information on the editor’s family life.

Van Deusen, Glyndon G. Horace Greeley: Nineteenth Century Crusader. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953. This is the standard biography. Balanced, readable, well documented; includes a general bibliography, “bibliography by chapter,” and illustrations (a number of which are cartoonists’ caricatures of Greeley).