Horace Greeley (1811-1872), Editor of the New York Tribune

Copyright 1996 by David H. Fenimore, University of Nevada, Reno

Memorable Greeley Quotations | His Universalism | Meet Him in Person | Hear a Rare Recorded Interview | Read An Essay on His Populist Agrarianism

INTRODUCTION

Born on a hardscrabble New Hampshire farm and apprenticed to a Vermont printer at age 15, Horace Greeley worked his way to prominence as founding editor of the New York Tribune, one of the first "penny daily" newspapers. In addition to the daily Tribune, Greeley published a weekly edition that reached at its height nearly a million readers throughout the United States and western territories, and which gave the celebrated and eccentric editor an enormous influence on American popular opinion.[Mathew Brady Daguerrotype of Greeley]

Daguerreotype by Matthew Brady, c.1850 (Library of Congress)

REFORMER AND GADFLY

As a youth the precocious Greeley devoured all the books and newspapers he could find, and his passion for detail was reflected in the Tribune's closely packed mass of facts, statistics, correspondence, fiction, poetry, lectures, and reviews. His fierce New England-style sense of morality was displayed in trenchant editorials advocating a mixture of his own social reformist causes, such as workers' rights and temperance, with more conservative Whig positions on protective tariffs, internal improvements, and recharter of the Bank of the United States.

Greeley also argued in favor of guaranteed employment, and grants of public land to industrious settlers. The exact words often attributed to him--"go West, young man"--were actually first written by an Indiana editor, John Soule, but Greeley himself, while not an expansionist, was a staunch proponent of organized western settlement and expressed many similarly phrased versions of this sentiment. In 1859 he traveled overland to California, sending dispatches back to the Tribune in support of a railroad to the Pacific. His articles, collected in An Overland Journey, evaluate the agricultural and industrial potential of the territories he passed through, and criticize the rough-and-tumble, disorganized and inefficient process of settlement.

During the 1840s Greeley had written numerous articles promoting a voluntary system of agricultural collectives he called "association," based on the writings of French socialist Charles Fourier. But although he employed Karl Marx as a European correspondent in the 1850s, Greeley exchanged most of his high-minded utopian schemes for down-and-dirty party politics in the contentious decade leading up to the Civil War.

THE POLITICIAN

When he first came to New York City in 1831, Greeley was a journeyman printer, an experienced writer and debater, and already a staunch supporter of the Whig party. Within a few years he was able to open his own print shop and with the help of party bosses in Albany began publishing partisan journals in support of Whig candidates and their pro-business platform of internal improvements, tariffs on foreign manufactures, recharter of the National Bank, and opposition to pro-slavery Jacksonian Democrats. At the same time he published editorials arguing the rights of factory workers and unemployed New Yorkers.

Although in 1841 he announced that his new Tribune would shun "servile partisanship," he continued to editorialize for the Whig cause and violently against what he called the "Loco-Foco" Democratic Party, until the Whig coalition began to fracture over the issue of legalizing slavery in the territories. He then played a leading role in founding the Republican party, and although not initially a Lincoln supporter, engineered the Illinois senator's last-minute nomination at the 1860 convention.

He sought various appointments from men he had helped to win office, but the only time Greeley served in the government was for 90 days in 1848, as a replacement for an indicted U.S. congressman from New York City. He quickly lost favor with his colleagues for publicizing day-to-day Capitol shenanigans and printing exposes of legislative fraud and corruption. Covering Congress in 1855 as a reporter, he suffered a mild concussion from a caning by Speaker Albert Rust (D-AR) in reprisal for his criticism of Rust's pro-slavery maneuvering.

HIS FINAL DECADE

Greeley embroiled himself and his newspaper in enough Civil War controversy to antagonize both North and South. Always prone to sudden shifts of opinion, he vacillated unpredictably between pacifism and saber-rattling, even as his newspaper used every conceivable stratagem to scoop its competitors with the latest war news. Lincoln often acknowledged Greeley's influence on public opinion, and wrote him several times in response to critical and cajoling editorials in the Tribune.

After the South's surrender, Greeley contributed to the bail of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and was subsequently attacked in an editorial cartoon that pictured him shaking hands with John Wilkes Booth over Lincoln's grave.

In a great irony of American political history, Greeley was nominated as the 1872 Democratic candidate for President. He lost by a landslide to the incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, and died one month later in a sanitarium. His funeral, better-attended than Lincoln's, filled the streets of New York for three days with processions of high government officials and ordinary working people.

HIS FAMILY

[Mary Greeley] Greeley was survived by his two daughters, Ida and Gabrielle. Five other children died in infancy or childhood, including his beloved son Arthur ("Pickie"). His wife Mary Young Cheney Greeley, a schoolteacher from Connecticut whom Greeley met at a New York City boarding house, was a confidante of Margaret Fuller, who worked briefly as a literary correspondent for the Tribune. To her husband's dismay, "Molly" Greeley also supported the women's rights movement led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Greeley's mother, Mary Woodburn Greeley (b. 1788)---

In later life Molly Greeley was frequently ill and spent long periods abroad with her daughters while her husband toiled 18 hours a day at his newspaper. Regarding his wife's irritability and unwillingness to entertain his friends and associates at their Chappaqua, NY home, Greeley once wrote to a friend that "Mother's sanity is not of the highest order." She died a few weeks before the 1872 election, leaving her husband prostrate with grief.

A LIFELONG UNIVERSALIST

In his early days as an apprentice printer in East Poultney, Vermont, Greeley had confided to an acquaintance that he was unable to reconcile the hell-and-damnation Congregationalist faith of his New England neighbors with the merciful New Testament God, so, he wrote in his autobiography, "I exchanged the severe creed of my orthodox neighbors for a kinder one of my own devising." He was thereupon told he was "little better than a Universalist."

Greeley arrived in New York City a year after a young and inexperienced preacher from New England, T.J. Sawyer. He joined Sawyer's congregation on Orchard Street and stayed with it until Sawyer left the city in 1845, moving with his friend P.T. Barnum to the Rev. Edwin Chapin's Church of the Divine Paternity on Fifth Avenue. He had heard Chapin lecture on social reform and personal morality as early as 1843. Greeley was active in church affairs as late as 1870, when he unsuccessfully argued for the establishment of a Universalist publishing house.

QUOTATIONS FROM (AND ABOUT) HORACE GREELEY

Bibliography

Copyright 1996 by David H. Fenimore / University of Nevada, Reno / fenimore@unr.edu