Horace Greeley by Lee & Co., 1872.
Horace Greeley was a journalist, newspaper editor, and publisher who founded and edited the New York Tribune. Active in politics, he served briefly as a congressman from New York and was the unsuccessful candidate of the new Liberal Republican Party in the 1872 presidential election against incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant, who won by a landslide.
Horace Greeley was born on February 3, 1811, on a farm about five miles from Amherst, New Hampshire, to Zaccheus and Mary Woodburn Greeley. He was the oldest of five children. Unfortunately, his father’s farm was unsuccessful, and the family was poor.
Horace attended local schools, was a very good student, and was an avid reader. Recognizing the boy’s intelligence, neighbors offered to pay Horace’s way at Phillips Exeter Academy, but the Greeleys were too proud to accept charity. In 1820, his father’s financial issues caused him to flee New Hampshire with his family so he wouldn’t be sent to debtors’ prison, and they settled in Vermont. Horace continued school and had a neighbor who let him use his library. In 1822, the pale, flaxen-haired, intelligent boy ran away from home to become a printer’s apprentice but was told he was too young.
His formal schooling stopped at 15 when he went to work for a newspaper in East Poultney, Vermont, in 1826. He became a printer’s apprentice to Amos Bliss, editor of the Northern Spectator newspaper, where he learned the mechanics of a printer’s job. He soon became an assistant in editing the newspaper, introducing him to journalism. When the newspaper closed in 1830, Horace joined his family, which had moved again to a farm near Erie, Pennsylvania. He remained there briefly, going from town to town seeking newspaper employment, and was hired by the Erie Gazette. When Horace visited his family, he walked most of the way. Although ambitious for greater things, he remained until 1831 to help support his father.
Wall Street, New York City, Augustus Kollner, 1847.
At that time, he went to New York City to seek his fortune. Though he didn’t know anyone there and had only $10.00 in his pocket, he soon found work writing or editing for several publications.
Soon after moving to New York City, Greeley met Mary Young Cheney, a schoolteacher who lived in the same Graham Boarding House. In 1835, Mary moved to North Carolina to take a teaching job. The couple kept in touch and married in Warrenton, North Carolina, on July 5, 1836. They eventually had five children. Afterward, Mary took up a teaching job in New York City.
Horace became involved in Whig Party politics, playing a significant role in William Henry Harrison’s successful 1840 presidential campaign. In 1841, he founded the Tribune, which attracted favorable notice from the public for its independence and public spirit. Through weekly editions sent by mail, it soon became the highest-circulating newspaper in the country.
Greeley advocated for Henry Clay’s election to the presidency in 1844, and soon afterward, the Tribune began opposing the slavery system.
Go West, Young Men
Among many other issues, he urged the settlement of the American West, which he saw as a land of opportunity for the young and the unemployed. He popularized the slogan, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” though he didn’t coin the term. He endlessly promoted utopian reforms such as socialism, vegetarianism, agrarianism, feminism, and temperance while hiring the best talent.
In successive campaigns for the office of President of the United States, he supported General Winfield Scott in 1852 and John C. Fremont in 1856.
In 1859, he traveled to California to see the West, write about it for the Tribune, and publicize the need for a transcontinental railroad. Along the way, he delivered lectures and was honored with public receptions for his fame as a journalist and publicist. In May 1859, he went to Chicago, Illinois, and then to Lawrence in Kansas Territory and was unimpressed by the local people. However, after speaking before the first-ever Kansas Republican Party Convention at Osawatomie, Kansas, Greeley took one of the first stagecoaches to Denver, Colorado, seeing the town in the course of formation as a Pike’s Peak Gold Rush mining camp. Sending dispatches back to the Tribune, Greeley took the Overland Trail, reaching Salt Lake City, Utah, where he conducted a two-hour interview with the Mormon leader Brigham Young– the first newspaper interview Young had given. Greeley encountered Native Americans and was sympathetic but, like many of his time, deemed Indian culture inferior. In California, he toured widely and gave many addresses.
Horace Greeley and Brigham Young met in Salt Lake City in 1859.
When the Civil War began, he initially favored a peaceful division of the republic. However, he urged vigorously prosecuting the war when it began with flagrant attacks upon the government.
By 1860, the newspaper’s circulation had reached almost 288,000, and Greeley enjoyed a national reputation as a political authority, moralist, social crusader, and eccentric who espoused many new causes and fads. His newspaper became a significant influence in shaping public opinion. He became one of the first to join the new Republican Party, and although he initially opposed the nomination of Abraham Lincoln, he ended up supporting him. After the election, he assumed that even the end of the Union was preferable to any compromise with the extension of slavery. He was known as one of the biggest supporters of the Civil War effort.
Convinced that Lincoln could not win the presidency in 1864, he hesitated to support him. His growing urge to promote peace led him to attempt direct negotiations with the Confederacy in 1864. However, his attempts to bring peace during the war were failures and brought him ridicule.
Greeley & Brown Campaign by H.H. Lloyd & Co., 1872.
When the war ended, he advocated conciliatory measures, universal amnesty, and universal suffrage. In May 1867, he pleaded for amnesty and signed his name as surety on the bail bond of Jefferson Davis, who was released from prison in Fort Monroe, Virginia. This alienated some of his friends in the north, who wanted to see treason punished. This gesture also cost him half of his subscribers to the Tribune. Many found his helping of Davis odd as he had been attacking new President Andrew Johnson for not dealing hard enough with the South.
Disillusioned with the Ulysses S. Grant Administration, he joined with others to form the Liberal Republicans, a partial secession from the Republican Party. In 1872, the secessionists nominated Greeley for the presidency, which he had been eyeing for some time. Greeley resigned as editor of the Tribune for the campaign and, unusual for the time, embarked on a speaking tour to bring his message to the people. However, his campaign did not go well despite campaigning hard and sincerely. By this time, his conflicting positions had confused people so much that the opposition attacked him, calling him everything from a national traitor to a country bumpkin.
Just a few days before the election, his wife Mary died. She had returned ill from a trip to Europe in late June, and her condition worsened in October. At that time, Horace broke off campaigning to be with her. She died on October 30, plunging him into despair a week before the election. At the same time, many of his old and most valued political friends deserted him, and the toll of the election left him a broken man. Ulysses S. Grant thoroughly defeated him and was elected for a second term.
Afterward, he was also denied the editorship of his former newspaper, and his health dramatically declined. At the recommendation of a family physician, Greeley was sent to Choate House, an asylum in Pleasantville, New York. He continued to worsen, and he died on November 29, 1872, less than a month after the election. He is buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
Despite the conflict in the presidential campaign, Greeley’s death was widely mourned. Harper’s Weekly wrote:
“Since the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, the death of no American has been so sincerely deplored as that of Horace Greeley, and its tragical circumstances have given a peculiarly affectionate pathos to all that has been said of him.”
The Tribune remained under that name until 1924 when it merged with the New York Herald to become the New York Herald-Tribune, published until 1966. The name survived until 2013, when the International Herald-Tribune became the International New York Times.
“Greeley was an eclectic and unsystematic thinker, a one-man switchboard for the international cause of “Reform.” He committed himself, all at once, to utopian and artisan socialism, to land, sexual, and dietary reform, and, of course, to anti-slavery. Indeed, Greeley’s great significance was in the culture and politics of the Civil War.”
— Iver Bernstein, Historian
New York Tribune newspaper building in New York City, 1873.
©Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, January 2025.
Also See:
Historical Text – Writings from American History
Sources:
Find-a-Grave
House of Representatives
Lossing, Benson John; Eminent Americans, Volume II; American Publishers Corporation, New York, 1890.
Wikipedia