Horace Greeley

• 1. Introduction

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  Horace Greeley could not breathe for the first twenty minutes of his life. He was born on the 3rd of February 1811, on a small farm about five miles from Amherst, New Hampshire, to poor farmers Zaccheus and Mary Greeley. From that uncertain start came one of the best-known Americans of the nineteenth century, a newspaper editor who founded the New-York Tribune and made it the highest-circulating newspaper in the country. He served three months in Congress, helped found the Republican Party, and ran for president against Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. How did a printer's apprentice with eccentric habits and an old linen coat come to mold public opinion across a nation? What drew him to socialism, vegetarianism, feminism, and a peace mission to Confederate agents in Canada? And why did a man who wanted the presidency so badly die before the Electoral College could even meet?

• 2. A Brilliant Runaway

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  Some neighbors offered to pay Horace's way at Phillips Exeter Academy, but the Greeleys did not want to accept charity. Horace attended the local schools and was a brilliant student, but his father's failures kept the family moving, as far west as Pennsylvania. In 1820, financial reverses forced Zaccheus to flee New Hampshire lest he be imprisoned for debt, and the family settled in Vermont. A neighbor let Horace use his library, and the boy read everything he could. In 1822, he ran away from home to become a printer's apprentice, but was told he was too young. Four years later, at age 15, he was apprenticed to Amos Bliss, editor of the Northern Spectator in East Poultney, Vermont. There he learned the mechanics of a printer's job and earned a reputation as the town encyclopedia, reading his way through the local library. When the paper closed in 1830, he joined his family near Erie, Pennsylvania, was hired by the Erie Gazette, and stayed until 1831 to help support his father. While there, he became a Universalist, breaking from his Congregationalist upbringing.

• 3. Seeking His Fortune

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  In late 1831, Greeley went to New York City to seek his fortune, joining many young printers who had likewise come to the metropolis. He could only find short-term work, but he built his resources and set up a print shop in 1832. An early attempt with Horatio D. Sheppard at a daily, the New York Morning Post, was not a success, and he turned to the thrice-weekly Constitutionalist, which mostly printed lottery results. On the 22nd of March 1834, he published the first issue of The New-Yorker in partnership with Jonas Winchester. It was cheaper than other literary magazines and mixed contemporary ditties with political commentary. Circulation reached 9,000, a sizable number for the time, yet the venture was ill-managed and fell victim to the Panic of 1837. Soon after arriving in the city, Greeley met Mary Young Cheney at a boarding house run on the diet principles of Sylvester Graham, where residents shunned meat, alcohol, coffee, tea, spices, and tobacco. He subscribed to those principles and rarely ate meat to the end of his life. The two married in Warrenton, North Carolina, on the 5th of July 1836, an announcement appearing in The New-Yorker eleven days later.

• 4. Go To The West

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  The harsh winter of 1836-37 and the financial crisis that followed left many New Yorkers homeless and destitute. The New-Yorker had already taken the position that the unemployed should seek lives in the developing American West, which in the 1830s meant today's Midwestern states. Greeley urged new immigrants to buy guide books and asked Congress to make public lands available cheaply to settlers. He told his readers, "Fly, scatter through the country, go to the Great West, anything rather than remain here... the West is the true destination." In 1838 he advised any young man about to start in the world, "Go to the West: there your capabilities are sure to be appreciated and your energy and industry rewarded." This conviction would follow him for decades and surface in the slogan he popularized, "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country."

• 5. Whig Songs And Log Cabins

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  In 1838, Greeley met Albany editor Thurlow Weed, who spoke for a liberal faction of the Whigs in his newspaper, the Albany Evening Journal. Weed hired him to edit a state Whig campaign paper, the Jeffersonian, which premiered in February 1838 and helped elect William H. Seward as governor. Two years later, Greeley threw himself into the presidential campaign of William Henry Harrison, publishing the major Whig periodical, the Log Cabin, and writing many of the pro-Harrison songs sung at mass meetings he organized and led. According to biographer Robert C. Williams, "Greeley's lyrics swept the country and roused Whig voters to action." Harrison and his running mate John Tyler were easily elected. By the end of the campaign, the Log Cabin's circulation had risen to 80,000, and Greeley decided to build something of his own.

• 6. Birth Of The Tribune

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  Greeley borrowed money from friends and published the first issue of the New-York Tribune on the 10th of April 1841, the day of a memorial parade in New York for President Harrison, who had died after a month in office. He promised a "new morning Journal of Politics, Literature, and General Intelligence." New Yorkers were not initially receptive: the first week's receipts were 92 dollars against expenses of 525 dollars. The paper sold for a cent a copy through newsboys, started with 600 subscribers, and moved 5,000 copies of its first issue. To steady the finances, Greeley sold a half-interest to attorney Thomas McElrath, who ran the business side as publisher while Greeley remained editor. His chief assistant in the early days was Henry J. Raymond, who a decade later founded The New York Times. A key move was the Weekly Tribune, created in September 1841 by merging the Log Cabin and The New-Yorker; sent by mail at two dollars a year, it grew especially popular in the Midwest. He was among the first editors to keep a full-time correspondent in Washington, an innovation his rivals quickly copied. Journalist Bayard Taylor judged the paper's influence in the Midwest second only to that of the Bible.

• 7. A Newspaper Of Reformers

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  Greeley hired Margaret Fuller in 1844 as the Tribune's first literary editor, and she wrote over 200 articles before he made her a foreign correspondent in Italy. He promoted Henry David Thoreau as a literary agent and helped publish Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1851, managing editor Charles A. Dana recruited Karl Marx as a London correspondent; Marx, collaborating with Friedrich Engels, wrote over 500 articles across more than a decade. Greeley printed a defense of him: "Mr. Marx has very decided opinions of his own, with some of which we are far from agreeing, but those who do not read his letters are neglecting one of the most instructive sources of information." The roster of talent he assembled included George William Curtis, William Henry Fry, Julius Chambers, and George Ripley as staff literary critic, while Jane Swisshelm became one of the first women hired by a major newspaper. Greeley embraced causes that did not last, subscribing to the ideas of French thinker Charles Fourier, whose settlements called phalanxes would share profits as a corporation. He was tied to two such settlements, both of which failed, though the Pennsylvania site later became a town renamed Greeley. Historian Allan Nevins wrote that the paper barred police reports, scandals, and dubious medical advertisements, and "appealed to substantial and thoughtful people."

• 8. From Congress To Candidate

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  In November 1848, Greeley won a special election to fill a New York seat vacated for election fraud, taking his place when Congress convened in December. In three months he introduced a homestead bill to let settlers buy improved land cheaply, attacked legislative privileges, and on the 22nd of December published Tribune evidence that many congressmen had drawn excessive travel allowances. He so outraged colleagues that he wrote of having "divided the House into two parties, one that would like to see me extinguished and the other that wouldn't be satisfied without a hand in doing it." His lasting gain was a friendship with a fellow Whig serving his only term, Illinois's Abraham Lincoln. Greeley helped found the Republican Party beginning in 1853 and may have coined its name. During the Civil War he prodded Lincoln toward emancipation, culminating in an August 1862 open letter, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," which drew Lincoln's famous reply that his paramount object was to save the Union. After Lincoln's assassination, Greeley signed the bail bond for Confederate president Jefferson Davis in 1867, an act that turned public anger against him. He broke with the Radical Republicans and with President Grant over corruption, and in 1872 the new Liberal Republican Party made him its nominee, with the Democrats joining in support. His wife Mary died on the 30th of October, a week before the election, plunging him into despair. He lost in a landslide, receiving 2,834,125 votes to Grant's 3,597,132 and carrying only six states. Unable to sleep, he was sent to Choate House asylum at Pleasantville, New York, and died there on the 29th of November 1872, before the Electoral College could meet. His 66 electoral votes were divided among four others, and the town of Greeley, Colorado still carries his name.