Horace Greeley

“ I turned and saw the tall form of Horace Greeley entering the door. His big, full face looked rather serious. He wore gold-bowed spectacles. He was smooth-shaven save for the silken, white, throat beard that came out from under his collar. His head was bald on top with soft, silvered locks over each ear. He was a picturesque and appealing figure. They called on him to speak. He stepped forward and said slowly in a high-pitched drawl:
"Gentlemen, this is my speech: On your second ballot vote for Abraham Lincoln of Illinois." ”

“ In the governor's room in the City Hall, draped in black, surrounded by a guard of honor composed of the leading men of New York, the body of the great journalist lay in state. Over fifty thousand persons, rich and poor, maimed soldiers and working people, passed in one by one to look upon the familiar face. Said one workman, "It is little enough to lose a day for Horace Greeley, who spent many a day working for us." Just as the doors of the room were being closed for the night, a farmer made his way, saying, "I've come a hundred miles to be at the funeral of Horace Greeley. ”

“ It would seem that a statement so explicit as this would put an end to any controversy, but it takes a long time for the truth to overtake a lie (very often, indeed, it never does) , and the verses continued to be printed as the work of Horace Greeley. Various papers even added editorial notes explaining that Mr. Greeley wrote the poem in 1842. Gradually, however, truth did prevail, Mr. Greeley’s name was used less and less frequently, and Homer Greene’s took its place. ”

“ That the Democratic party could ever have been brought to the support of Horace Greeley for President of the United States reads even now like a page out of a nonsense-book. That his warmest support should have come from the South seems an incredible, and was a priceless, fact. His martyrdom shortened the distance across the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly filled it. The candidacy of Charles Francis Adams or of Lyman Trumbull would have meant a mathematical formula, with no solution of the problem, and as certain defeat at the end of it. ”

“ Clad in a homespun tow shirt, shrunken, butternut-colored, linsey-woolsey pantaloons, battered straw hat, and much-mended jacket and shoes, with ten dollars in his pocket, and all his other worldly goods packed in the bundle he carried on his back, Horace Greeley, the future founder of the New York Tribune, started to seek his fortune in New York.
A newspaper had always been an object of interest and delight to the little delicate, tow-haired boy, and at the mature age of six he had made up his mind to be a printer. His love of reading was unusual in one so young. ”

“ Sticking to the actual conditions doesn't seem to help much either. Future generations will come and stand in front of the statue of a leader of thought who flourished back about 1840, say, and wonder how anybody ever had feet like those and lived. Horace Greeley's chin whiskers no doubt looked all right on Horace when he was alive, but when done in bronze they invariably present a droopy not to say dropsical [Pg 108] appearance ”

“ Our two great journalists of the nineteenth century were Greeley and Godkin. Though differing in very many respects, they were alike in possessing a definite moral purpose. The most glorious and influential portion of Greeley’s career lay between the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 and the election of Lincoln in 1860, when the press played an important part in the upbuilding of a political party which formulated in a practical manner the antislavery sentiment of the country. Foremost among newspapers was the New York Tribune; foremost among editors was Horace Greeley. ”

“ He would lie before the fireplace after a hard day’s work on the farm and read by the light of a pine-knot. When he went to bed, he would tell his brother what he had been reading or studying, but his brother would fall asleep while Horace was talking.
When he was thirteen the school-teacher said to Horace’s father, “Mr. Greeley, your boy knows more than I do. It is no use to send him to school any more.” He had always wanted to be a printer. One day he walked twelve miles and was given a trial in a printer’s office. He learned more in a day than most boys do in a month. ”

“ It was nearly a century later, in the person of Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune during the anti-slavery struggle, that the journal of opinion reached its highest expression in America. America has had better newspaper men than Horace Greeley, although none, perhaps, whose opinions exercised so wide an influence. ”

“ I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.
You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession.
You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.
We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the "lousiest petty bourgeois cheating". ”

“ The success of the Herald led Horace Greeley to found the Tribune, in 1841. We can see at once that, like Bennett and Raymond, he was greatly endowed with that species of sagacity which divines at a glance the capabilities of a new project or speculation. Greeley was the son of a New England farmer, and came to New York a poor penniless boy. His earlier essays in newspaper management were total failures; but the Tribune was remarkably successful from its very commencement. ”

“ Horace Greeley,1811-1872, perhaps the most famous editor of America, was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, of poor parents. His boyhood was passed in farm labor, in attending the common school, and in reading every book on which he could lay his hands. His reading was mostly done by the light of pine knots. At fifteen he entered a printing office in Vermont, became the best workman in the office, and continued to improve every opportunity for study. At the age of twenty he appeared in New York City, poorly clothed, and almost destitute of money. ”

“ It is none the less idle to suppose that Democrats supporting Horace Greeley expect or desire that he should depart from those principles which are the glory of his character. They have accepted the Cincinnati platform with its twofold promises, and intend in good faith to maintain it. Democrats cannot turn back, who at the Convention adopting this platform sang Greeley songs to the tune of “Old John Brown, his soul is marching on.” Seeking especially the establishment of character in the National Government, they will expect their President to be always true to himself. ”

“ Horace Greeley was born to poverty and educated himself in a printing-office. President Grant, fortunate in early patronage, became a cadet at West Point and was educated at the public expense. One started with nothing but industry and character; the other started with a military commission. One was trained as a civilian; the other as a soldier. Horace Greeley stood forth as a Reformer and Abolitionist. President Grant enlisted as a Proslavery Democrat, and, at the election of James Buchanan, fortified by his vote all the pretensions of Slavery, including the Dred Scott decision. ”

“ Horace Greeley was ten years the junior, but he was the colleague and peer of Garrett Davis in devotion to Henry Clay. In the whole country, among all whose enthusiastic support he aroused, there was no one who upheld the Kentucky [Pg 262] statesman with more chivalrous devotion than these two. Here they were alike, and in the record of life this signal fidelity cannot be forgotten. It was to the honor of Henry Clay that he inspired this sentiment in such men, and it was to their honor that they maintained it so truly. Kindred to truth is fidelity. ”

“ A divided Democracy again made candidates confident, and eight or ten names were presented for governor. Horace Greeley thought it time his turn should come. He had been pronounced in his advocacy of the Maine liquor law and active in his hostility to the Nebraska Act. As these were to be the issues of the campaign, he applied with confidence to Weed for help. The Albany editor frankly admitted that his friends had lost control of the convention, and that Myron H. Clark would probably get the nomination. Then Greeley asked to be made lieutenant-governor. ”

“ Their victory was to inaugurate an era of reform. But no sooner was that victory won than it turned out that the victors had taken the infection. “We have nothing new here in politics,” wrote Horace Greeley, who in the campaign had distinguished himself as the editor of the “Log Cabin” newspaper in New York, “but large and numerous swarms of office-hunting locusts sweeping on to Washington daily. All the rotten land speculators, broken bank directors, swindling cashiers, etc., are in full cry for office, office; and even so humble a man as I am is run down for letters, letters. ”

“ If he held such a hope, it was most startlingly dissipated in 1868, when he carried but eight States, while twenty-six voted for Grant.
Unique Campaign of 1872 The presidential campaign of 1872 was unique in its way. There is something grotesque in the thought of Horace Greeley becoming the Democratic candidate in opposition to Grant, the Republican nominee. No one had delivered more telling blows against the Democracy than the vigorous and talented editor of the Tribune. He had fought them mercilessly for more than a generation and none was his equal. ”

“ The leading candidates for nomination for the presidency were Charles Francis Adams, David 16 Davis, Horace Greeley, Lyman Trumbull, and B. Gratz Brown. From these men, as a result of manipulation, the convention unhappily selected the one least suited to lead the party to victory—Horace Greeley. The only hope of success for the movement was in coöperation with that very Democratic party whose principles, policies, and leaders, Greeley in his editorials had unsparingly condemned for years. ”

“ His career is another illustration of the saying that truth is stranger than fiction.
II
Joseph Pulitzer and I came together familiarly at the Liberal Republican Convention, which met at Cincinnati in 1872--the convocation of cranks, as it was called--and nominated Horace Greeley for President. He was a delegate from Missouri. Subsequent events threw us much together. He began his English newspaper experience after a kind of apprenticeship on a German daily with Stilson Hutchins, another interesting character of those days. ”

“ As soon as he reached an age to appreciate his tastes and to form a purpose, he began equipping himself for the career of a political journalist. He was not yet twenty-one when he made Whig speeches in the campaign of 1840 and gained employment with Horace Greeley on the New Yorker and a little later on the Tribune. "I never found another person, barely of age and just from his studies, who evinced so much and so versatile ability in journalism as he did," wrote Greeley. "Abler and stronger men I may have met; a cleverer, readier, more generally efficient journalist I never saw. ”

“ Before Horace was ten years old (1820) , his father became bankrupt, his home was sold by the sheriff, and Zaccheus Greeley himself fled the state to escape arrest for debt. The family soon removed to West Haven, Vermont, where, all working together, they made a scanty living as day labourers. Horace from childhood desired to be a printer, and, when barely eleven years old, tried to be taken as an apprentice in an office at Whitehall, New York, but was rejected on account of his youth. ”

“ Led by such distinguished men as Thurlow Weed and Henry J. Raymond, on the one side, and Horace Greeley, with an exceedingly capable body of earnest lieutenants on the other, the question of success or defeat depended upon the harmonizing of the two factions. ”

“ Makes our necessities its watchful task.” Plainly in recent events there has been a presiding influence against which all machinations have been powerless. Had the Convention at Philadelphia nominated a good Republican, truly representing Republican principles without drawback, there is no reason to believe that Horace Greeley would have been a candidate. The persistence for President Grant dissolved original bonds, and gave practical opportunity to the present movement. The longing for peace, which in existing antagonisms of party was without effective expression, at last found free course. ”

“ Ach, I was only shoking, was I? Vail, dot's a faict; I was only shoking; and you was pretty smart to find it out. But now, shoking aside, I tell you what you do. You keep right on mit your education, and you study real hard, and you'll get to be—why, you might get to be as big a man as Horace Greeley, aictually. ”

“ Greeley time is more valuable than money or even friendship. When busy, he is no respecter of persons. President or hod-carrier, general or boot-black, clergyman or express-driver, authoress or apple-woman—all are treated alike. Eminent men have left his room under the impression that they have been deliberately slighted, while Horace still slashed away at his inky pickets, totally unconscious of any neglect.”
Mr. Greeley’s home is at Chappaqua, in Westchester County, New York, about thirty miles from the city. He owns a fine farm of about forty acres, which has cost him more money than p. ”