Horace
Greeley was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, on 3rd February,
1811. He trained as a printer but he later moved to New
York City where he became a journalist. Greeley worked for the
New Yorker and in 1841 established
the New York Tribune.
A newspaper he was to edit for over thirty years.
Greeley took a strong moral tone in his newspaper and campaigned against
alcohol, tobacco, gambling, prostitution and capital punishment. However,
his main concern was the abolition of slavery.
In 1838 Greeley agreed to edit the Jeffersonian,
a Whig newspaper in New York. A close associate
of William Seward, Henry
Clay and William Harrison, he edited
the pro-Whig journal, Log Cabin,
during the 1840 presidential election.
Greeley was very interested in socialist
and feminist ideas and published articles by Karl
Marx, Charles Dana, Margaret
Fuller and Jane
Grey Swisshelm in the New
York Tribune.
He also promoted the views of Albert Brisbane, who wanted society
organised into co-operative communities.
After the demise of the Whigs, Greeley supported
the Free Soil Party. He was one of the
leaders of the campaign against the 1850
Fugitive Slave Law and in 1856 helped form the Republican
Party.
In 1860 Greeley supported the presidential campaign of Abraham
Lincoln. However, Greeley, like many of the strong opponents of
slavery, was unhappy with the way Lincoln
dealt with John
C. Fremont and
David Hunter when
they freed slaves in territory they captured from the Confederate
Army during the Civil War.
On 19th August, 1862 Greeley wrote an open letter to the president
in the New
York Tribune. In the letter Greeley critized
Abraham Lincoln for failing to make slavery
the dominant issue of the war and compromising moral principles for
political motives. Lincoln famously replied on 22nd August, "My
paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without
freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing
all the slaves, I would do it."
Greeley wrote several books including Glances
at Europe (1851), An Overland
Journey (1860), a two volume history of the Civil
War, The American Conflict
(1865), and an autobiography, Recollections
of a Busy Life (1868).
Greeley was highly critical of the presidency
of Ulysses G. Grant and became associated
with the Radical Republicans. Later he helped form the Liberal Republican
Party.
In 1872 he Liberal Republican Party nominated Greeley as their candidate
and he stood against Ulysses G. Grant
for the presidency. During the campaign Thomas
Nast produced a series of cartoons attacking Greeley. He commented
that the venom of these cartoons were so bad that he "scarcely
knew whether he was running for the presidency or the penitentiary."
Greeley, won 40% of the popular vote but died soon afterwards
on 29th November, 1872. One friend claimed that he had been "crushed
by the unmerciful ridicule Nast had heaped on him."
Thomas Nast linked Horace Greeley with the corrupt
politician, Robert Tweed, during the
presidential
campaign. (Harper's Weekly,
3rd October, 1872)
(1)
Horace Greeley, letter to President Abraham
Lincoln (19th August, 1862)
I do not intrude to tell
you - for you must know already - that a great proportion of those
who triumphed in your election, and of all who desire the unqualified
suppression of the rebellion now desolating our country, are solely
disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing
with regard to the slaves of the Rebels.
We think you are strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge
of your official and imperative duty with regard to the emancipating
provisions of the new Confiscation Act. Those provisions were designed
to fight slavery with liberty. They prescribe that men loyal to the
Union, and willing to shed their blood in the behalf, shall no longer
be held, with the nation's consent, in bondage to persistent, malignant
traitors, who for twenty years have been plotting and for sixteen
months have been fighting to divide and destroy our country. Why these
traitors should be treated with tenderness by you, to the prejudice
of the dearest rights of loyal men, we cannot conceive.
Fremont's Proclamation and Hunter's Order favoring emancipation were
promptly annulled by you; while Halleck's Number Three, forbidding
fugitives from slavery to Rebels to come within his lines - an order
as unmilitary as inhuman, and which received the hearty approbation
of every traitor in America - with scores of like tendency, have never
provoked even your remonstrance.
(2)
President Abraham
Lincoln, letter to Horace Greeley (22nd
August, 1862)
If there be those who
would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy
slavery. I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle
is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it;
and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and
if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would
also do that.
(3)
Horace Greeley interviewed Brigham Young
for the New York Tribune
in 1859.
Horace Greeley: What is
the position of your church with respect to slavery?
Brigham Young: We consider it of divine institution and not to be
abolished until the curse pronounced on Ham shall have been removed
from his descendants.
Horace Greeley: Are any slaves now held in this territory?
Brigham Young: There are.
Horace Greeley: Do your territorial laws uphold slavery?
Brigham
Young: These laws are printed; you can read for yourself. If slaves
are brought here by those who owned them in the states, we do not
favor their escape from the service of those owners.
Horace Greeley: How general is polygamy among you?
Brigham Young: I could not say. Some of those present (heads of the
church) have each but one wife; others have more; each determines
what is is his individual duty.
Horace Greeley: What is the largest number of wives belonging to any
one man.
Brigham
Young: I have fifteen; I know no one who has more; but some of those
sealed to me are old ladies whom I regard rather as mothers than wives,
but whom I have taken home to cherish and support.
(4)
Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life
(1932)
From my youth I was always
interested in political questions. My father, like many others in
northern Ohio, had early come under the spell of Horace Greeley, and,
as far back as I can remember, the New York Weekly Tribune
was the political and social Bible of our home. I was fifteen years
old when Horace Greeley ran for the presidency. My father was an enthusiastic
supporter of Greeley and I joined with him; and well do I remember
the gloom and despair that clouded our home when we received the news
of his defeat.
Our candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, was elected in 1876, but was not
allowed to take his seat. The Civil War was not then so far in the
background as it is now, and any sort of political larceny was justifiable
to save the country from the party that had tried to destroy the union.
So, though Tilden was elected, Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated
and served Tilden's term.
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