Horace Greeley (February 3,
1811 – November 29, 1872) was an American
editor of a
leading newspaper, a
founder of the Liberal Republican
Party, a reformer, and a politician. His
New York Tribune was America's most
influential newspaper from the 1840s to the 1870s and "established
Greeley's reputation as the greatest editor of his day." Greeley
used it to promote the
Whig and
Republican
parties, as well as
opposition to
slavery and a host of reforms. Crusading against the corruption
of
Ulysses S. Grant's Republican administration, he was
the new
Liberal
Republican Party's candidate in the
1872 U.S. presidential
election. Despite having the additional support of the
Democratic
Party, he lost in a landslide. He is currently the only
presidential candidate who has died during the electoral
process.
Early life
Greeley
was born on February 3, 1811, in Amherst, New Hampshire
, the son of poor farmers Zaccheus and Mary
Greeley. He declined a scholarship to Phillips Exeter
Academy
and left school at the age of 14; he apprenticed as
a printer in Poultney,
Vermont
, at The Northern Star, and moved to
New York
City
in 1831. In 1834 he founded the weekly the
New Yorker, which consisted mostly of clippings from other
magazines.
On July 5,
1836 Greeley married Mary Cheney
Greeley, an intermittent suffragette, in Warrenton, North
Carolina
. Horace Greeley spent as little time as
possible with his wife and would sleep in a boarding house when in
New York City rather than be with her. Only two of their seven
children survived into adulthood.
Whig
In 1838 leading Whig politicians selected him to edit a major
national campaign newspaper, the
Jeffersonian, which
reached 15,000 circulation. Whig leader
William Seward found him "rather unmindful
of social usages, yet singularly clear, original, and decided, in
his political views and theories." In 1840 he edited a major
campaign newspaper, the
Log Cabin, which reached 90,000
subscribers nationwide, and helped elect
William Henry Harrison president on
the Whig ticket. In 1841 he merged his papers into the
New York Tribune. It soon was a
success as the leading Whig paper in the metropolis; its weekly
edition reached tens of thousands of subscribers across the
country. Greeley was editor of the
Tribune for the rest of
his life, using it as a platform for advocacy of all his causes. As
historian
Allan Nevins explains:
Greeley prided himself in taking radical positions on all sorts of
social issues; few readers followed his suggestions.
Utopia fascinated him; influenced by
Albert Brisbane he promoted
Fourierism. His journal had
Karl Marx (as well as
Friedrich Engels) as European correspondent
in the early 1850s (although most of his views sharply contrasted
with the ones promoted by marxism).
[25965] He promoted all sorts of agrarian
reforms, including
homestead laws. He
was elected as a
Whig to
the Thirtieth Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the unseating
of
David S. Jackson and served from December 4, 1848,
to March 3, 1849.
Greeley supported liberal policies towards settlers; in a July 13,
1865 editorial, he famously advised "
Go West, young man, go West and grow up
with the country." Some have claimed that the phrase was originally
written by
John Soule in the
Terre
Haute Express in 1851, but it is most often attributed to
Greeley. Historian Walter A. McDougall quotes Josiah Grinnell, the
founder of Iowa's Grinnell College, as saying, "I was the young man
to whom Greeley first said it, and I went." Researcher Fred R.
Shapiro questions whether Greeley ever used the term at all and
cites, instead, an occurrence of Greeley writing "If any young man
is about to commence the world, we say to him, publicly and
privately, Go to the West" in the Aug. 25, 1838, issue of the
newspaper
New Yorker.
A champion of the working man, he attacked monopolies of all sorts
and rejected land grants to railroads. Industry would make everyone
rich, he insisted, as he promoted high tariffs. He supported
vegetarianism, opposed liquor and paid serious attention to any
"-ism" anyone proposed. What made the ‘’Tribune’‘ such a success
were the extensive news stories, very well written by brilliant
reporters, together with feature articles by fine writers. He was
an excellent judge of newsworthiness and quality of reporting. His
editorials and news reports explaining the policies and candidates
of the
Whig Party were
reprinted and discussed throughout the country. Many small
newspapers relied heavily on the reporting and editorials of the
Tribune.
Greeley was noted for his eccentricities. His attire in even the
hottest weather included a full-length coat, and he was never
without an umbrella; his interests included spiritualism and
phrenology. He considered the word 'news'
to be a plural word, and habitually corrected his staff when they
asked, "Is there any news?" He once cabled a Tribune reporter: “ARE
THERE ANY NEWS?” The employee cabled back: "NOT A NEW."
He served as Congressman for three months, 1848–1849, but failed in
numerous other attempts to win elective office.

Horace Greeley
Republican
When the new
Republican
Party was founded in 1854, Greeley made the
Tribune
its unofficial national organ, and fought slavery extension and the
slave power on many pages. On the eve of the Civil War circulation
nationwide approached 300,000. In
1860 he supported
the ex-Whig
Edward Bates of Missouri
for the Republican nomination for president, an action that
weakened Greeley's old ally Seward.[Van Dusen 241-44]
Greeley made the
Tribune the leading newspaper opposing
the
Slave Power, that is, what he
considered the conspiracy by slave owners to seize control of the
federal government and block the progress of liberty. In the
secession crisis of 1861 he took a hard line against the
Confederacy. Theoretically, he agreed, the South could declare
independence; but in reality he said there was "a violent,
unscrupulous, desperate minority, who have conspired to clutch
power"—secession was an illegitimate conspiracy that had to be
crushed by federal power. He took a
Radical Republican position during the
war, in opposition to Lincoln’s moderation. In the summer of 1862,
he wrote a famous editorial entitled "The Prayer of Twenty
Millions" demanding a more aggressive attack on the Confederacy and
faster emancipation of the slaves. A month later he hailed
Lincoln’s
Emancipation
Proclamation.
Although after 1860 he increasingly lost control of the
Tribune’s operations, and wrote fewer editorials, in 1864
he expressed defeatism regarding Lincoln’s chances of reelection,
an attitude that was echoed across the country when his editorials
were reprinted. Oddly he also pursued a peace policy in 1863–64
that involved discussions with
Copperheads and opened the possibility of a
compromise with the Confederacy. Lincoln was aghast, but outsmarted
Greeley by appointing him to a peace commission he knew the
Confederates would repudiate.
Reconstruction
In
Reconstruction he
took an erratic course, mostly favoring the
Radicals and opposing president
Andrew Johnson in 1865–66. In 1867, Greeley
was one of 21 men who signed a $100,000 bond for the release of
former president of the Confederacy
Jefferson Davis. The move was controversial,
and many Northerners thought Greeley a traitor and canceled
subscriptions to the
Weekly Tribune by the thousands. In
1869, he ran on the
Republican ticket for
New
York State Comptroller but was defeated by the incumbent
Democrat
William F.
Allen.
Election of 1872

Greeley/Brown campaign poster
After supporting
Ulysses Grant in the
1868 election, Greeley broke from Grant and the Radicals. Opposing
Grant's re-election bid, he joined the
Liberal Republican
Party in 1872. To everyone’s astonishment, that new party
nominated Greeley as their
presidential candidate.
Even more surprisingly, he was officially endorsed by the
Democrats, whose party he had denounced for decades.
As a candidate, Greeley argued that the war was over, the
Confederacy was destroyed, and slavery was dead—and that
Reconstruction was a
success, so it was time to pull Federal troops out of the South and
let the people there run their own affairs. A weak campaigner, he
was mercilessly ridiculed by the Republicans as a fool, an
extremist, a turncoat, and a crazy man who could not be trusted.
The most vicious attacks came in cartoons by
Thomas Nast in
Harper's Weekly. Greeley ultimately ran
far behind Grant, winning only 43% of the vote.
This crushing defeat was not Greeley's only misfortune in 1872.
Greeley was among several high-profile investors who were defrauded
by
Philip Arnold in a
famous diamond and gemstone hoax.
Meanwhile, as Greeley had been pursuing his political career,
Whitelaw Reid, owner of the
New York Herald, had gained
control of the
Tribune.
Death
Not long after the election, Greeley's wife died. He descended into
madness and died before the electoral votes could be cast. In his
final illness, allegedly Greeley spotted Reid and cried out, "You
son of a bitch, you stole my newspaper."
Greeley died at 6:50
p.m. on Friday, November 29, 1872, in Pleasantville,
New York
at Dr. George
C. S. Choate’s private hospital. Greeley would
have received 66 electoral votes, which, because of his death, were
scattered among others. However, three of Georgia's electoral votes
were left blank in honor of him. (Other sources report Greeley
receiving 3 electoral votes posthumously, with those votes being
disallowed by Congress.)
Although Greeley had requested a simple funeral, his daughters
ignored his wishes and arranged a grand affair.
He is buried in New
York's Green-Wood
Cemetery
.
The
Greeley home in Chappaqua, New York
, now houses the New Castle Historical
Society. The local high school
is named for him. Paying homage to the
19th-century paper owned by Greeley, the high school named its
newspaper the
Greeley Tribune.
Legacy and cultural references

Monument of Horace Greeley in
Green-Wood Cemetery
- The New York Tribune
building was the first home of Pace
University. Today, the site where the building stood is now the
One Pace Plaza complex of Pace's New
York City campus. Dr. Choate’s residence and private hospital,
where Horace Greeley died, today is part of Pace's campus in
Pleasantville.
- There
is a bas-relief of Greeley in the lobby of the Columbia
Journalism School
.
- Several places are named after him,
including: Greeley,
Pennsylvania
, Greeley, Colorado
, Greeley, Texas,
Greeley County, Kansas (where
there is also a city of Horace, and the county seat is Tribune), and Greeley
County, Nebraska
(which also has a town named Horace).
- Horace Greeley Square is a small park in the
Herald
Square
area of Manhattan featuring a seated statue of
Greeley. The park is next to the site of the former
New York Herald
building.
- Another seated statue is in City Hall Park.
- Horace Greeley High School
in Westchester, New York
is named for him.
- Greeley Park in Nashua, New
Hampshire
is named for him.
- Mount Horace
Greeley is one of the highest points in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan
.
- Greeley Avenue in Grant City,
Staten Island
is named for Horace Greeley
- The
portion of New Hampshire Route
101 that runs through Amherst
, is named Horace Greeley Highway.
- Hjalmar
Schacht, Adolf Hitler's "financial magician" and Reichbank
President during Weimar
Republic
and Third Reich, later a defendant at the International Military
Tribunal
at Nuremberg (acquitted), was named after Greeley
(Schacht's full name was Horace Greeley Hjalmar
Schacht).
- Greeley's endorsement of frontier economics was satirized in
the environmentalist cartoon series Captain Planet and the
Planeteers, which featured the antagonist and polluter
Hoggish Greedly.
- Horace Greeley is depicted in the film Gangs of New York in his capacity as
publisher of the Tribune.
- Greeley is quoted and mentioned in an inspirational light in
both John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance and Samuel Fuller's
Park Row.
- Horace Greeley is a main character in the episode The Daily Star of the
Franco-Belgian comics series
Lucky Luke
Quotes
- “It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a
Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the
groundwork of human freedom.”
Notes
- Emery, Michael; Emery, Edwin, The Press and America
(1988) 124-6.
- Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los
Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 39. ISBN
086576008X
- Skagit River Journal: "Go West , young man" Who
wrote it? Greeley or Soule?
- [1]
- www.u-s-history.com
- Turner, Hy B. When Giants Ruled: The Story of Park Row, New
York's Great Newspaper Street. New York: Fordham University
Press, 1999: 79. ISBN 0-8232-1943-7
- Brands, H. W. Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, p.
492.
References
Primary sources
Secondary sources
- Cross, Coy F., II. Go West Young Man! Horace Greeley's
Vision for America. U. of Mexico Press, 1995. 165 pp. online edition
- Downey, Matthew T. "Horace Greeley and the Politicians: The
Liberal Republican Convention in 1872," The Journal of American
History, Vol. 53, No. 4. (March, 1967), pp. 727–750. in JSTOR
- Durante, Dianne, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A
Historical Guide (New York University Press, 2007): discussion
of Greeley and the 2 memorials to him in New York.
- Lunde, Erik S. Horace Greeley (Twayne's United States
Authors Series, no. 413.) Twayne, 1981. 138 pp.
- Lunde, Erik S. "The Ambiguity of the National Idea: the
Presidential Campaign of 1872" Canadian Review of Studies in
Nationalism 1978 5(1): 1-23. ISSN 0317-7904
- McDougall, Walter A. Throes of Democracy: The American
Civil War Era, 1829-1877 (Harper Collins, 2008)
- Nevins, Allan. "Horace Greeley" in
Dictionary of American Biography (1931).
- Parrington, Vernon L.
Main Currents in American Thought (1927), II, pp. 247–57.
online edition
- Robbins, Roy M., "Horace Greeley: Land Reform and Unemployment,
1837-1862," Agricultural History, VII, 18 (January,
1933).
- Rourke, Constance Mayfield ; Trumpets of Jubilee: Henry
Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lyman Beecher, Horace Greeley,
P.T. Barnum (1927). online edition
- Schulze, Suzanne. Horace Greeley: A Bio-Bibliography.
Greenwood, 1992. 240 pp.
- Seitz, Don C. Horace Greeley: Founder of the New York
Tribune (1926) online edition
- Van Deusen, Glyndon G. Horace Greeley, Nineteenth-Century
Crusader (1953), standard biography online edition
- Weisberger, Bernard A. "Horace Greeley: Reformer as Republican"
. Civil War History 1977 23(1): 5-25. ISSN 0009-8078
- Robert C. Williams. Horace Greeley: Champion of American
Freedom (2006)
External links