Horace Greeley (1811-1872)

Sources

Newspapr editor and poliyician

The Written Word. Horace Greeley was born into a poor family in Amherst, New Hampshire, in 1811. Greeley’s father always struggled and could not provide his son with much in the way of an education, but Greeley took advantage of the family’s few William Shakespeare works, and his early apprenticeship as a printer with the Northern Spectator of East Poultney, Vermont, gave him exposure to the news of the day. Not long after the Nothern Spectator failed in 1830, Greeley stuffed his possessions into a bandana and walked to New York, determined to make a living as a newspaper newspaperman. Living in a boardinghouse for $2.50 a week, Greeley scraped by as a typesetter but continued to feed his appetite for politics and writing by regularly contributing articles to the Daily Whig, one of the many newspapers run by the Whig Party. In 1840 Thurlow Weed and other prominent Whigs tagged Greeley for the editorship of the Log Cabin, the Whig Party newspaper organized to promote the hugely successful William Henry Harrison presidential campaign.

New York Tribune. Greeley had long wanted to get in to New York City’s exploding newspaper business. With the reputation and contacts made from his work on the Harrison campaign, by April 1841 he was able to raise the capital to launch the New York Tribune into the crowded and competitive New York newspaper market. Between the sensationalism of the penny press and the “staid correctness” of William Cullen Bryant’s Evening post, Greeley saw room for a newspaper that advocated political reform but didi so in goor taste. To attract this audience Greeley assembled what was probably the best staff of writers in the nation, including Margaret Fuller (literary reviewer and woman’s rights activist), Charles A. Dana(later editor of the New York Sun ), and Bayard Taylor. In an era when newspapers frequently influenced the nation’s political agenda, Greeley’s Tribune became the most influential of all. The circulation of the Tribune reached 287, 750 on the eve of the Civil War, making it the “political bible” of the North. Greeley’s views on Western lands, his opposition to immigration restriction, and his virulent hatred of slavery all found a place in the pages of the Tribune and eventually in the platforms of American political parties. Greeley augmented his paper’s reputation by giving frequent lectures on every conceivable issue of moral reform, from agricultural science to abolitionism. Greeley’s moral earnestness, combined with his baggy trousers, white socks, and absent-minded manner made him an immensely popular figure. According to historian Menahem Blondheim, Greeley was known to stick mail in his winter coat on the last cold day of spring and then forget about it until he put the same coat back on six months later.

Go West Young Man. Despite his popularity, many of Greeley’s views were considered radical. He regularly corresponded with Karl Marx and for two years allowed the socialist Fourierists to use the front page of the Tribune to publish their unusual ideas for social reorganization. In an age when abolitionism was not always popular he became a fierce opponent of slavery in the South while simultaneously attacking Northern corporations for exploiting their factory workers. Among his readership, however, Greeley was perhaps best known as an advocate of the free distribution of federally owned Western lands to migrating settlers, a notion that became law with the Homestead Act of 1862. A charter member of the Republican Party, Greeley adhered closely to the party dictum that America should be a land of “free soil, free labor, free men.” Greeley saw in the nation’s Western lands a perpetual opportunity for any hardworking individual to achieve independence and economic security. This philosophy is embodied in the phrase for which Greeley is best known, “Go West Young Man,” although it was a newspaperman named John Soule from Terre Haute, Indiana, who first wrote the words.

Civil War and Political Failure. During the Civil War, Greeley remained a staunch supporter of the Union and the Republican Party, especially its radical wing. But he nonetheless took editorial positions during and after the war that opened him to intense criticism. From the first he saw the conflict not only as a fight to preserve the Union but also a holy war to abolish slavery, an unpopular position among many moderate Republicans and among almost all Democrats. Greeley’s vacillation over supporting Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 election, his advocacy of peace with the South in 1864–1865, and his call for full civil equality for freedmen after the war all eroded his public image. When Greeley ran for president in 1872, he became the object of vicious assaults in the press, including scathing cartoons by Thomas Nast. When he lost the election to Ulysses. S. Grant and subsequently was edged out of active service in the Tribune , Greeley lost heart and died on 29 November 1872.

Sources

Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994);

Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley: Nineteenth-Century Crusader (New York: Hill & Wang, 1953).