The life of Horace Greeley, editor of "The New-York tribune," from his birth to the present time

Contents

CHAPTER L

EARLY CHILDHOOD.

The Village of Amherst. — Character of the Adjacent Country. — The Greeley Farm. — The Tribune in the Boom in which its Editor was born. —Horace learns to read. — Book up-side down. — Goes to School in Londonderry. — A District School Forty Years Ago. — Horace as a Young Orator. — Has a Mania for spelling Hard Words. — Gets great Glory at the Spelling-School. — Recollections of his surviving School-Fellows. — Ilis Future Eminence foretold. — Delicacy of Ear. — Early Choice of a Trade. — His Courage and Timidity.— Goes to School in Bedford. — A Favorite among his School-Fellows. — His early Fondness for the Village Newspaper. — Lies in Ambush for the Post- Rider who brought it. — Scours the Country for Books. — Project of sending him to an Academy. — The Old Sea-Captain. — Horace as a Farmer's Boy. — Let us do our Stint first — His Way of Fishing

Chapter I. Birth And Childhood

Birth of Horace Greeley— The Town of Amherst— The Greeley farm— The Tribune in the room in which its Editor was born— Horace learns to read— Book up-side down— Goes to school in Londonderry— A district school forty year* ago — Horace as a young orator— Has a mania for spelling hard words— Gets great glory at the spelling-school— Recollections of his surviving schoolfellows—His future eminence foretold— Delicacy of ear— Early choice of a trade —His courage and timidity— Goes to school in Bedford— A favorite among his schoolfellows— His early fondness for the village newspaper— Lies in ambush for the post-rider who brought it— Scours the country for books— Project of sending him to an academy— The old sea-captain — Horace as a farmer's boy- Let us do our stint first — His way of fishing.

Horace Greeley was born at Amherst, in New Hampshire, Feb. 3, 1811. He was the third of the seven children of Zaccheua Greeley, a respectable farmer, of Scotch-Irish lineage.

The township of Amherst contains about eight square miles of somewhat better land than the land of New England generally is. "Wheat cannot be grown on it to advantage, but it yields fair returns of rye, oats, potatoes, Indian corn, and young men : the last-named of which commodities forms the chief article of export. The farmers have to contend against hills, rocks, stones innumerable, sand, marsh, and long winters ; but a hundred years of tillage have subdued these obstacles in part, and the people generally enjoy a safe and moderate prosperity. Yet severe is their toil. To see them ploughing along the sides of those steey 1 , rocky hills, the plough creaking, tbe oxen groaning, the little boy-driver leaping from sod to sod, as an Alpine boj is supposed to leap from crag to crag, th« >loughman wrenching the plough round the rooks, boy and man ivery minute or two uniting in a prolonged and agonizing yell for the panting beasts to stop, when the plough is caught by a hidden rock too large for it to overturn, and the euiemn slowness with which the procession winds, and creaks, and groans along, gives tc iio languid citizen, who chances to pass by, a new idea of hard work, and a new sense of the happiness of his lot. l i

The farm owLed by Zaccheus Greeley when his son Horace waa oorn, was four or five miles from the village of Amherst. It consisted of fifty acres of land — heavy land to till — rocky, moi a t, and uneven, worth then eight hundred dollars, now two thousand The house, a small, unpainted, but substantial and well-built farrj • liouse, stood, and still stands, upon a ledge or platform, half wa5 up a high, steep, and rocky hill, commanding an extensive and al most panoramic view of the surrounding country. In whatever direction the boy may have looked, he saw rock. Kock is the feature of the landscape. There is rock in the old orchard behind the house; rocks peep out from the grass in the pastures; there is rock along the road ; rock on the sides of the hills ; rock on their summits ; rock in the valleys ; rock in the woods ; — rock, rock, everywhere rock. And yet the country has not a barren look. I should call it a serious looking country ; one that would be congeniaJ to grim covenanters and exiled round-heads. The prevailing colors are dark, even in the brightest month of the year. The pine woods, the rock, the shade of the hill, the color of the soil, are all dark and serious. It is a still, unfrequented region. One may ride along the road upon which the house stands, for many a mile, without passing a single vehicle. The turtles hobble across the road fearless of the crushing wheel. If any one wished to know the ful meaning of the word country, as distinguished from the word £owr, he need do no more than ascend the hill on which Horace Greeley saw the light, and look around.

Yet, the voice of the city is heard even there ; the opinions of the city influence there ; for, observe, in the very room in which our hero was born, on a table which stands where, in other days, a bed stood, we recognize, among the heap of newspapers, the well known heading of the "Weekly Tribune.

Such was the character of the region in which Horace Greeley passed the greater part of the first seven years of his life. H's father's neighbors were all hard-working farmers — men who worked their own farms — who were nearly equal in wealth, and to whom the idea of social inequality, founded upon an inequality in possessions, did not exist, even as an idea. Wealth and went we/e a" ike unknown. It was a community of plain people, wfc t had dei jved all their book-knowledge from the d'strict scnoo^and depended

HORACE LEARNS TO READ. 3

upon the village newspaper for their knowledge o: the world without. There were no heretics among them. All tLe people eithei cordially embraced or undoubtingly assented to the faith called Orthodox, and all of them attended, more or less regularly, tha ;h arches in which that faith was expounded.

The first great peril of his existence escaped, the hoy grew apace, and passed through the minor and ordinary dangers of infancy without having his equanimity seriously disturbed. He was a u quiet and peaceable child," reports his father, and, though far from robust, suffered little from actual sickness.

To say that Horaoe Greeley, from the earliest months of his existence, manifested signs of extraordinary intelligence, is only to repeat what every biographer asserts of his hero, and every mother of her child. Yet, common-place as it is, the truth must be told. Horace lireeley did, as a very young child, manifest signs of extraordinary «ntelligence. He took to learning with the promptitude and instinctive, irrepressible love, with which a duck is said to take to the water. His first instructor was his mother ; and never was there a mother better calculated to awaken the mind of a child, and «eep it awake, than Mrs. Greeley.

Tall, muscular, well-formed, with the strength of a man without uis coarseness, active in her habits, not only capable of hard work, but delighting in it, with a perpetual overflow of animal spirits, an exhaustless store of songs, ballads and stones, and a boundless, exuberant good will toward all living things, Mrs. Greeley was the 'ife of the house, the favorite of the neighborhood, the natural *riend and ally of children ; whatever she did she did " with a will.'* She was a great reader, and remembered all she read. "Sha worked," says one of my informants, " in doors and out of doors, could out-rake any man in the town, and could load the hay-wag ons as fast and as well as her husband. She hoed in the garden ; Bhe labored in the field ; and, while doing more than the work of an ordinary man and an ordinary woman combined, would laugh and Bing all day long, and tell stories all the evening."

To these stories the boy listened greedily, as he sat on the flooi at he: feet, -while she spun and talked with equal energy. They " served," says Mr. Greeley, in a passage already quoted, " to awaken in me a thirst f >r knowledge, and a lively interest in learning and history." Think of it, you word-mongering, gerund-grinding «aub.ers who delight in signs and symbols, and figures end " facts," and feed little children's souls on the dry, innutrtious husks of Knowledge ; and think of it, you play -abhorring, fiction-ft rbidding parents ! Awaken the interest in learning, and the thirst for knowledge, and there is no predicting what may or what may not result from it. Scarcely a man, distinguished for the supremacy or thd beauty of his immortal part, has written the history of his childhood without recording the fact that the celestial fire was first kirdled In his soul by means similar to those which awakened an " ir .erest in learning" and a "thirst for knowledge" in the mind of Horace Greeley.

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, — rigl t-side up, up-side down, or sidewise.

His third winter Horace spent at the house of his grandfather, David Woodburn, in Londonderry, attended the district schooi there, and distinguished himself greatly. He had no right to attend the Londonderry school, and the people of the rural districts

A DISTRICT SCHOOL FORTY TEARS AGO. O

are apt to be strenuous upon the point of not admitting to theii school pupils from other towns ; but Horace was an engaging child; "every one liked the little, white-headed fellow," says a surviving member of the school committee, "and 60 we ravored him."

A district school — and what was a district school forty yeare ago ? He race Greeley never attended any but a district school, an<? it concerns us to know what manner of place it was, and what was its routine of exercises.

The school-house stood in an open place, formed (usually) by the crossing of roads. It was very small, and of one story ; contained one apartment, had two windows on each side, a small door in the gable end that faced the road, and a low door-step before it. It was the thing called house, in its simplest form. But for its roof, windows, and door, it had been a box, large, rough, and unpainted. Within and without, it was destitute of anything ornamental. It was not enclosed by a fence ; it was not shaded by a tree. The sun in summer, the winds in winter, had their will of it : there was nothing to avert the fury of either. The log school-houses of the previous generation were picturesque and comfortable ; those of the present time are as prim, neat, and orderly (and as elegant some- Mines) as the cottage of an old maid who enjoys an annuity ; but the echool-house of forty years ago had an aspect singularly forlorn and uninviting. It was built for an average of thirty pupils, but it frequently contained fifty ; and then the little school-room was a compact mass of young humanity : the teacher had to dispense with tiis table, and was lucky if he could find room for his chair. The side of the apartment opposite the door was occupied, chiefly, by a vast fireplace, four or five feet wide, where a carman's load of wood could burn in one prodigious fire. Along the sides of the room was a low, slanting shelf, which served for a desk to those who wrote, and against the sharp edge of which the elder pupils leaned when they were not writing. The seats were made of " slabs," inverted, supported on sticks, and without backs. The elder pupils sat along the sides of the room, — the girls on one side, the boys on the other ; the youngest sat nearest the fire, where they were as much too warm as those win sat near the door were too cold. In a school ©f forty pupils, th'jre would be a dozen who were grown up, mar

D EAKLY CHILDHOOD.

riageable young men and women. Not unfreqi.entl) married men, and occasionally married women, attended school in the winter. Among the younger pupils, there were usually a dozen who could not read, and half as many who did not know the alphabet. The teacher was, perhaps, one of the farmer's sons of the district, whi? knew a little more than his elder pupils, and only a little; or hf was a student who was working his way through college. Hii wages were those of a farm-laborer, ten or twelve dollars a month and his board. He boarded " round" i. e. he lived a few days at each of the houses of the district, stopping longest, at the most agreeable place. The grand qualification of a teacher was the ability "to do" any sum in the arithmetic. To know arithmetic was to be a learned man. Generally, the teacher was very young, sometimes not more than sixteen years old ; but, if he possessed the due expertness at figures, if he could read the Bible without stumbling over the long words, and without mispronouncing more than two thirds of the proper names, if he could write well enough to set a decent copy, if he could mend a pen, if he had vigor enough of character to assert his authority, and strength enough of arm to maintain it, he would do. The school began at nine in the morning, and the arrival of that hour was announced by the teacher's rapping upon the window frame with a ruler. The boys, and the girls too, came tumbling in, rosy and glowing, from their snowballing and sledding. The first thing done in school was reading. The " first class," consisting of that third of the pupils who could read best, stood on the floor and read round once, each individual reading about half a page of the English Reader. Then the second class. Then the third. Last of all, the youngest children said their letters. By that time, a third of the morning was over ; and then the reading began again; for public opinion demanded of the teacher that he should hear every pupil read four times a day, twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon. Those who were not in the class reading, were employed, or were supposed to be employed, in ciphering or writing. When they wanted to write, they went to the teacher with their writing-book and pen, and he set a copy, — *' Procrastination is the thief of time," " Contentment is a virtue," >r some other wise saw, — and mended the pen. When they were muzzled with a "sum," they went to the teacher to have it elucidat-

THE SPELLING SCHOOL. i

ed. They seem to have written and ciphered as much or as little as they chose, at what time they chose, and in what manner. Ir Borne schools there were classes in arithmetic and regular instruc tion in writing, and one class in grammar ; but such schools, forty years ago. were rare. The exercises of the morning were concluded with a general spell, the teacher giving out the words from a spelling book, and the pupils spelling them at the top of their voices. At noon the school was dismissed ; at one it was summoned again {o go through, for the next three hours, precisely the same routine as that of the morning. In this rude way the last generation of children learned to read, write, and cipher. But they learned something more in those rude Cohool-houses. They learned obedience. They were tamed and disciplined. The means employed were extremely unscientific, but the thing was done! The means, in fact, were merely a ruler, and what w T as called, in contradistinction to that milder weapon, " the heavy gad ;" by which expression was designated five feet of elastic sapling of one year's growth. These two implements were plied vigorously and often. Girls got their full share of them. Girls old enough to be wives were no more exempt than the young men old enough to marry them, who sat on the other side of the schoolroom. It was thought, that if a youth of either sex was not too old to do wrong, neither he nor she was too old to suffer the consequences. In some districts, a teacher was valued in proportion to his severity ; and if he were backward in applying the ferule and the " gad," the parents soon began to be uneasy. They thought he had no energy, and inferred that the children could not be learning much. In the district schools, then, of forty years ago, all the pupils learned to read and to obey ; most of them learned to write ; many acquired a competent knowledge of figures; a few learned the rudiments of grammar; and if any learned more than these, it was generally due to their unassisted and unencouraged exertions. There were no school -libraries at that time. The teachers usually possessed little general information, and the little they did possess was not often made to contribute to the mental nourishment of their pupils.

On one of the first benches of the Londonderry school-house, neai the fire, we may imagine the little white-headed fellow, whom every body liked, to be seated during the winters of 1813-14 and'ld-'lS. Ha

(t EARLY CHILDHOOD.

was «j«ger to go to school. When the snow lay on the ground in drifts too deep for him to wade through, one of his aunts, who still lives to tell the story, would take him up on her shoulders aDd carry him to the door. He was the possessor that winter, of thre« books, the " Columbian Orator," Morse's Geography, and a spelling book. From the Columbian Orator, he learned many pieces bj heart, and among others, that very celebrated oration which prob ably the majority of the inhabitants of this nation have at some p»» riad of their lives been able to repeat, beginning,

*' You 'd scarce expect one of my age To speak in public on the stage."

One of his schoolfellows has a vivid remembrance of Horace's re citing this piece before the whole school in Londonderry, before lie was old enough to utter the words plainly. He had a lisping, winning little voice, says my informant, but spoke with the utmost confidence, and greatly to the amusement of the school. He spoke the piece so often in public and private, as to become, as it were, identified with it, as a man who knows one song suggests that long by his presence, and is called upon to sing it wherever he goes.

It is a pity that no one thinks of the vast importance of those M Orators " and reading books which the children read and wear out in reading, learning parts of them by heart, and repeating them over and over, till they become fixed in the memory and embedded in the character forever. And it is a pity that those books should contain so much false sentiment, inflated language, Buncombe oratory, and other trash, as they generally do ! To compile a series of Reading Books for the common schools of this country, were a task for a conclave of the wisest and best men and women that ever lived; a task worthy of them, both from itt difficulty and the incalculable extent of its possible results.

Spelling was the passion of the little orator during the first winters of his attendance at school. He spelt incessantly in school and out of school. He would lie on the floor at his grandfather's house, for hours at a time, spelling hard words, all that he could find m the Bible and the few other books withiD his reach. It was th«

RECOLLECTIONS OF HIS SURVIVING SCHOOLFELLOWS. \l

standing amusement of the family to try and puzzle the boy with words, and no one remembers succeeding. Spelling, moreover, was one of the great points of the district schools in those days, and he who could out-spell, or, as the phrase was, u spell down " the whole school, ranked second only to him who surpassed the rest in arithmetic. Those were the palmy days of the spell ingsch'jol. The pupils assembled once a week, voluntarily, at the school-house, chose " sides," and contended with one another long and earnestly for the victory. Horace, young as he was, was eager to attend the spelling school, and was never known to injure the "side" on which he was chosen by missing a word, and it soon became a prime object at the spelling-school to get the first choice, because that enabled the lucky side to secure the powerful aid of Horace Greeley. He is well remembered by his companions in orthography. They delight still to tell of the little fellow, in the long evenings, falling asleep in his place, and when it came his turn, his neighbors gave him an anxious nudge, and he would wake instantly, spell off his word, and drop asleep again in a moment.

Horace went to school three terms in Londonderry, spending part of each year at home. I will state as nearly as possible in their own words, what his school-fellows there remember of him.

One of them can just recall him as a very small boy with ahead as white as snow, who " was alractet always up head in his class, and took it so much to heart when he did happen to lose his place, that he would cry bitterly ; so that some boys when they had gained the right to get above him, declined the honor, because it hurt Horace's feelings so." He was the pet of the school. Those whom he used to excel most signally liked him as well as the rest. He was an active, bright, eager boy, but not fond of play, and seldom took part in the sports of the other boys. One muster day, this informant remembers, the clergyman of Londonderry, who had heard glowing accounts of Horace's feats at school, took him on his lap in the field, questioned him a long time, tried to puzzle him with hard words, and concluded by saying with strong emphasis to one of the boy's relatives, " Mark my words, Mr. Woodburn, that boy was not made for nothing."

Another, besides confirming the above, adds that Horace was m eome respects exceedingly brave, and in others exceedingly tim orous. He was never afraid of the dark, could not be frightened by ghost-stories, never was abashed in speaking or reciting, wa» not to be overawed by supposed superiority of knowledge or rank, would talk up to the teacher and question his decision with perfect freedom, though never in a spirit of impertinence. Yet he could not stand up to a boy and fight. When attacked, he would neither fight nor run away, but " stand still and take it." His ear was so delicately constructed that any loud noise, like the report of a gun, would almost throw him into Convulsions. If a gun were about to be discharged, he would either run away as fast as his legs could carry him, or else would throw himself upon the ground and stuff grass into his ears to deaden the dreadful noise. On the fourth of July, when the people of Londonderry inflamed their patriotism by a copious consumption of gunpowder, Horace would run into the woods to get beyond the sound of the cannons and pistols. It was at Londonderry, and about his fourth year, that Horace began the habit of reading or book-devouring, which ho never lost during all the years of his boyhood, youth, and apprenticeship, and relinquished only when he entered that most exacting of all professions, the editorial. The gentleman whose reminiscences I am now recording, tells me that Horace in his fifth and sixth years, would lie under a tree on his face, reading hour after hour, completely absorbed in his book ; and " if no one stumbled over him or stirred him up," would read on, unmindful of dinnei time and 6un-set, as long as he could see. It was his delight ii books that made him, when little more than an infant, determim to be a printer, as printers, he supposed, were they who made books 44 One day," 6ays this gentleman, " Horace and I went to a black smith's shop, and Horace watched the process of horse-shoeing with much interest. The blacksmith, observing how intently he looked on, said, ' You 'd better come with me and learn the trade.' ' No," said Horace in his prompt, decided way, ' I 'm going to be a printer.' He was then six years old, and very small for his age ; and this positive choice of a career by so diminutive a piece of humanity mightily amused the by-standers. The blacksmith used to tell the Btory with great glee when Horace was a printer, and one of some note."

Another gentleman, who went to school with Horace at Londor*

R£C0LL3CTI0NS OF HIS SURVIVING SCHOOLFELLOWS. 11

Aerry, writes : — " I think I attended school with Horace Greeley two summers and two winters, but have no recollection of seeing him except at the school-house. He was an exceedingly mild, quiet and inoffensive child, entirely devoted to his books at school. It used to be said in the neighborhood, that he was the same out of school, and that his parents were obliged to secrete his books to prevent his injuring himself by over study. His devotion to his books, together with the fact of his great advancement beyond others of his age in the few studies then pursued in the district school, rendered him notorious in that part of the town. He waa regarded as a prodigy, and his name was a household world. He was looked upon as standing alone, and entirely unapproachable by auy of the little mortals around him. Reading, parsing, and spelling are the only branches of learning which I remember him in, or in connection with which his name was at that time mentioned, though he might have given some attention to writing and arithmetic, which completed the circle of studies in the district school at that time; but in the three branches first named he excelled all, even in the winter school, which was attended by several young men and women, some of whom became teachers soon after. Though mild and quiet, he was ambitious in the school ; to be at the head of his class, and be accounted the best scholar in school, seemed to be prominent objects with him, and to furnish strong motives to effort.

I can recall but one instance of his missing a word in tho spelling class. The classes went on to the floor to spell, and he al most invariably stood at the head of the i first class,' embracing the most advanced scholars. He stood there at the time referred to, and by missing a word, lost his place, which so grieved him that he wept like a punished child. While I knew him he did not engage with other children in the usual recreations said amusements of the school grounds ; as soon as the school was dismissed at noon, he would start for home, a distance of half a mile, with all his books u:der his arm, including the New Testament, Webster's Spelling Book, English Reader &c, and would not return till the last moment of intermission ; at least such was his practice in the summer time. With regard to his aptness in spelling, it used to be said that the minister of the town, Rev. Mr. McGregor, once attempted to find a w ~d or name in the Bible which he could n<>( spell correctly, but hOied to do so. I always supposed, however that this was an exaggeration, for he could not have been more than seven years old at the time this was told. My father soon after removed to another town thirty miles distant, and I lost sight of the family entirely, Horace and all, though I always remembered the gentle, flaxen-haired schoolmate with much interest, and often wondered what became of him ; and when the ' Log Cabin ' appeared, I took much pains to assure myself whether this Horace Greeley was the same little Horace grown up, and found it was."