Horace Greeley

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Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from New York's 6th district
In office
December 4, 1848 – March 3, 1849
Preceded by David S. Jackson
Succeeded by James Brooks
Election date
November 5, 1872
Running mate B. Gratz Brown
Opponent(s) Ulysses S. Grant (R)
Incumbent Ulysses S. Grant (R)
Born February 3, 1811(1811-02-03)
Amherst, New Hampshire, U.S.
Died November 29, 1872 (aged 61)
Pleasantville, New York, U.S.
Political party Whig, Democrat, Republican
Spouse Mary Cheney Greeley
Profession Editor, Politician
Signature Horace Greeley's signature

Horace Greeley (February 3, 1811 – November 29, 1872) was an American editor of a leading newspaper, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, reformer and 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."[1] Greeley used it to promote the Whig and Republican parties, as well as antislavery and a host of reforms. Crusading against the corruption of Ulysses S. Grant's Republican administration, he was the presidential candidate in 1872 of the new Liberal Republican Party. Despite having the additional support of the Democratic Party, he lost in a landslide.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Greeley was born on February 3, 1811,[2] 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, moving to New York City in 1831. In 1834 he founded the weekly the New Yorker, which was mostly comprised of clippings from other magazines.

In 1836 Greeley married Mary Cheney Greeley, an intermittent suffragette. 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.

[edit] The New York Tribune

New York Tribune editorial staff. Greeley is third from the left in the front row.
New York Tribune editorial staff. Greeley is third from the left in the front row.

[edit] 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:

The Tribune set a new standard in American journalism by its combination of energy in news gathering with good taste, high moral standards, and intellectual appeal. Police reports, scandals, dubious medical advertisements, and flippant personalities were barred from its pages; the editorials were vigorous but usually temperate; the political news was the most exact in the city; book reviews and book-extracts were numerous; and as an inveterate lecturer Greeley gave generous space to lectures. The paper appealed to substantial and thoughtful people. [Nevins in Dictionary of American Biography (1931)]

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 (and Friedrich Engels too) as European correspondent in the early 1850s.[1] 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; he memorably advised the ambitious to "Go West, young man." Though the phrase was originally written by John Soule in the Terre Haute Express in 1851, 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." For its first use in popular culture, see Go West.

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.

Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley

[edit] 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.

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. He served as Congressman for three months, 1848--1849, but failed in numerous other attempts to win elective office. In 1860 he supported the ex-Whig Edward Bates of Missouri 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.

[edit] Reconstruction

In Reconstruction he took an erratic course, mostly favoring the Radicals and opposing president Andrew Johnson in 1865-66. His personal guarantee of bail for Jefferson Davis in 1867 stunned many of his long-time readers, half of whom canceled their subscriptions.

[edit] Election of 1872

Greeley/Brown campaign poster
Greeley/Brown campaign poster
Greeley helps murder blacks in an 1872 Thomas Nast cartoon
Greeley helps murder blacks in an 1872 Thomas Nast cartoon

After supporting Ulysses Grant in the 1868 election, Greeley broke with 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.

[edit] 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 received no electoral votes, with the ones he was to have received being scattered among others. However, three of Georgia's electoral votes were left blank in honor of him. (Other sources have Greeley receiving 3 electoral votes posthumously, with those votes being disallowed by Congress.)

Greeley had requested a simple funeral, but his daughters ignored this request 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, and the name of one of the school newspapers pays homage to the 19th-century paper owned by Greeley.

[edit] Legacy & cultural references

[edit] Trivia

  • Horace Greeley is the one who misquoted President Andrew Jackson as saying, after the Supreme Court ruling in Worcester v. Georgia, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" (H. W. Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, pg 492)
  • Greeley mistakenly 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."

[edit] References

[edit] Primary sources

[edit] 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. (Mar., 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)
  • Lauren Keach Lessing (2006). Presiding Divinities: Ideal Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century American Domestic Interiors. Ph.D. dissertation: Indiana University. 

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Michael Emery and Edwin Emery, The Press and America (1988) 124-6.
  2. ^ Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 39. ISBN 086576008X

[edit] External links

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United States House of Representatives
Preceded by
David S. Jackson		 Member from New York's 6th congressional district
December 4, 1848 – March 3, 1849		 Succeeded by
James Brooks
Party political offices
Preceded by
Horatio Seymour		 Democratic Party presidential candidate
1872		 Succeeded by
Samuel J. Tilden
New political party Liberal Republican Party presidential candidate
1872		 Party disbanded
v • d • e
United States Democratic Party Presidential Nominees