Horace Greeley, the editor

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Prefatory Note

This volume, while the most complete, does not pretend to be an exhaustive account of Horace Greeley, nor of the times and the "causes" with which he was identified, and in some of them a magna pars. It undertakes, however, to give a condensed, unified, and popular presentation of the man, and what he stood for in the thick of days which made history rapidly, and saw our young Republic change from the gristle of its aspiring and restless youth into its settled and not unscarred maturity.

My chief material and authority have been Mr. Greeley's own " Recollections of a Busy Life," published in 1868. Mr. James Parton's delightful omnium gatherum of Greeleyana, published in 1855, is, of course, a mine of wealth, especially valuable as being written under the eye and doubtless with the concurrence of Mr. Greeley himself, as St. Peter is credited with the supervision or approval of his disciple Mark's gospel. Besides these, I have availed iv PREFATORY NOTE.

myself of various sketches and estimates which have appeared from time to time in the periodical press, especially at the time of his death, from those whose information and judgment made their words of the highest authority. I have consulted also letters which have been since collected, have availed myself of personal recollections by mutual friends, and drawn upon a lifetime of familiarity (though not of private acquaintance with himself) with the sayings and doings of perhaps the most incessantly active and conspicuous of Americans and New Yorkers for a generation. And, lastly, I have made good use of several works on the history and characteristics of American journalism. I wish to make special acknowledgment of the courtesy and kindness, in these researches, of the Librarians of the College of New Jersey, and of the Theological Seminary of Princeton.

Princeton, N. J., October 12th, 1889.

Chapter I. The Hour And The Man

The public career of Horace Greeley exactly spans what may be called the era of transition and development in our country's history. By his public career we understand the period from his beginnings as editor in New York, in 1833, to his death, in 1872.

When, on January 1st of the former year, he made his first journalistic venture in the abortive attempt to establish a penny newspaper, the first break was made in the traditional and almost sacred idea of a journal as a slow, costly, and unwieldy vehicle of information. Up to that time the " blanket" or folio sheet, with its meagre news and occasional heavy essay by way of editorial, and its advertisements addressed to the wants of the larger dealers of the business community, distributed almost wholly to subscribers, and sold only over the counter and in business quarters at lO HORACE GREELEY.

the price of sixpence, was tlie type of a New York journal. Those who are familiar with the Journal of Commerce of to-day, or the Courier and Enquirer of a generation ago, will realize what we mean. The little one-cent Morning Post, though it soon set beneath the horizon, was the morning star of the Sun, the Herald, the Tribune, the Times, and the World, — all of which were not only cheap (beginning, at least, as penny papers), but were of manageable size, quivering with enterprise, abounding in brief editorials, and crowded with readable matter for the million. This process of journalistic development has been one of the most striking signs and achievements of the times, and has done more than almost any other agency to evolve and shape the America of to-day.

It was no less of an era, which was now to open, in the establishment of what is known as the independent press. By this we do not mean a neutral or even non-partisan press,, but one which was not dependent for its support upon the subsidies of political cliques and parties. It had been taken for granted that no paper could be established or supported except as a party organ, absolutely controlled by the political powers in return for Government patronage, or opposition funds. The editor,

THE HOUR AND THE MAN. II

therefore, was virtually owned, as well as the paper virtually mortgaged ; he was placed there to take care of the interests of a party, a committee, or a candidate. A high authority has said : " There was no such thing as an independent paper in those days. The editors were simply party hacks, and not journalists. The Washington Globe, the Richmond Enquirer, the Albany Argus, were the ' thunderers,' but the Richmond Junta, the Ritchie Cabinet, and the Albany Regency furnished the lightning. From a few ' organs ' like these the smaller papers took their cue. and followed suit to their lead." This state of things was strikingly exposed by Mackenzie's publication, in pamphlet form, of a once famous correspondence found in the New York Custom House, involving the political intrigues of the Democratic leaders of New York, the Albany Regency, for securing the support of the Courier and Enquirer, as well as the candid and business-like appeals of James Gordon Bennett for the pecuniary assistance of the State Committee in establishing the Globe, and afterward the Pennsylvanian.

The rebuffs which Bennett met with opened his eyes to the fact that the time was ripe for a new departure. The people had become distrustful of a hireling press and an automaton editorship, and the very party leaders and candidates were beginning to find more harm than benefit from this system. If, as Mr. Jesse Hoyt said, "recent developments have had a tendency to satisfy the people that its conductors, or many of them at least, are as negotiable as a promissory note," it was not wonderful that " the press has lost some portion of its hold upon public confidence."

It was then that Bennett's discovery took place of " the hoUow-heartedness and humbuggery of these political associations and political men ;" and, " flinging himself loose from the slough," he regained his liberty and independence completely. The Herald appeared on May 6th, 1835, and its immediate success proved the truth of his diagnosis of the public mind, and effectually broke the spell of a slavish and purchased journalism. Six years were still to elapse before Horace Greeley was to burst the cords with which his young hands were tied, and essay the still more adventurous course of an independent party paper ; but he had convinced himself by the twofold experiment of a hired pen and of an attempted political neutrality, that his time had come to join the new rdgime.

Doubtless much of the success, both of the cheaper and of the independent press, was due to the contemporary and rapid increase of facilities for circulating newspapers and for obtaining news. When the -Sun was issued, in

THE HOUR AND THE MAN. I3

1833, there were only two short railroads in the United States, one from Albany to Schenectady, and the other from Charleston to a point on the Savannah River. There were few steamboats, and those comparatively slow and infrequent. Papers had mostly to be distributed by stage-coaches and post -riders — these last being the pioneers even of the mail routes, and riding at intervals of a week or a fortnight. But the opening of more speedy transit went on rapidly from this date. The Albany and Schenectady Railroad was extended to Utica the next year. In 1835 Boston shot out roads to Lowell, Providence, and Worcester ; within three or four years these two latter were extended to Stonington and to Springfield. In 1837 the Baltimore and Wilmington began the line of connection between the national capital and the Northern cities. In 1840 there were nearly four million miles of mail route by railroads and steamboats ; in 1859 the number of miles had grown to nearly thirty-two millions. It was not till 1838 that steam navigation was established between this country and Europe, the first trip of the Sirius and the Great Western taking fifteen days to cross the ocean. The foreign mails were even then received only once a fortnight ; previously they had been dependent on wind and weather. Even by the fast steamboats of the Hudson,

SO late as 1 844, it was sometimes a week before the election returns were sufficiently received to determine the result in the State of New York. The magical era of the telegraph was not far in the future — Morse completing his line between Washington and Baltimore on May 27th, 1844. Submarine telegraphs began to be successfully worked under various rivers and bays even earlier; in 185 1 cables were laid between Calais and Dover, and in August, 1858, the Atlantic cable united Europe and America. It was on the threshold of this stirring and marvellous period of development that the subject of our biography was privileged to begin his editorial career, and to keep pace with it in the evolution of American journalism.

Our country was still in its callow but inquiring youth. The people, from the circumstances of their early immigration, their adventurous struggles to establish themselves in a vast wilderness secluded from the Old World, their successful emancipation from the mother country, their national organization under untried conditions, were naturally disposed to pay none too great respect to precedent, and to consider all the facts and relations of life subject to a new investigation and to an ofttimes crude and rash experimenting. These experiments and speculations included the food that

THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 1 5

was eaten, the liquor that was drunk, the relations of the sexes, the question of master and servant, the whole fabric of society, the fundamental doctrines, and even the essential truth, of Christianity itself. All the circumstances of birth and training and early experience were such as to make Horace Greeley's development almost a parallel with that of the country, and to constitute him in the truest sense a " Young America." And accordingly we are not surprised to find him nibbling successively at nearly every tentative reform, and embracing zealously and with constancy two or three of them ; above all, making their free exposition and discussion the most distinctive feature of his paper. This hospitality to recent or eccentric thought arose not more from sympathy than from a genuine journalistic instinct, which was intent upon the widest publication of the newest ideas as of the newest facts.

The period of Horace Greeley's d/but in editorial life was also synchronous with the opening up of a new departure in American politics. The great name of Washington alone sufHced to maintain the Federal Party in power for a single Presidential term after his retirement, or to even preserve it in existence for a generation. When James Monroe was reelected to the Presidency, in 1820, with a single dissenting electoral vote, tliere was only one party in the United States. But this famous era of good feeling, so placid on the surface, was a boiling caldron of intrigues, ambitions, and jealousies between rival chieftains and their factions, underneath. The partisans of Adams, Jackson, Crawford, Clay, and Calhoun were about to play the role of Alexander's successors in dividing up the imperial political legacy of the Republican Party. The result of the election of John Quincy Adams by the House of Representatives, in 1825, through a combination of his forces with those of Henry Clay, intensified and embittered the strife, though no attempt was made during his administration to create a distinct party. Politics consisted for several years in the personal issue of Jackson and anti-Jackson.

But President Jackson's second election, in 1832, found an opposition -party arrayed under the leadership of Henry Clay, calling themselves Whigs, and with a platform that took issue with the Democratic creed which the political genius of Martin Van Buren had formulated, as it had also completely organized the party itself. It was during this second term that the battle was fully joined between the two great forces, upon such economic issues as the Tariff, the National Bank, Internal Improvements, and the Public Lands, which constituted the polit-

THE HOUR AND THE MAN. i;

ical tenets of the Whigs for the years during which they were able to resist the remorseless progress within their ranks of the divisive and dynamitic slavery question. The training and the tendencies of Horace Greeley, and particularly his intense admiration of " Harry" Clay, drew him irresistibly into the Whig Party, to whose championship he devoted the earliest efforts of his editorial pen at the critical hour when, in 1835, the battle was rolling up to defeat the election of Martin Van Buren as the successor of Andrew Jackson.

The founders of this Republic, in their anxiety to obtain the consent of all sections to the Constitution and the Union, were fain to adr mit a compromise upon one point, which they little realized would prove an agonizing and almost deadly gall-stone in the very vitals of the country. It would have suited the great majority of the convention. North and South, not to recognize the existence of American slavery, and to prohibit at once the African slave-trade. But the extreme Southern States, South Carolina and Georgia, took such a determined stand, that it was deemed necessary to exempt the slave-trade from interference for twenty years, to recognize the slaves as a basis of political power and apportionment, and to provide for the return of fugitives to their masters by the Federal authority. Some of the Southern States only consented to ratify the Constitution upon the condition that no regulation of Congress should tend to the emancipation of slaves, and that the ordinance of 1787, prohibiting slavery in the Northwestern Territory, should not be extended to the Southwestern Territory, or to the admission of Southern States. This question of admitting slave States, however, could not be suppressed on the application of Missouri, in 181S ; and after a struggle of two years another compromise, admitting Missouri without restriction, but excluding slavery forever from all territory north and west of its southern boundary.

From, this time till 1835 (mark the date, in connection with the career of our hero) the subject of slavery was a very insignificant factor in the politics of the nation, and there was a general consent to. acquiesce in the sfatus ^uo as a final settlement. Here and there the conscience of a Lundy or a Garrison would not let him rest, and abolition societies kept the subject from being forgotten. There was even a show of organization, which escaped much tribulation only because it was regarded as too insignificant to be persecuted. The anti-slavery feeling of the North chiefly embodied itself in the mild and equivocal form of the

THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 1 9

Colonization movement. Up to this time even Horace Greeley held sentiments of a thoroughly conservative kind, having little sympathy and less connection with the agitators, and deprecating a third party as calculated to weaken the Whigs, whom he regarded as the only effective resistance to the aggressions of the slave power.

These aggressions, however, were now taking shapes which could no longer be ignored, and which startled him, together with a large portion of the Northern people, into a moral and political sensitiveness that was to be the turn of the tide in the rapid development of our history. One of these was the assassination of Owen Lovejoy, a Congregational minister and editor in Alton, 111., by a mob, which had already driven him out of Missouri. This hounding down and murder of a man for his anti-slavery teachings in a free State awoke multitudes to a realization, that there could be no terms on which a free and a slave-holding people could get on together, except the virtual enslavement of the latter. Just at this time, also, opened the first scene of the great Texas drama by the invasion of that Mexican province by "Sam" Houston, with the slightly disguised intent of seizing and annexing it as an enlargement of the area of the slave power, — all of which resulted, according to arrangement, in a rapid series of like movements in less than a dozen years. At least, in this predetermined light did the awakened and prophetic eye of young Greeley regard them. And henceforth he took his place as one of the foremost, and probably the most effective, antagonists of the great aggression, which — over the wreck of the Missouri Compromise, and through its defeat in the Kansas-Nebraska struggle — organized against itself first a political and then an armed resistance, under whose blows the serpent's head was forever crushed. Of the subsequent history of reconstruction and reconciliation, we need only say here that Mr. Greeley's part was probably the most conspicuous of any American, and, notwithstanding his personal mistakes and failures, was probably the most effective in healing the gaping wounds of Civil War — a service of which he may justly be regarded alike as the pioneer and the martyr.

It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that the career of Horace Gteeley not only marks a new epoch in the journalism of this country, but that "he presents an extraordinary illustration both of the spirit of the age and the genius of American institutions. In another country, or at a previous date, his history would have been well-nigh impossible. He

THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 21

was born, it would seem, at the precise epoch which demanded such natural endowments as his, and in a state of society which made them almost instantly available." The man was meant and fitted for the hour. He would be an anachronism now, as would be Daniel Boone in Kentucky, or George Rogers Clarke in Illinois, or John Carver in Massachusetts.

Chapter II. Early Days

Horace Greeley came of a stock as likely to produce a sound and sturdy growth as any in the world, — that of the Scotch-Irish of Ulster, transplanted to the rocky soil and free air of the Northern New England hills. He was not insensible to the pride of ancestry, in the noblest sense, and loved to trace his descent from the stanch Protestants of Ulster and the heroes of Londonderry. An emigration from that city and its vicinity, embracing a considerable part of four congregations, with their ministers, impelled by ecclesiastical oppressions and disabilities, arrived at Boston on August 4th, 1718. After various explorations and experiments, they finally settled upon a tract of land about fifteen miles north of Haverhill, N. H., which they promptly and proudly re-christened from Nutfield to Londonderry. Among the settlers was John Woodburn, the grandfather of Horace Greeley's mother ; his descendants are still, we believe, occupying the homestead, and the community retains to a remarkable degree its primitive elements of character, simplicity of life, and rural occupation. During the Revolutionary War, this little town furnished its " embattled farmers" to the number of three hundred and forty-seven out of a whole adult male population of about five hundred.

On his father's side, Horace Greeley derived his descent from one of three brothers of that name who emigrated to America in 1640. Zaccheus, Horace's great-grandfather, settled on the verge of Londonderry, into the bounds of which town his son Zaccheus removed to within a hundred rods of the Woodburns. Hence it was natural that the third Zaccheus should marry Mary Woodburn, the mother of our hero, their third out of seven children. He had the felicity to escape the Biblical patronymic, though the classic name which was given him suggests not a little in the way of humorous contrast, when closely examined. It were difficult to conceive of two more diverse personalities than the tuneful, cultured, self-indulgent, parasitic Roman, and the ungainly, rough-spoken, hard-worked, independent New Englander. I think they would have liked each other none the less, however.

It was not in Londonderry that our Horace was born, on February 3d, 181 1, but in the neighboring town of Amherst, to which his parents had removed three years before. Here

Zaccheus Greeley had purchased the " Stewart farm" of forty or fifty acres, a gravelly and rocky bit of land, more adapted to hard work than to plentiful or certain crops. The house in which Horace was born was an unpainted framed cottage of one story, built in the boxlike style of shapeless ugliness which succeeded the rather picturesque log-cabin of the earliest settlers. Its immediate environment was a rude and straggling fence, an old-fashioned well, with its mossy bucket swinging high in air upon its long sweep, and a soil out of which the rocks thrust themselves in every direction. There were " the orchard, the meadow, and deep tangled wild wood" of the song ; but the former, though of the same rocky substratum as the rest, produced apples which made Horace's mouth water long years after. (I suppose we all think there never were such apples as the apples of our youth.) The meadow was chiefly a frog-pond, where the boy doubtless learned to take aim at the croakers and slippery divers of the social and political puddle of a later day. The house was then quite new, he says ; " it was only modified in our time by filling up and making narrower the old-fashioned fireplace, which having devoured all the wood on the farm yawned ravenously for more."

That voracious fireplace seems to have been typical of the general fortunes of the ancestral Greeleys. They were " excellent, though never thrifty citizens ; kind, mild, easy-going, honest, and unambitious," marrying young and blessed with large families of children (the grandfather having had thirteen, who all grew to be men and women). We can readily trace, then, the source of one side of their illustrious descendant's composite and inconsistent nature to the paternal stock — his gentle and even childlike qualities, his expansive benevolence, his carelessness of outward appearance, his unambitious social disposition, his unthrifty business and money habits.

It was in spite of these that the qualities inherited from his mother led him on to success and even to fortune, in the pecuniary sense of that word. She was of a masculine hardihood of body, intellect, and character ; of cheerful and untiring industry, working out-doors as well as in-doors ; and a humorist, endowed with a constant flow of animal spirits. It is reported of her that she " could out- rake any man in the town, and could load the haywagon as fast and as well as her husband. While doing more than the work of an ordinary man and an ordinary woman combined, she would laugh and sing all day long, and tell stories all the evening." She was a great favorite especially with the children, whom she.

delighted with an inexhaustible stock of stories and songs, and old-country ballads and traditions, derived from her immigrant grandmother. It was this latter source from which her little Horace derived his first educational impulse, as he stood beside her while she plied her spinning-wheel. She was also his first teacher in the more prosaic " rudiments." Horace was a feeble, sickly child, often under medical treatment, and unable to watch through a closed window the falling of rain without incurring an instant and violent attack of illness. She was particularly tender of him from the fact of having lost her two previous children just before his birth. Hence he was kept close to her side ; and from the spelling-book on her knee he learned to read, as well as to be entertained, before he could fairly talk, and at an earlier period than he could remember in his later years. By a singular adaptation to the changes of motion on his mother's part while spinning, he acquired the unwonted facility of reading with the book in almost any position, sidewise or upside down, as readily as in the usual fashion, without at that time thinking it anything unusual. He read also in the great family Bible, spread upon the floor for his behoof, and even in the newspaper with a prophetic interest. By the time he was three years old he read children's books with ease, and at four he was free of the whole range of literature as far as it came under his eye.

Two months before he reached three, he was taken home by his grandfather Woodburn and sent to school from there — ^the school-house at home being two miles away, while that of his grandfather's district was a few rods from the door. Here he lived for most of the time during the next three years, and probably absorbed still more of the stalwart Woodburn characteristics. The school-house was even more destitute of architecture than his home. The type has not yet disappeared, even in the thriving rural districts near the great towns in our most advanced Eastern States. It was a single enclosed room with three cuttings for windows, two on the side and one in the front or gable end, where was also the door. There were no trees or fence about it, and the interior was as " forlorn and uninviting" as the exterior. Happy the child who has not had to sit from nine till four upon those hard benches, without backs, except so far as the sharp edge of the desks along the walls afforded at times a support to a few aching and otherw^ise stooping little spines. The school-house was crowded to suffocation, and was in winter either scorching or freezing, in accordance with the relative position of its inmates to the fireplace. The curriculum consisted of spelling, reading, writing, grammar, and arithmetic, the three latter of a very elementary grade. The teachers were usually very young, under their teens, getting about the wages of a farm-laborer. The discipHne was of the most heroic character, administered over the knuckles by the ferule, or over the hindmost parts by the switch or " gad."

Horace Greeley was from the beginning the pet and pride of his school. He was a tow-headed little fellow, with a quaint manner and a lisping and whining voice, always good-humored, and " enduring all things" with a nonresistant gentleness which was recognized . as neither cowardice nor lack of character. He was considered a prodigy of precocious acquisition. His especial forte was spelling. It seemed to be a natural taste and instinct. It became in those days a passion, betokening the future editor, who discovered the slightest deviation from his rules of orthography or punctuation, and treated it with corresponding severity. He drilled himself continually in those primary school-days, and even spent much time in spelling hard. words for the pleasure of it, or to meet the frequent challenge of his family. Constant efforts were made in vain to puzzle him, even with the proper names of the Bible. In the weekly evening spellingmatches, he was always the first one chosen by the side which had the " toss," and it was regarded as equivalent to victory in advance. He was then so young, that he would often have to be wakened before it came to his turn.

He was also fond of speaking pieces out of the " Columbian Orator," even before he could utter the words distinctly, and his frequent and favorite speech, " You'd scarce expect one of my age," etc.; in his self-possessed and confident manner, was a source of much amusement. He knew the whole volume by heart, and it was to his great disgust that he was dragged forward incessantly to recite those baby lines. Besides the " Columbian Orator," the schoolbooks of that day consisted of Webster's spelling-book, which was just supplanting Dilworth's; " The American Preceptor ;" and Caleb Bingham's " The Ladies' Accidence," the only grammar then in use, " as poor an affair as its name would indicate." Morse's " Geography" had not yet come into vogue, and had barely one map. Lindley Murray's " Grammar and English Reader" had not yet come into fashion, nor had Adams's " Arithmetic ;" the former, at any rate, was not well adapted to beginners, and Mr. Greeley thinks that Greenleaf, a few years later, " shortened the time and effort required to gain a decent knowledge of English grammar by at least one half."

Horace was an omnivorous reader from his fourth year, devouring, like the locust, every dry twig as well as green blade of print to which he could get access. It mattered little whether it was the " Confession of Faith," a stray almanac, the " Pilgrim's Progress," the " Arabian Nights" or " Robinson Crusoe," a book of history, the Bible, or the weekly newspaper. We are told that there was scarcely a book within seven miles which he did not borrow. He would read as he dressed in the morning, in every spare moment he could gain from other studies or from home and farm work throughout the day, and even as he went about on the lighter errands of the latter, clinging to his book like a wasp to a mellow harvest apple. His evenings were spent in a veritable trance of reading, lying coiled up in the comer of the capacious fireplace by the light of a pine-knot, paying no attention to those who purposely or inadvertently stumbled over him or dragged him out by the legs, but rolling himself back and going on with his reading as if nothing had happened. It took as long to arouse him and get him off to bed as it takes many a body to get out of bed in the morning.

The newspaper was his chief delight — a poor enough affair in its scope of news or editorial ; but its advent was the event of the week, which he would anticipate by walking down the road to meet the post-rider that he might have the first chance at it, and lying on the ground would absorb its contents from beginning to end. Meagre as was its intelligence, those were stirring times, as Mr. Parton reminds us. The ground-swell of the War of 181 2 had not yet subsided. " He may have read of Decatur's gallantry in the war with Algiers ; of Wellington's victory at Waterloo ; of Napoleon, fretting away his life on the rock of St. Helena ; of Monroe's inauguration ; of the dismantling of the fleets on the great lakes ; of the progress of the Erie Canal project ; of Jackson's inroads into Florida and the subsequent secession of that province to the United States ; of the first meeting of Congress in the Capitol ; of the passage of the Missouri Compromise," together with the important and fundamental discussions of Congress over the various commercial treaties with the States of Europe. The first book which he read consecutively through was the Bible, under the guidance of his mother, when he was about five years old.