Horace Greeley, American journalist, was born a small farmer’s son at Amherst, New Hampshire, February 3, 1811. He entered a printing-office as apprentice (1826) at East Poultney, Vermont, rose to assist in editorial work, and by-and-by worked as a journeyman printer. In 1834 he started the weekly New Yorker, for which he wrote essays, poetry, and other articles. His Log Cabin, a Whig campaign paper, contributed largely to the election of General Harrison as president in 1840. In April, 1841, he commenced the New York Tribune, of which he was the leading editor till his death. The Tribune was at first Whig, then anti-slavery Whig, and finally extreme Republican; it advocated to some extent the social theories of Fourier. In 1848 Greeley was elected to congress by a New York district, but lost popularity by agitating for a reform in the mileage payments to members. In 1851 he visited Europe, and was chairman of one of the committees of the Great Exhibition. Greeley at first upheld the constitutional right of the southern states to secede; but when the war began he became one of its most zealous advocates. He published in the Tribune the impressive “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” and within a month the emancipation proclamation was issued. After Lee’s surrender he warmly advocated a universal amnesty; and his going to Richmond and signing the bail-bond of Jefferson Davis awakened a storm of public indignation. In religious faith he was a Universalist. An unsuccessful candidate in 1872 for the presidency, he died in New York, 29th November of the same year. Greeley’s works include “The American Conflict” (1864–66), “Recollections of a Busy Life” (1868), “Essays on Political Economy” (1870), and “What I Know of Farming” (1871). See Lives by Parton (new eds. 1882), Ingersoll (1873), Cornell (1882), and Sotheran (1892).

Personal

  His manuscript is a remarkable one, having about it a peculiarity which we know not how better to designate than as a converse of the picturesque. His characters are scratchy and irregular, ending with an abrupt taper—if we may be allowed this contradiction in terms, where we have the fac-simile to prove that there is no contradiction in fact. All abrupt manuscripts save this, have square or concise terminations of the letters. The whole chirography puts us in mind of a jig. We can fancy the writer jerking up his hand from the paper at the end of each word, and, indeed, of each letter. What mental idiosyncrasy lies perdu beneath all this is more than we can say, but we will venture to assert that Mr. Greeley (whom we do not know personally) is, personally, a very remarkable man.

  Was introduced to Greeley. Think him coarse and cunning.

  My life has been busy and anxious, but not joyless. Whether it shall be prolonged few or more years, I am grateful that it has endured so long, and that it has abounded in opportunities for good not wholly unimproved, and in experiences of the nobler as well as the baser impulses of human nature. I have been spared to see the end of giant wrongs, which I once deemed invincible in this century, and to note the silent upspringing and growth of principles and influences which I hail as destined to root out some of the most flagrant and pervading evils that yet remain…. So, looking calmly, yet humbly, for that close of my mortal career which cannot be far distant, I reverently thank God for the blessings vouchsafed me in the past; and, with an awe that is not fear, and a consciousness of demerit which does not exclude hope, await the opening before my steps of the gates of the Eternal World.

  Horace learned to read before he had learned to talk; that is, before he could pronounce the longer words. No one regularly taught him. When he was little more than two years old, he began to pore over the Bible, opened for his entertainment on the floor, and examine with curiosity the newspaper given him to play with. He cannot remember a time when he could not read, nor can any one give an account of the process by which he learned, except that he asked questions incessantly, first about the pictures in the newspaper, then about the capital letters, then about the smaller ones, and finally about the words and sentences. At three years of age he could read easily and correctly any of the books prepared for children; and at four, any book whatever. But he was not satisfied with overcoming the ordinary difficulties of reading. Allowing that nature gives to every child a certain amount of mental force to be used in acquiring the art of reading, Horace had an overplus of that force, which he employed in learning to read with his book in positions which increased the difficulty of the feat. All the friends and neighbors of his early childhood, in reporting him a prodigy unexampled, adduce as the unanswerable and clinching proof of the fact, that, at the age of four years, he could read any book in whatever position it might be placed,—right-side up, up-side down, or sidewise.

  About the time—now over forty years ago—that Horace Greeley entered New York without money or friends, to seek employment in a printing office, another youth, as penniless and as friendless, was wandering about that city with the same object. Side by side they achieved their successes, visibly represented in the large neighbouring buildings whence issue each morning the two most powerful journals in America. But how different are the successes of James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley. The one is the triumphant demonstration that shrewdness, enterprise, and intelligence, when unimpeded by scruple of principle, and entirely concentrated on the task of adding cent to cent, may pile up a heap of gold and enshrine it in a palace. The other attests the power of Justice and Truth to endow those who have no other dower, and to reward self-sacrificing fidelity to them—not indeed with a pile of gold or marble, for Mr. Greeley has never been a rich man, but with character, which is sure to make for itself channels of influence.

  Mr. Greeley was neither cold nor tough. He was keenly sensitive both to praise and blame. The applause of even paltry men gladdened him, and their censure stung him. Moreover, he had that intense longing for reputation as a man of action by which men of the closet are so often torn. In spite of that his writing brought him in reputation, he writhed under the popular belief that he could do nothing but write, and he spent the flower of his years trying to convince the public that it was mistaken about him. It was to this we owed whatever was ostentatious in his devotion to farming and in his interest in the manufacturing industry of the country. It was to this, too, that we owed his keen and lifelong desire for office, and, in part at least, his activity in getting offices for other people…. Those who opposed him most earnestly must now regret sincerely that in his last hours he should have known the bitterness of believing, what was really not true, that the labors of his life, which were largely devoted to good causes, had not met with the appreciation they merited at the hands of his countrymen. It is for his own sake, as well as that of the public, greatly to be regretted that he should not have lived until the smoke of the late conflict had cleared away.

  Among my fellow-commissioners to the Exposition was my good old friend Horace Greeley. It was at that time in Mr. Greeley’s career when he still affected very old white overcoats and equally old white hats. This peculiarity of summer attire caused him to attract more attention on the street in Paris than would have been attracted by a score of Japanese, Chinese, and South-Sea Islanders. Of this he appeared serenely unconscious. I remember one high-priced or gala day at the Exhibition, when all the fashion, elegance, and distinction of Paris were assembled there. While I was standing in our own part of the building, Horace entered in his usual costume. Telling me that he wanted to show me something, and seizing me by the arm, he started off, with his peculiar plowman’s lope, dragging me along through space which the astonished visitors opened for us on either side. Wonder was expressed upon every face. All the way down the principal gallery we went, until we reached its farther extremity, a distance which I would be afraid to express in feet. What he desired to show me was well worth seeing. It was some specimens, in the Austrian department, of printing and book-binding, executed at the Imperial Press in Vienna, which excelled everything else of the same character to be found in the Exposition.

  Mr. Greeley throughout life was twitted with his slovenliness of person, and many people were made to believe that he incurred the risk of being sold for a bag of ancient rags whenever he passed into Ann Street. The fit and quality of his clothes were not what Grammont or D’Orsay would have recommended; but he was always scrupulously neat—Beethoven himself having no greater passion for the bath. His linen was ever immaculate; his boots, though often coarse, well blacked; his face carefully shaven, and his hands as daintily kept as those of a fine woman. His cravat had a tendency, it is true, to assume the shape of a hangman’s knot, and his trowsers were often suggestive of required continuance; but that he was really slovenly was palpably false. The idle tales that he disarranged his toilet before the looking-glass, and carefully squeezed his pantaloons into the leg of his boot ere he appeared on the street, were purposely told to annoy him, and, strange to say, they had the effect intended. He was sensitive on the subject of his dress, and seldom received advice thereupon with becoming equanimity. Oddly enough, he believed himself a very well attired person, and that few men in his station went better clad.

  No woman ever was his personal friend, trusting him, caring for him, who was not helped by the word and deed of his companionship toward the truest and noblest womanhood. No praise higher than this can woman offer to the memory of man. His friendships were Catholic, comprehensive, and abiding. They held within their steadfast range some of the most illustrious as well as some of the most purely and sweetly domestic women of his time.

  The high estimate I formed of Mr. Greeley’s character at the outset of our acquaintance, was strengthened by all I saw and knew of him for the ensuing twelve years. I invested him with more good qualities than generally belong to the best of our public men. The great ability and greater industry displayed seemed designed to work out enlightened and beneficent purposes. He seemed also to work unselfishly, finding his reward in the consciousness of doing good. His happiness seemed to consist in laboring diligently for his country and his race. He had no vices great or small, no recreations, and few amusements. I do not remember in all our intercourse to have heard him speak of his boy-life, of ball-playing, of kites, of marbles, of tops, etc.; and I incline to the belief that he was a stranger to all or nearly all of these juvenile joys. Indeed, it is by no means certain that his case was not the exception to a rule which is supposed to be universal, of a grown-up man who had never played “High, low, Jack, and the game.”… In looking back, therefore, through a vista of nearly forty years, I find myself seriously perplexed in endeavoring to understand Mr. Greeley’s true character. While all I saw and knew of him in early life inspired feelings of confidence and admiration, there was very much in later years to occasion surprise and regret. I only can account for this change, if I am right in assuming that his character did so change, by attributing it to a cause which has worked men’s downfall in all ages of the world. Ambition, while under the subjection of reason, is laudable; but when it breaks bounds and “o’erleaps itself,” the consequences are disastrous.

  I should like to speak of his tenderness and generosity. I should like to explain the awkward devices of his heart to hide itself, knowing that the exhibition of feeling is unconventional, and sensitive lest its earnest impulses should be misconstrued. But the veil which he wore during life must not be lifted by the privilege which follows death; enough of light shines through it to reveal all that the world need know. To me his nature seemed like a fertile tract of the soil of his native New Hampshire. It was cleared and cultivated and rich harvests clad its southern slopes; yet the rough primitive granite cropped out here and there, and there were dingles which defied the plough, where the sweet wild flowers blossomed in their season, and the wild birds built their nests unharmed. In a word, he was a man who kept his life as God fashioned it for him, neither assuming a grace which was not bestowed, nor disguising a quality which asserted its existence.

  He had been assailed as the enemy of his country by the party which he had done more than any man in the Nation to organize. He had been hunted to his grave by political assassins whose calumnies broke his heart. He was scarcely less a martyr than Lincoln, or less honored after his death, and his graceless defamers now seemed to think they could atone for their crime by singing his praises…. What he had sorely needed and was religiously entitled to was the sympathy and succor of good men while he lived, and especially in his heroic struggle for political reconciliation and reform. The circumstances of his death made it peculiarly touching and sacramental, and I was inexpressibly glad that I had fought his battle so unflinchingly and defended him everywhere against his conscienceless assailants.

  I had never before seen Mr. Greeley, who was then beginning to attract notice as the editor of the New York “Tribune.” At that time he was about thirty-five years old, round-faced and healthful, with blue eyes and very light hair. The restless eagerness of his interrogations denoted the character he afterwards established, which enabled him to change his convictions or ruling texts and hobbies as suddenly as a bird in a cage hops from one perch to another.

  To the mind and the eyes of the whole country, there was no more familiar figure than that of Horace Greeley. The big round face, the spectacled blue eyes, the fringe of white whiskers, the slouching farmer-like figure, the pockets stuffed with newspapers—were known to every New-Yorker.

  Mr. Greeley was not an orator in any scholastic sense. He had a poor and somewhat squeaking voice; he knew nothing of gestures; and he could not take an orator’s pose, which adds such emphasis sometimes to the matter and argument to be set forth. Not all his years of practice on the platform and on public occasions ever changed his habit and methods as a speaker, and he ended as poorly equipped for the vocation as he was when he began it. But he had one prime quality without which all the others are exploited in vain. He invariably had something to say; and he said it in such clear and wholesome English, with such utter sincerity, with such humane endeavor, and backed by such a character for probity and guilelessness, that he was an orator after all, in spite of all the rules. I have introduced Wendell Phillips, George William Curtis, and Anna Dickinson, and, in fact, all the most famous speakers of both sexes more than once and to various audiences, including P. T. Barnum, Mark Twain, and Josh Billings, but no one of them ever gave better satisfaction, different and notable as they were, than Horace Greeley. As a consequence he came to me oftenest, and wore the best.

  Mr. Greeley was one of those quaint men so surprisingly himself, so unlike everybody else, and the fact was so apparent not merely in face and figure and clothing, but in walk and voice and gesture, that there entered into one’s affectionate regard a kindly sense of humor. Why, there is a way of winding up an umbrella and carrying it that is recognized as Greeley’s fashion. I have seen him with his head tied up in a handkerchief, after he had been cruelly assaulted by a statesman from Arkansas, and so deliciously unconscious of anything comical in his aspect, that you did not dare laugh, and he had no more notion of animosity toward his assailant than if he had been attacked by a wild animal. The member of Congress who struck him with a stick was to him a stupid barbarian, it would have been at once criminal and ludicrous to kill…. Greeley was smooth, round-cheeked as a wholesome baby, with a delicate pallor, a brow white as alabaster, with just a suspicion of rosy tint, and his eyes were concealed by his glasses…. Mr. Greeley’s earnings as editor, publisher, author, and lecturer were very large, but he was not a business manager who could grasp even his own. He sold half the Tribune for two thousand dollars after it was a success. In 1868 he owned but one-tenth of his paper, and in 1872 held but six shares out of a hundred. If he had been a fighter for the fractions of cents he might have joined the procession of the millionaires. But he enjoyed his own good opinion, and felt there was something tawdry in money-grabbing and hoarding.

  Greeley took a deep and practical interest in Brook Farm; several of his intimate and trusted friends were there, and he was glad to sustain them by kindly encouragement in the Tribune, and by an occasional visit. Miss Russell relates amusingly the coming of an apparition which proved to be Greeley, not in disguise, but simply his astonishing self. “His hair was so light that it was almost white; he wore a white hat; his face was entirely colorless, even the eyes not adding much to save it from its ghostly hue. His coat was a very light drab, almost white, and his nether garments the same.” This Apostle of Light, however odd his personality, was welcome to the community to which he was never disloyal, though his heart was more with the North American Phalanx, a visit to which was easier for so busy a man. Little as they saw of him, Greeley’s good will was valued by the Brook Farmers, none of whom is known to have held Emerson’s opinion that he was both coarse and cunning. Through no fault of his own, Greeley was probably an injury to the West Roxbury community. It was his misfortune—a misfortune which followed him to his tragic end—to excite marked political antagonisms, and it was natural that such interests as he espoused should come also under the ban.

General

  The prince of paragraphists—the Napolean of Essayists. For years he has employed his talents in winding and unwinding the “tangled yarn” of human affairs in Church and State—in Philosophy and Politics—in Art and Literature. He is the great recording secretary of this Continent, employed by the masses to take notes and print them. His business is to “hold the mirror up to Nature, and show the very age and body of the time its form and pressure.” He has the pluck to say as an editor what he feels as a man—when he forgets that he is a politician. It is then that we find truth without concealment, and genuine open-heartedness without wire-working behind the curtain.

  With a shrewd, clear intellect, an astonishingly vigorous style, and a heart easily wrought up to that degree of passion necessary to the production of the best kind of writing, he fears not the quill of any man living.

  Mr. Greeley’s character and career as an editor and politician can be understood and appreciated by remembering his key note: Benevolent ends by utilitarian means. He desires the amelioration of all human conditions and the instrumentalities which he would propose are generally practical, common sense ones. Of magnificence, of formalities, of all the conventional part of life, whether in public or private, he is by nature as utterly neglectful as he is of the dandy element in costume, but he has a solid and real appreciation of many appreciable things, which go to make up the sum total of human advancement and happiness.

  Mr. Greeley entered upon the career of journalism step by step, and became a writer without premeditation. He is a man of convictions, but the particular mode in which it has been his lot to express them has been plainly decided by destiny for him. The force with which his words have told upon the American mind has been due to the depth from which they have come in his own life and thought far more than to any natural literary ability.

  The best-known citizen of America, the foremost journalist of his time.

  The greatest of American journalists, and eminent as a writer of pure and vigorous English…. Pure in mind, honest and upright to such an extent that he was called by many an eccentric man, he made his way, by his own unaided efforts, from poverty to well-deserved fame as a writer and philosopher. His style is better in certain respects than that of any of his contemporary writers. It is terse and masculine, so evenly balanced and nicely constructed, so simple and yet so graceful that it is equally admired by the uneducated farmer and the fastidious literary critic. Mr. Greeley will always be best known as the founder and first editor of the New York Tribune, but his collected writings will hold a place in standard American literature.

  Distinctively a political rather than a military history [“American Conflict”] of the war. It is one of the most valuable, as it is quite the most interesting, of the numerous accounts of our great civil contest.

  No man of his generation talked to the common people so forcibly, so clearly, and with so much sense and benevolence as he. Other men made of the Tribune a great newspaper; to him it was the mouthpiece of his own personality,—a personality of the utmost energy and picturesqueness. His writing was as lucid and racy as Franklin’s; as weighty with passion and hard sense as John Bright’s; and copious beyond either, as the daily journalist exceeds in copiousness the essayist or parliamentarian. His sympathies were generous and humane; his religion was simple and genuine. His heart was with the common people; he had shared their experiences, he spoke their language. His culture was defective, and he had the fault incident to deficient culture,—ignorance of his own limitations. He was liable to be most dogmatic on subjects which he knew least about. In his beliefs, his instincts, his enthusiasms, his prejudices, he was as thoroughly a representative American as any man of his time.

  Intellectually, he was remarkable for technical memory, for mental activity, and for clear, racy, and forcible expression. His mind was stimulated to the neglect of the outer man’s culture. He was as evidently marked by the stamp of the printing-press from his birth, as Plato is said to have drawn the Hybla bees to his budding lips, though, as is frequently the case with men of special genius, he imagined that his mission was to those agricultural pursuits from which he had been drawn away to the types, like a magnetized needle to iron filings. This is only an instance of the visionary and sentimental cast of his thought and theories, as contrasted with the practical and utilitarian tendency of his action. His was the unusual combination of a speculative mind and a realistic method. His opinions were formed amid a cloud-capped region of rarefied thought and lofty principle; his presentation of details was prosaic, plausible, and at least seemingly practical.

  Horace Greeley, a unique personality, simple, unaffected, earnest, an immense believer in American institutions, a staunch friend of the working-man, and a brave lover of impartial justice.

  Our Later Franklin, as the poet John Greenleaf Whittier once designated Horace Greeley, was one of those noble souls associated with what has been styled the renaissance of New England literature, who earliest apprehended and taught the truths of Socialism to the people of the United States of America. He never wearied in the good work of propaganda by both pen and voice. The movement itself may have changed in its methods and assumed a wider scope in the four essentials of “agitation, education, organization and action,” but its final objects and fundamental principles remain the same. And when the triumph of the Cooperative Commonwealth will be assured and the Emancipation of Labor accomplished, the work of Horace Greeley will be recognized by grateful generations, and will not be hidden out of sight and mind, as it has been, from the multitude, by those interested in keeping the American proletariat ignorant of economic truth and in the condition of wage-slaves.

  During the years of his busy life, from the late thirties when he was in the New Yorker and the Log Cabin, until the sad unnecessary end in 1872, Greeley was ever in argument…. This was an atrocious world,—that he knew very well. It was permeated with Democrats and free-traders and idle folks given to drink. There were evil men and evil women; but that was no reason for giving it over to fire. It should be converted. There should be regeneration through the spirit of daily reproof and objurgation. Greeley labored with the world to better it, to give men moderate wages and honest food, and to teach women to earn their own living, and that it was better that they should learn how to make shoes than to play on the piano.

  The man who was second to no other citizen in establishing the intellectual ascendency of the metropolis.