Horace Greeley Horace
Greeley was a man of his word who, in a time when street corner
philosophers were common, was America’s pre-eminent street corner
philosopher. How Greeley came to have such a prominent voice and such
immense influence on public opinion is at the least an extraordinary
curiosity. He had a prodigious memory from childhood, an overweening
ambition and developed a remarkable debating prowess at a young age. When
he was only 15, his reputation as a wordsmith with a biting wit drew
crowds to the East Poultney Green where he would engage adults in debate
on every manner of subject. Unlike journalism from the early twentieth
century on, local newspapers through most of the nineteenth century felt
free to hazard views on issues of war and peace, emancipation, women’s
suffrage and the wisdom of building canals and railroads across the
country. By
his mid-twenties, Greeley would rise above the crowded field of journalism
and assume editorship of the New York Tribune. The Tribune was the most powerful paper in the
country, with the largest readership. The reach of Greeley’s views and
his passionate commitment to a variety of causes were profound at a time
when newspaper readership was growing exponentially. His newspaper career
extending from the 1830s until the time of his death in 1872 influenced
the careers of contemporaries like Henry David Thoreau, for whom he was a
publicist; Frederick Law Olmstead whose works were serialized in the
Tribune; Abraham Lincoln of whom he urged in 1862 to abolish slavery
without compromise while Lincoln wrote to him only that “…we should
urge it persuasively, and not menacingly, upon the South…[and that]… I
am a little uneasy about the abolishment of slavery in the District”;
and Albert Brisbane the social activist who first brought the utopian
scheme of Charles Fourier to Greeley’s attention – it is doubtful that
Brook Farm in Massachusetts or the phalansteries in Red Bank, New Jersey and
Sylvania, Pennsylvania would have been established without Greeley’s
sponsorship and publicity. He was likely the most
influential person in America yet in appearance seemed a peculiar figure. Vanity
Fair of London wrote of him “He is a plain, rather foolish old
gentleman with a journalistic training and a taste for wild beliefs and
agricultural pursuits.”
One of the most remarkable feats of misjudgment ever put in print.
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