GREELEY, HORACE (1811-1872), American journalist and statesman, was born at Amherst, N.H., on Feb. 3, 181 i. His parents were exceedingly poor and he secured little education. At 14 he became an apprentice in the printing office of The Northern Spectator at East Poultney, Vt. Here he developed a passion for politics and came to be depended upon for more or less of the editing of the paper. In June 183o The Northern Spectator was suspended. Experiencing difficulties in obtaining employment, he went to New York.
By 1838 he had gained such standing as a writer that he was selected by Thurlow Weed, William H. Seward and other leaders of the Whig Party, for the editorship of a campaign paper entitled The Je ff ersonian, published at Albany. So satisfactory was this campaign sheet that on May 2, 1840, some time after the nomina tion by the Whig Party of William Henry Harrison for the presi dency, Greeley began the publication of a new weekly campaign paper The Log Cabin. It was a brilliant political success, but was not profitable, and in Sept. 1841 Greeley merged his weekly papers, The Log Cabin and The New Yorker, into The Weekly Tribune which soon attained a circulation of a quarter of a million. In the meantime (April 1o, 1841) he had begun the publication of a daily newspaper called The Tribune.
From the founding of The Tribune Greeley was popularly identified with this paper and its share in public discussion of the time is his history. It was a financial success, and his assured income should have placed him beyond pecuniary worry. But he lacked business thrift, inherited a disposition to endorse for his friends, and was often unable to distinguish between deserving applicants for aid and adventurers. He was thus frequently straitened, and, as his necessities pressed, he sold successive in terests in his newspaper.
Antislavery Leader.—It is as an antislavery leader, and as perhaps the chief agency in educating the mass of the Northern people to that opposition through legal forms to the extension of slavery which culminated in the election of Lincoln and the Civil war, that Greeley's main work was done. Incidents in it were his vehement opposition to the Mexican War as a scheme for more slave territory, the assault made upon him in Washington by Con gressman Albert Rust of Arkansas in 1856, an indictment in Virginia in the same year for circulating incendiary documents, perpetual denunciation of him in Southern newspapers and speeches, and the hostility of the Abolitionists, who regarded his course as too conservative. His antislavery work culminated in his appeal to President Lincoln, entitled "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," in which he urged "that all attempts to put down the rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause" were preposterous and futile, and that "every hour of deference to slavery" was "an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union." The Politician.—Greeley's political activity, first as a Whig, and then as one of the founders of the Republican Party, was in cessant; but he held few offices. His failure to hold greater political favour was due chiefly to his candour and idiosyncrasy. In 1848-49 he served a three months' term in Congress, filling a vacancy. He introduced the first bill for giving small tracts of Government land free to actual settlers, and published an exposure of abuses in the allowance of mileage to members, which corrected the evil. In the Republican National convention in 186o, serving as a delegate for Oregon, Greeley actively opposed Seward and did much to prevent the success of that statesman, and to bring about instead the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. In 1861 he was a candidate for U.S. senator, but was defeated. At the outbreak of the war he favoured allowing the Southern States to secede, provided a majority of their people at a fair election should so decide.
When the war began he urged the most vigorous prosecution of it. In 1864 he urged negotiations for peace with representatives of the Southern Confederacy then in Canada, and was sent by President Lincoln to confer with them. They were found to have no sufficient authority. At the close of the war, contrary to the general feeling of his party, he urged universal amnesty and im partial suffrage as the basis of reconstruction. In 1867 his friends again wished to elect him to the U.S. Senate, but he was defeated. Later he signed the bail bond of Jefferson Davis, an this provoked a torrent of public indignation. The second volume of his popular history of the Civil War was just issued, and the subscribers in their anger refused by thousands to receive it. An unsuccessful attempt was also made to expel him from the Union League Club of New York. In 1867 he was a delegate-at-large to the conven tion for the revision of the State Constitution, and in 1869 and 1870 he was the Republican candidate for controller of the State and member to Congress respectively, but was defeated.
Leader of Liberal Republicans.—Greeley was dissatisfied with Grant's administration, and became its sharp critic. The dis content which he did much to develop ended in the organization of the Liberal Republican Party, which held its national conven tion at Cincinnati in 1872, and nominated Greeley for the presi dency. The tide of feeling ran strongly in his favour until the Democrats, his life-long opponents, also nominated him. His old party associates regarded him as a renegade ; the Democrats gave him a half-hearted support. In August he made a series of campaign speeches which were regarded at the time by both friends and opponents as among the most brilliant continuous exhibitions of varied intellectual power ever made by a candidate in a presidential canvass. General Grant received in the election 3,597,070 votes, Greeley Closing Events.—He had resigned his editorship of The Tribune immediately after the nomination ; he now resumed it cheerfully; but it was soon apparent that his powers had been overstrained. For years he had suffered greatly from insomnia. During the intense excitement of the campaign the difficulty was increased. Returning from his campaign tour, he went imme diately to the bedside of his dying wife, and for some weeks had practically no sleep at all. This resulted in delirium. He died on Nov. 29, 1872. His funeral was a simple but impressive public pageant. The body lay in state in the City Hall, where it was viewed by thousands of mourners. The ceremonies were attended by the president and vice-president of the United States, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and a large number of eminent public men of both parties. He had been the target of constant attack during his life. But his death revealed the high regard in which he was generally held as a leader of opinion and faithful public servant. He was a Universalist, and for many years was a conspicuous member of the leading Universalist church in New York.
His published works are: Hints Toward Reforms (1850) ; Glances at Europe (1851) ; History of the Struggle for Slavery Extension (i856) ; Overland Journey to San Francisco (185o) ; The American Conflict (1864-66) ; Recollections of a Busy Life (i868; new edition, with appendix containing an account of his later years, his argument with Owen on marriage and divorce, and miscellanies, 1873) ; Essays on Political Economy (1870) ; and What I Know of Farming (i871). He also assisted his brother-in-law, J. F. Cleveland, in editing A Political Textbook (186o), and supervised for many years the annual issues of The Whig Almanac and The Tribune Almanac, comprising extensive political statistics.
The best Lives of Greeley are those by J. Parton (1855; new ed., 1872) and W. A. Linn (19o3). Lives have also been written by L. U. Reavis (1872), L. D. Ingersoll (1873) ; F. N. Zabriskie (1890) and D. C. Seitz (1926) ; and there is a Memorial of Horace Greeley