The Dominant Journalist Of Our Defining Era

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Ulysses Grant, who defeated him for the presidency, called him a “genius without common sense.” Abraham Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, recalled that “He dipped his pen of infallibility into his ink of omniscience with as little self-distrust as a child plays with matches.” Yet, Henry Ward Beecher, one of the leading preachers of the age, declared in his eulogy that “He was feet for the lame; he was tongue for the dumb; he was an eye for the blind; and he had a heart for those who had none to sympathize with them.” Horace Greeley’s self assessment was more modest. “I can write better slang than any editor in America,” he said.

Greeley indisputably was the leading newspaperman of his age, 19th-century America’s answer to Benjamin Franklin. Like Franklin, he began as an apprentice printer; like Franklin he soon founded a leading paper of his own; like Franklin he soon blurred the lines between journalism and politics. But there the comparison stalls. Where Franklin is lionized three centuries after his birth, Greeley is little remembered today, except perhaps as the author of a phrase he may not have uttered, “Go west, young man.”

But Greeley’s was a remarkable life, and Robert Williams paints it in full in “Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom” (New York University Press, 411 pages, $34.95).

Here is the story of Greeley’s New York Tribune, founded in 1841 and by 1860 the largest paper not only in New York or the United States but the entire world, with a staff of 350. By the end of the Civil War, the Tribune was selling 95,000 copies a day in New York – more than the combined circulation of all daily newspapers in New York at the time the Tribune was founded – while a weekly edition that sold throughout the country topped 200,000 in circulation.

Beyond this, Greeley was a man of parts. President of the New York Printers’ Union, he nevertheless opposed the right to strike. A daily journalist by trade, he also published long-form works and served as literary agent for Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. An early version of Thoreau’s “Walden” made its first appearance in Greeley’s Tribune. Like all great publishers, Greeley collected outstanding reporters and editors. In his case, the reporters included Mark Twain – and Karl Marx. One Greeley protege, Henry Raymond, founded the New York Times; another, Charles Dana, led The New York Sun for nearly three decades.

Greeley may not have said “Go west, young man,” and Thoreau had earlier made the essential point when he wrote, “Eastward I go only by force, but westward I go free.” But Greeley was an early and consistent supporter of a transcontinental railroad and what became the Homestead Act.

Yet, his political judgment was far from sure, and this brings us closer to the essence of why his legacy seems so limited. He opposed the admission of Texas to the Union. Although an early Republican, he favored Stephen Douglas over Lincoln in the 1858 Senate race in Illinois (as a tactic, eventually successful, to divide the Democratic Party along sectional lines in the 1860 campaign).

In fact, it was Lincoln whom Greeley most grievously and consistently misjudged. The two men briefly served together in the House of Representatives in 1848-49, Greeley’s only time in public office – and Lincoln’s only such experience before the White House. But at the Republican Convention of 1860 Greeley preferred Edward Bates, who later became Lincoln’s attorney general; four years later, even less wisely, Greeley opposed Lincoln’s re-nomination. His last editorial challenging Lincoln was scheduled to be printed the night of the president’s assassination.

As Mr. Williams writes, “Greeley wanted slavery to disappear, even at the cost of the Union. Lincoln wanted the Union to survive, whether or not slavery was eliminated.” But Lincoln kept his nerve throughout the trials of civil war, while Greeley did not. In 1862, in an open letter to Lincoln modestly headlined the “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” Greeley called for immediate emancipation. But in 1863, after Lincoln had made his Emancipation Proclamation, Greeley wrote that “it is almost impossible to make a good war or a bad peace.”

Greeley was a complicated man. Immensely successful as a publisher, he sought elective office, for which he seemed patently ill-suited, repeatedly in the years just after the Civil War, running for the United States Senate in 1867, New York State comptroller in 1869, the House in 1870, and finally president in 1872. In this last campaign, remarkably, Greeley gained the nomination of a rump group of so-called liberal Republicans to challenge President Grant and the corruption he seemed to represent. Lacking any real alternative, the Democrats then handed Greeley their nomination as well. Opportunistically accepting the Democratic nod probably ended whatever slight chance Greeley had of winning. His campaign faltered, then collapsed, his invalid wife died just before election day, and Greeley himself, a broken man, died even before the Electoral College could confirm his defeat at the polls. He was 61.

Mr. Williams does a creditable job relating all of this, and his book is thoroughly researched, and ably written, if occasionally repetitive. The book is longer on narrative, however, than insight. We learn at the outset that Greeley may have suffered from birth from Asperger’s Syndrome and along the way that he suffered three apparent nervous breakdowns, at the death of his son in 1849, in the face of the Union defeat at Bull Run in 1861, and finally at the death of his long-suffering wife. But Greeley’s writing is better explicated here than is his personality. Mr. Williams’s continuing theme of Greeley’s relationship to evolving notions of liberty and freedom is solid, but is more memorably outlined in David Hackett Fischer’s “Liberty and Freedom” (2004) with hardly any mention of Greeley seeming necessary.

That said, the Civil War remains the central event of American history, and Horace Greeley was unquestionably the dominant journalist, and one of the leading politicians, of the Civil War era. And his story has never been better told than it is here.

Mr. Tofel last wrote for these pages about the birth of journalism in America.


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