Philip Randall Giles  Phebe Ann Coffin Hanaford

Horace Greeley (1811-1872)

Horace Greeley Horace Greeley

Known for telling people to Go West! and settle the land, Greeley was the founder of the New York Tribune. He was born on February 3, 1811 in Amherst, New Hampshire to Zaccheus and Mary (Woodburn) Greeley. The family moved a great deal, as Greeley’s father struggled to make a living. After residing for a time in Vermont, the family ended up in Erie County, Pennsylvania. Greeley’s formal education ended when he was fourteen, but he was known as a champion speller as a child. In 1826 he became a printer’s apprentice in East Poultney, Vermont. He later worked for the Erie Gazette, where he learned all the facets of journalism while still quite young. When he moved to New York City in 1831 he became a printer. He stayed in New York for the rest of his life. He married Mary “Molly” Cheney, a schoolteacher from Connecticut in 1836, and they had seven children together, but only two survived childhood, and their marriage was fraught with difficulty.

His first job as an editor came in 1834 with the New-Yorker. Here he learned how to write editorials, but the publication collapsed after the economic panic of 1837. After that Greeley published two partisan political papers to support Whig candidates for office. The Tribune first appeared on April 10, 1841, as a daily Whig “penny” paper. It soon won wide acclaim for its editorial quality, literary content and book reviews, and wide political and international coverage. Two important Transcendentalists served as literary critics. First Margaret Fuller, who wrote reviews of works by Edgar Allen Poe and others, and then the Brook Farm founder, George Ripley. He also employed Karl Marx as a European correspondent.

One of the central reasons for the papers’ success was Greeley’s ability to make it appeal to an international audience. By the Civil War circulation for all Tribune editions was nearly 300,000. This included a weekly edition that was circulated throughout the country, and gave Greeley a huge ability to influence public opinion. His editorials reflected support for a wide variety of social issues in nineteenth-century America. In commenting on one of the early women’s rights conventions he said: “I recognize most thoroughly the right of woman to choose her own sphere of activity and usefulness.” Despite this view, he was against woman suffrage. He also advocated for workers’ rights including unionization and a belief in guaranteed employment, and also for temperance. For a time he was influenced by the socialist Charles Fourier, and he wanted to set up agricultural collectives. His invectives against the pro-slavery positions of U. S. House Speaker Albert Rust resulted in Rust using a cane on Greeley’s skull inflicting a concussion when Greeley was reporting from the Capitol. His most famous editorial was issued in 1862, “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” which implored Abraham Lincoln to declare immediate abolition.

Although Greeley was liberal on social issues, on financial issues he had a more pro-business approach to such issues as tariffs and the National Bank. In 1854 he helped form the Republican Party. During the Civil War his positions vacillated between pacifism and war drums, and he eventually wrote a history of the war in two volumes, The American Conflict (1864-1866).

Greeley was an active Universalist, especially after he moved to New York. He first encountered the faith in Vermont, and decided he would choose this “kinder creed.” In New York, Greeley joined Thomas Jefferson Sawyer’s church on Orchard Street, but after Sawyer left town in 1845, Greeley joined the Church of the Divine Paternity, where P. T. Barnum was a member. Greeley was familiar with its minister Edwin Chapin. He attended church frequently, arriving with the pockets of his long white coat filled with newspapers, and then would sleep before and sometimes during the service, opening his eyes only when Chapin was especially eloquent.

Greeley’s Christology was Unitarian, but he also expressed a belief in Restorationism, a period of chastisement in the afterlife, but finally concluded, “all suffering is disciplinary and transitional, and shall ultimately result in universal holiness and consequent happiness.” Greeley was a frequent delegate to Universalist General Conventions, and was in Gloucester, Massachusetts for the Centennial Celebration in 1870. Here he helped seat the Maryland delegation, and read the report on “Diffusion of Universalism,” which argued for the publication and distribution of more tracts. He called for the raising of an endowment fund for the establishment of a Universalist Publishing House, and this soon came to fruition. Years before he had given money towards the founding of the Canton Theological School at St Lawrence University. In 1872 he was nominated for U. S. president by the Democratic Party and campaigned on a platform of returning control of the South to its “best men,” but he lost to Ulysses S. Grant in a landslide. He died a month later on November 29, 1872 in a sanitarium, having been called insane. Dr. Chapin led the funeral for this pioneering journalist, who was one of the great public figures of the nineteenth century.