# History of Journalism in the United States/Chapter 20

CHAPTER XX
GREELEY AND THE TRIBUNE
Reasons for the Tribune—Greeley's early life—Through Pennsylvania—Morning Post—Thurlow Weed—Seward, Weed & Greeley partnership—Description of Weed—Log Cabin and Harrison campaign—Tribune open for liberal ideas—Hard times in New York—Free soil party encouraged.
Nominally, the New York Tribune was brought out as a protest against the sensational journalism that Bennett was offering in the Herald. There were also political reasons, the principal one being that the Whigs desired a paper that would appeal to the laboring classes, who were unable to get a Whig paper for a penny.
"I had been incited to this enterprise," Greeley relates, "by several Whig friends, who deemed a cheap daily, addressed more especially to the laboring class, eminently needed in our city, where the only two cheap journals then and still existing—the Sun and the Herald—were in decided, though unavowed, and therefore more effective, sympathy and affiliation with the Democratic party.
"My leading idea was the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other. Party spirit is so fierce and intolerant in this country that the editor of a non-partisan sheet is restrained from saying what he thinks and feels on the most vital, imminent topics; while, on the other hand, a Democrat, Whig, or Republican journal is generally expected to praise or blame, ​like or dislike, eulogize or condemn, in precise accordance with the views and interest of the party. I believed there was a happy medium between these extremes,—a position from which a journalist might openly and heartily advocate the principles and commend the measures of that party to which his convictions allied him, yet frankly dissent from its course on a particular question, and even denounce its candidates if they were shown to be deficient in capacity or (far worse) in integrity. I felt that a journal thus loyal to its guiding convictions, yet ready to expose and condemn unworthy conduct or incidental error on the part of men attached to its party, must be far more effective, even party-wise, than though it might always be counted on to applaud or reprobate, bless or curse, as the party's prejudices or immediate interest might seem to prescribe. Especially by the Whigs—who were rather the loosely aggregated, mainly undisciplined opponents of a great party, than, in the stricter sense, a party themselves—did I feel that such a journal was consciously needed, and would be fairly sustained."
The story of Horace Greeley and the New York Tribune is of the best American tradition. It is a more important part of American history than the stories of some presidential administrations. It has been accepted as an important event in the history of the press, but has not been given its proper place in that of American politics.
The history of American journalism that begins with Benjamin Harris and Publick Occurances might properly end with Greeley and the Tribune. The world that pilloried and imprisoned Harris atoned amply to Greeley. The battle for the right to criticize government and to make it more human, the battle that began with Harris, ​was brought to a victorious and dramatic close by Greeley. From the time when Harris presumed to tell the government what it should not do in the matter of waging barbarous warfare, till the time when Greeley did tell the government what to do, when he became the most influential single figure in the selection of the country's presidents, there is a steady, never-failing progression. One might almost expect to find a blood descent from one to the other; indeed, the rise of journalistic power, from Harris to Greeley, moves with a precision such as marked the development of an ancient dynasty.
But Greeley, for all the good that he did and all the power that he had—and he never used power but for good—was not a happy man, and he founded no dynasty. The great paper that he founded passed to another on his death, and Whitelaw Reid, the man who succeeded him—with none of his struggles or handicaps—was a much happier man, and achieved far greater honors.
Greeley himself tells us that from childhood he so loved and devoured newspapers that he early resolved to be a printer. Born on a rocky farm in New Hampshire in 1811, he was only eleven years of age when, hearing that an apprentice was wanted in a newspaper office at Whitehall, he went with his father to obtain the job, but he was rejected because of his youth.
In the spring of 1826 another opportunity came, when the Northern Spectator at East Poultney, Vermont, advertised for an apprentice. The spirit of the times is revealed in the fact that the citizens of the town of East Poultney had decided to finance the journal, private capital having come to the conclusion that there was no profit in the undertaking.
Greeley's father was moving for the west, one of the ​great number who had grown tired of the struggle for existence in the east, and in consequence was very glad to allow young Horace to make arrangements with the publishers at East Poultney. This was done, and the boy went to work for his board, with the understanding that after he became twenty years of age, he was to receive $40 a year—less than a dollar a week. This helps us to understand why men were willing to seek opportunity in the western wilderness.
His apprenticeship over, Greeley started out to seek his "future," a cardinal belief of young America of that time being that the golden opportunity awaited him who persistently sought it. Romantic though this seems now, it was the spirit that made possible the emigration of great numbers. He traveled from East Poultney to Lake Erie and thence to his father's house in Pennsylvania, catching steamboats when possible, or a canal boat now and then, but, for the greater part of the journey, afoot. Such a trip, which now takes but ten or twelve hours, at that time could not be made in less than two weeks.
After exhausting the possibilities of the printing shops in Chautauqua County, Greeley visited Erie, Pennsylvania (about 1830), and worked on the Gazette, which had been started twenty years before by Joseph M. Sterrett; this was, he says, the first newspaper on which he had ever worked that made any money for its owner.
On his way back he applied, unsuccessfully, for a position on the Wyoming Herald in Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania. He now began to realize that there was a surfeit of printers traveling about the country, and he turned toward the great city.
Between 1818 and 1830, he tells us, thousands and tens of thousands of men were unwillingly idle. The country that had once boasted its political unanimity was now ​torn in dissension. As men contemplated their condition, they turned bitterly to the government for some kind of relief. The country suffered from a dearth of money and, as the pressing need for money increased and merchants and banks struggled to avert bankruptcy, the political furies enveloped the East, especially the city of New York, which was rapidly becoming the financial center of the nation.
When Greeley arrived in New York in August, 1831—a tall, thin country boy of twenty—he had not a friend within two hundred miles and only ten dollars in his pocket.
On the first day he visited two-thirds of the printing offices on Manhattan Island, before securing employment. For the next eighteen months he worked at odd jobs, but managed to save money; he was then induced by Dr. D. H. Shepherd to start a small printing shop, with the idea of putting out a cheap paper. The forty dollars' worth of type needed for this enterprise was bought on credit.
Shepherd was the originator of the idea of a cheap paper, his belief being that a paper sold on the streets by newsboys would be a great success. The Morning Post, as the new venture was called, came out January 1, 1833, but, a terrible storm having driven the people off the streets, no one bought the paper. The enterprise lasted but three weeks.
This experience had given Greeley a taste for editorship, and with only enough money to pay the printer, he shortly afterward brought out the New Yorker, a small paper of literary and general intelligence. This was established in 1834 and attracted immediate attention among those interested in politics. "Those who read it became Whigs." His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism, attract ​ing thousands of readers by his marvelous gift of expression and the broad sympathies and clear discernments that characterized his writings.
Although Bennett never referred to it, Greeley's friendly biographer is authority for the statement that, while he was conducting his job office, under the name of Greeley and Company, James Gordon Bennett, "a person then well known as a smart writer for the press," visited him one day and, exhibiting fifty dollars and some other notes of smaller denomination as his cash capital, invited him to join in setting up a new daily paper.
With his modest venture, the New Yorker, Horace Greeley began his rise to power and influence, for among those attracted by his writings was one of the strongest and most interesting characters in American history,—Thurlow Weed, the "man behind the scenes." Weed was the first real political boss of New York State. He was a journalist of ability, but his sole interest in life was politics. To a great extent he modeled his life on that of the man whom he later displaced, Edwin Croswell. Croswell was state printer, the editor of the Albany Argus, a politician of consummate ability and the journalistic advisor of the "Albany Regency," the powerful ring that governed Democratic politics. What he did in a small way, Weed did On a large scale, achieving such wealth, power and influence as no politician before him had even dreamed of.
Weed's early life was not unlike that of Greeley, though not marked by the same poverty. He began his active journalistic career by enlisting Whig support for a paper with which to fight the influential Albany Argus, ​and, on March 22, 1830, he establlshed the Albany Evening Journal.
At the time when Greeley came to Weed's attention the Whigs were about to enter the campaign of 1838, with William H. Seward, then the bright particular star of the party, as their candidate for governor. Weed was Seward's friend and advisor—a very Warwick. He was preeminently "practical"; being political boss of the state, he knew how to raise large campaign contributions. A weekly Whig paper was needed for this campaign, and Weed decided that the editor of the New Yorker, whose name he did not even know at the time, was the man to edit the paper. He went to New York and called at Greeley's office on Ann Street, inquiring for the editor. "A young man with light hair, blond complexion, with coat off and sleeves rolled up, was standing at a case with 'stick' in hand, and he replied that he was the editor, and that his name was Horace Greeley."
Greeley accepted Weed's offer, agreeing to edit the paper as desired, and also to spend at least two days each week in Albany. The paper was called the Jeffersonian and gave much satisfaction to the political dictator. Greeley's work even then was marked by such maturity of thought and felicity of expression as was given to few men in his day. While he was editing the Jeffersonian in Albany, he was Weed's personal guest, and the two became intimate, not only politically but socially. That was the beginning of the famous Seward-Weed-Greeley political partnership, the dissolution of which resulted in the nomination of Abraham Lincoln, instead of William H. Seward, for the Presidency in 1860.
There was idealism and patriotism in this partnership, but there was also a sordid side, as we shall see later. In ​a personal way there was not missing, however, an appealing note, such as was revealed in the correspondence of Seward, when he wrote to his wife that Weed had gone to New York "on an errand of love and tenderness to Greeley," who was worried under the weight of domestic grievances, and whose health had been impaired "from exposure in his nightly walks from his office." "He brought Greeley's child home," Seward wrote, "to keep until Greeley himself had recovered his health."
When Seward was elected governor in 1838, Weed was the acknowledged boss. He was consulted on all appointments, and there were, according to Seward, fourteen hundred of them. The State Senate, however, was under Democratic control, but Weed overcame that difficulty by going to New York, using his new-found power to collect $8,000, and putting the money into Democratic districts, thus gaining control of the entire Legislature.
Later in life, after their bitter quarrel, Greeley wrote concerning Weed and Seward:
"Mr. Thurlow Weed was of coarser mold and fiber—tall, robust, dark-featured, shrewd, resolute, and not over-scrupulous—keen-sighted, though not far-seeing. Writing slowly and with difficulty, he was for twenty years the most sententious and pungent writer of editorial paragraphs on the American press.
"In pecuniary matters, he was generous to a fault while poor; he is said to be less so since he became rich; but I am no longer in a position to know. I cannot doubt, however, that if he had never seen Wall Street or Washington, had never heard of the Stock Board, or had lived in some yet undiscovered country, where legislation is never bought nor sold, his life would have been more blameless, useful and happy."
​When the Harrison and Tyler campaign came on in 1840, Greeley, having come to be considered a valuable member of the party, was made the editor of another political journal, the Log Cabin. This title was the result of an article that, at the time of Harrison's nomination, the Baltimore American had written:
"Give him a barrel of hard cider and settle a pension of two thousand a year upon him, and, our word for it, he will sit for the remainder of his days contented in a log cabin." This sneer was the basis of a historic battlecry, which was first used at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, January 20, 1840, with the result that "the log cabin and hard cider" became the slogan of the Whig party.
In his biography of Henry Clay, Carl Schurz declared that "there has never been a presidential canvass in which there has been less thought." The parades, the songs and the log cabin cries were all part of an extraordinary excitement, but that excitement meant that the people were tired of the party in power and their ebullience was simply the outward evidence of their intention to throw off their bonds.
Greeley claimed much credit for the Whig victory that followed. He asserted that the Log Cabin had helped arouse most of the enthusiasm, citing the fact that it achieved the phenomenal circulation of 80,000.' He therefore determined to try a greater field and, with a capital of $1,000, lent him by a Whig friend, he brought out the Tribune on April 10, 1841.
When the Tribune appeared, the Courier and Enquirer, the New York American, the Express, and the Commercial Advertiser were Whig papers, all in the six-cent class. The Evening Post and the Journal of Commerce leaned to the Democratic party, while the Sun and the Herald, ​though affecting to be neutral, were really inclined to be Democratic.
From the very beginning Greeley established the fact that he was ready to fight for his place in the newspaper world; he had as his assistant Henry J. Raymond, of whom we shall speak later, and he very quickly attracted to himself and his paper all those who had reform causes at heart; all, indeed, who were in sympathy with the oppressed. Margaret Fuller was not only a contributor to the Tribune, but lived with Mr. and Mrs. Greeley at their country home on Forty-ninth Street. In this way he became, with her, a devoted champion of the emancipation of women and a believer in the fullest recognition of social and political equality with "the rougher sex."
The same spirit led him to open his columns to the socialists of that day. Fourier was then the rage among the intellectuals, due in great measure to the efforts of Alfred Brisbane, who presented Fourier's ideas to the public in a series of articles, which ran for two or three years in the Tribune.
Greeley attributed his own conversion to Fourierism to the fearful conditions that he saw in the winter of 1837-38, when destitution and suffering pervaded the city.
"I lived that winter," he says, "in the Sixth Ward,—then, as now, eminent for filth, squalor, rags, dissipation, want, and misery. A public meeting of its citizens was duly held early in December and an organization formed thereat, by which committees were appointed to canvass the ward from house to house, collect funds from those who could and would spare anything, ascertain the nature and extent of the existing destitution, and devise ways and means for its systematic relief. Very poor myself, I could give no money, or but a mite; so I gave time instead, and served, through several days, on one of ​the visiting committees. I thus saw extreme destitution more closely than I had ever before observed it and was enabled to scan its repulsive features intelligently. I saw two families, including six or eight children, burrowing in one cellar under a stable,—a prey to famine on the one hand, and to vermin and cutaneous maladies on the other, with sickness adding its horrors to those of a polluted atmosphere and a wintry temperature. I saw men who each, somehow, supported his family on an income of $5 a week or less, yet who cheerfully gave something to mitigate the suffering of those who were really poor. I saw three widows, with as many children, living in an attic on the profits of an apple stand which yielded less than $3 a week, and the landlord came in for a full third of that. But worst to bear of all was the pitiful plea of stout, resolute, single young men and women: "We do not want alms; we are not beggars; we hate to sit here day by day, idle and useless; help us to work,—we want no other help; why is it that we have nothing to do?"
Greeley's socialistic beliefs led to a warm debate with his erstwhile protégé, Henry J. Raymond, when the latter, leaving Greeley and the Tribune, went to work for James Watson Webb on the Courier and Enquirer. This was an additional reason for the coolness, which developed into actual enmity, between the two.
It was, however, by his vigorous championship of the Free Soil party and by the whole-souled manner in which he later threw himself into the Republican party, that Greeley achieved his greatest fame before the war. The Democratic party was dominated by the South; the Whigs were a weak opposition, led mainly by men who did not have the courage of their convictions and who did not sense the struggle that was coming. The Free Soil party ​grew up in the attempt to check the endeavors of the slaveholders to extend slave territory; it eventually supplanted the Whig party, which was never more than a party of opposition. Although it included all those who, for various reasons, were opposed to the Democrats, the Whig party never had strong and uniting principles of its own.
Despite the fact that there were Free Soil Democrats, the Democratic party had become the party of the South and of slavery, even at this time, 1840-1850. True it was that in the Whig party was to be found the only effective opposition to the extension of slavery, but many of its leaders were so anxious to conciliate sentiment among pro-slavery Northerners that a new party with firmer principles was inevitable. In the movement for such a party, Greeley and the Tribune rapidly became leaders.
So excellent a political authority as James G. Blaine gives credit to Greeley for having a national influence as early as 1848. He says that Seward's influence, backed by the organizing skill of Thurlow Weed and the editorial power of Horace Greeley, was responsible for the election of General Taylor, and adds, "Perhaps in no other national election did three men so completely control the result."
"There were many other journals in both the North and the South," says another writer, "but there was only one Tribune in the entire country."
The weekly Tribune had become the great anti-slavery journal of the period, and "went into almost every parsonage, college, and farmer's home in the Northern states." It was "the spokesman of the most numerous
* ↑ Greeley, Autobiography, 136, 137.
* ↑ Recollections of a Busy Life, 61.
* ↑ Alexander, ii, 27.
* ↑ Parton, Life of Greeley, 117.
* ↑ Weed's Autobiography, 466.
* ↑ Busy Life, 313.
* ↑ Busy Life, 134.
* ↑ Greeley, Busy Life, 145.
* ↑ Twenty Years in Congress, i, 82.
* ↑ Wilson, Life of Dana, 99.