Gre-Gro: Greeley through Grow

See below for annotated biographies of Radical Republicans. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.

GREELEY, Horace, 1811-1872, journalist, newspaper publisher, The New York Tribune. Supporter of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Major opponent of slavery. Co-founder, Liberal Republican Party in 1854.  Supporter of the Union. The effort which the Tribune had expended in the forties on numerous causes was concentrated in the fifties upon the Free-Soil movement. Greeley objected to slavery on both moral and economic grounds. At first he held mild views, but his opinions underwent a steady intensification. He opposed the Mexican War, indorsed the Wilmot Proviso, and in 1848 supported Zachary Taylor as the only candidate who could prevent Cass's election to the presidency. Two years later he showed coolness to the compromise measures, declaring to the South that he would let "the Union be a thousand times shivered rather than that we should aid you to plant slavery on free soil" (Tribune, February 20, 1850). The fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill aroused Greeley to his greatest eloquence. His editorial, "Is It a Fraud?" (February 15, 1854), was a magnificent answer to the Democratic claim that the measures of 1850 had involved a recognized repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He advocated "determined resistance" to the execution of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and assisted Gerrit Smith, Eli Thayer, and others in arming the Kansas Free-Soilers. He applauded forcible resistance to the Fugitive-Slave Act as the best method of obtaining its repeal (June 3, 1854). Having declared in 1852 that "if an anti-slavery Whig must give up his anti-slavery or his Whiggery, we choose to part with the latter," Greeley was among the first editors to join the Republican party,

(Blue, Frederick J. No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005, pp. 62, 110, 147-149, 159, 182, 253, 258, 262; Dumont, 1961, p. 352; Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960, pp. 6, 45, 56, 88, 112, 117, 163, 219, 237, 259; Greeley, 1866; Greeley, 1868; Mitchell, Thomas G. Antislavery Politics in Antebellum and Civil War America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007, pp. 33, 54, 78, 81, 86, 96, 98, 116-117, 136, 138, 143, 146, 153, 154, 199, 204, 217-220, 227-229, 233; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 65, 67, 69, 141, 324, 476, 692-695; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 734-741; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 529; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 370-373; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 9, p. 647)

American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, pp. 528-534:

GREELEY, HORACE (February 3, 1811-November 29, 1872), editor, political leader, was born at Amherst, New Hampshire, the third child of Zaccheus Greeley and Mary Woodburn his wife, the former being of English and the latter of Scotch-Irish stock. The father made a scanty living by farming and day labor, first at Amherst, later at Westhaven, Vermont, and finally in Erie County, Pennsylvania. Greeley's irregular schooling ended at fourteen, when he was apprenticed to Amos Bliss, editor of the Northern Spectator at East Poultney, Vermont. But he was a precocious lad, who gained much from his mother's repetition of British traditions, ballads, and snatches of history, the family copies of Shakespeare, Campbell, and Byron, and the omnivorous reading possible in a newspaper office and the town library of East Poultney. When the Nor them Spectator died in June 1830, he walk ed most of the way to the Erie County home, and after a short stay with his still-struggling parents found employment as a printer at Jamestown and Lodi, New York, and Erie, Pennsylvania. Finding his prospects poor, he set out, with about twenty-five dollars and his personal possessions tied in his handkerchief, for New York City, where he arrived in August 1831. He was twenty years old, "tall, slender, pale, and plain," as he later described himself, with an "unmistakably rustic manner and address," and equipped with only "so much of the art of printing as a boy will usually learn in the office of a country newspaper" (Recollections, p. 84). Obtaining board and room for two dollars and a half a week, he sought work in vain for several weeks before accepting the eye-ruining job of setting up a New Testament in agate with notes in pearl.

A succession of employments, including some typesetting for the Evening Post, from which William Leggett discharged him because he wanted only "decent-looking men in the office," enabled Greeley to save a small sum, and in January 1833 to form a partnership with a printer named Francis V. Story, who when drowned the following July was succeeded by Jonas Winchester. During 1833-34 the firm printed from 54 Liberty St., two lottery organs called Sylvester's Bank Note and Exchange Manual and the Constitutionalist, and did a job-printing business. But Greeley was far more than a printer. His fingers itched for the pen, and he was shortly contributing paragraphs to the two journals and to newspapers. He soon gained reputation in press circles, and a dubious tradition states that James Gordon Bennett offered him a partnership in starting the Herald. One reason for distrusting the tradition is that Greeley and Winchester had already, on March 22, 1834, found ed a weekly literary and news journal called the New Yorker. This periodical, well printed, avoiding political partisanship, containing full abstracts of foreign and domestic newspapers, and selected tales, reviews, and pieces of music, was edited largely with shears; but there were original contributions by Greeley, R. W. Griswold, Park Benjamin, and Henry J. Raymond (F. L. Mott, History of American Magazines, 1741-1850, 1930, pp. 358-60). It gained steadily in circulation. At the end of one year it had 4,500 subscribers; at the end of three years, 9,500. But the "cash principle" not yet being applied to the magazine business, it still lo st money. Greeley suffered great mental anguish from his constant struggle with debt. "My embarrassments were sometimes dreadful," he wrote; "not that I feared destitution, but the fear of involving my friends in my misfortunes was very bitter" (Parton, post, p. 172). He had married on July 5, 1836, Mary Youngs Cheney, who was born in Cornwall, Connecticut, but was a schoolteacher for a time in North Carolina. However great his worries over his magazine, it shortly gave him a wide reputation.

The failure of the New Yorker was fortunate for Greeley in that literary and non-partisan journalism was not his real forte. To add to his income he wrote constantly for the Daily Whig and other newspapers, and in 1838 accepted from Thurlow Weed, William H. Seward, and other Whig leaders the editors hip of a campaign weekly, the Jeffersonian. It ran for one year, obtained a circulation of 15,000 and exercised real influence. Greeley's salary of $1,000 was less important than the political friendships he formed. He struck Seward as "rather unmindful of social usages, yet singularly clear, original, and decided, in his political views and theories" (F. W. Seward, Autobiography of William H. Seward …with a Memoir of his Life, 1877, p. 395). In 1840 the Whig leaders called upon him to edit and publish another weekly. The result was the Log Cabin, begun May 2, which gained an unprecedented success. Of the first issue 48,000 copies were sold, and the circulation swiftly rose to almost 90,000. Greeley not only edited it and the New Yorker simultaneously, but made speeches, sat on committees, and helped manage the state campaign. He thought later that few men had contributed more to Harrison's victory than he (Recollections, p. 135). Ceasing after the election, the Log Cabin was revived on December 5, 1840, as a general political weekly, and continued till it and the New Yorker were merged in the Tribune. Greeley's apprenticeship was now completed.

Though in 1841 twelve dailies were published in New York City, no penny paper of Whig allegiance existed. Nor was there any newspaper standing midway between the sensational enterprise of Bennett's Herald and the staid correctness of Bryant's Evening Post. Greeley, now fully trusted by his party, with a large popular following and a varied practical experience, saw the opportunity. With a capital which he estimated at two thousand dollars, one-half in printing materials, and with one thousand dollars borrowed from James Coggeshall, he launched the New York Tribune on April 10, 1841. His object, he stated later, was to found "a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand, and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other" (Recollections, p. 137). For some days the prospect was dubious; his first week's receipts were ninety-two dollars, the expenses $525 (Ibid., p. 140). Then, thanks to the Tribune's sterling merits and the Sun's bitter attacks, subscriptions poured in rapidly. The paper began its fourth week with an edition of 6,000, and its seventh with 11,000, after which progress was slow, Success had been fairly assured when during July Greeley formed a partnership with a far more practical man, Thomas McElrath, who for ten years gave the establishment efficiency and system and Greeley entire independence. On September 20 the Log Cabin and New Yorker were merged into the weekly Tribune. Greeley, assisted with great ability by H. J. Raymond, labored tirelessly, his average day's writing in the early years according to Parton being three columns of close print. As funds accumulated, however, the staff was increased, till by 1846 the Tribune was the best all-round paper in the city, and Greeley had time for additional pursuits.

The Tribune set a new standard in American journalism by its combination of energy in newsgathering with good taste, high moral standards, and intellectual appeal. Police reports, scandals, dubious medical advertisements, and flippant personalities were barred from its pages; the editorials were vigorous but usually temperate; the political news was the most exact in the city; book reviews and book-extracts were numerous; and as an inveterate lecturer Greeley gave generous space to lectures. The paper appealed to substantial and thoughtful people and when its price was raised, on April 11, 1842, to nine cents weekly or two cents daily it lost fewer than two hundred subscribers. Greeley stamped it with his individual and then highly radical views. He was an egalitarian who hated and feared all kinds of monopoly, landlordism, and class dominance. Believing that all American citizens should be free men politically and economically, he sought means of increasing this freedom. At first he turned to Fourierism. Through the influence of Albert Brisbane [q.v.], he not only allowed a Fourierist association to publish first daily and then tri-weekly articles on the front page of the Tribune (1842-44), but also advocated the formation of Phalanxes, conducted a newspaper debate on the subject with Raymond, (1846), and invested in the North American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey. He espoused the agrarian movement for the free distribution of government lands to settlers as a guarantee against capitalist tyranny, attacked the railway land grants as fostering monopoly; assailed the heartlessness of corporations which exploited their workers, and in general inveighed against the fierce acquisitive competition of the day. Wage slavery in the forties distressed him as much as bond slavery. "How can I devote myself to a crusade against distant servitude," he wrote an anti-slavery convention in 1845, "when I discern its essence pervading my immediate community" (Tribune, June 20, 1845). Newspapers, he wrote, should be "as sensitive to oppression and degradation in the next street as if they were practised in Brazil or Japan." His thinking seemed inconsistent when it included high-tariff doctrines, but he never favored protection as more than a temporary means to an end. "Protection is the shortest and best way to real Free Trade, he wrote in 1851 (Tribune, June 23, 1851). He opposed capital punishment, urged freedom of speech and of the mails for Abolitionists, advocated the restriction of liquor-selling, and supported cooperative shops and labor unions, himself becoming in 1850 first president of the New York Printers' Union. Though no believer in woman's suffrage, he sympathized with other parts of the woman's rights crusade.

Greeley's devotion to such social aims made the Tribune more than a mere financial success; it became a great popular teacher, champion, and moral leader, and a vehicle for the ideas and experiments of constructive democracy. It required an able and liberal staff, and he drew to the Nassau Street office a versatile group. Margaret Fuller was literary reviewer and special writer from 1844 to 1846, living for a time in Greeley's Turtle Bay home. Charles A. Dana joined Greeley in 1847, acting as city editor, foreign correspondent, and managing editor. Bayard Taylor, after contributing travel letters, became a staff member in 1848. George Ripley was made literary assistant in 1849, raising the literary department to high influence. In the fifties the staff included James S. Pike, Washington correspondent and editorial writer; Solon Robinson, agricultural editor; W. H. Fry, music critic; C. T. Congdon and Richard Hildreth. To the energy of Dana, Pike, and the city editor, F. J. Ottarson, the paper owed its prompt and full intelligence. By 1854 it employed fourteen local reporters, twenty American correspondents, eighteen foreign correspondents, and a financial staff under George M. Snow (Parton, pp. 391-4u). During the late fifties the Tribune attained a national influence far surpassing that of any rival. Its total circulation on the eve of the Civil War, daily, weekly, and semi-weekly, was 287,750. This covered the whole country outside the South. The power of the paper was greater than even this circulation would indicate, for the weekly was the preeminent journal of the rural North, and one copy did service for many readers. As James Ford Rhodes has said, for great areas the Tribune was "a political bible." Many elements entered into its influence, but the greatest was the passionate moral earnestness of Greeley himself, his ability to interpret the deeper convictions of the Northern public, and the trenchant clarity and force of his editorials.

The effort which the Tribune had expended in the forties on numerous causes was concentrated in the fifties upon the Free-Soil movement. Greeley objected to slavery on both moral and economic grounds. At first he held mild views, but his opinions underwent a steady intensification. He opposed the Mexican War, indorsed the Wilmot Proviso, and in 1848 supported Zachary Taylor as the only candidate who could prevent Cass's election to the presidency. Two years later he showed coolness to the compromise measures, declaring to the South that he would let "the Union be a thousand times shivered rather than that we should aid you to plant slavery on free soil" (Tribune, February 20, 1850). The fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill aroused Greeley to his greatest eloquence. His editorial, "Is It a Fraud?" (February 15, 1854), was a magnificent answer to the Democratic claim that the measures of 1850 had involved a recognized repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He advocated "determined resistance" to the execution of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and assisted Gerrit Smith, Eli Thayer, and others in arming the Kansas Free-Soilers. He applauded forcible resistance to the Fugitive-Slave Act as the best method of obtaining its repeal (June 3, 1854). Having declared in 1852 that "if an anti-slavery Whig must give up his anti-slavery or his Whiggery, we choose to part with the latter," Greeley was among the first editors to join the Republican party, and attended the national organization meeting at Pittsburgh, February 22, 1856. He was disgusted with Seward because he failed to seize the leadership of the " uprising of the Free States" (Tribune, November 9, 1854), and warm in his advocacy of Fremont's candidacy for the presidency. In the critical year 1857 his union of moral fervor with shrewd practicality is seen at its best. Of the Dred Scott decision he said, it "is entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room" (Tribune, March 7, 1857), and he praised John Brown while condemning his raid. He insisted, however, upon the importance of the Union, showing no patience with Garrison's secessionist views, and he strongly attacked Know-Nothingism. He sought only the attainable. In 1854 he had dissolved, through political pique, his alliance with Thurlow Weed and Seward, and in 1860 was a free agent. As a delegate from Oregon at the Republican National Convention he joined with the Blairs to defeat Seward by urging the nomination of Edward Bates of Missouri, but on the night before the balloting advised the Massachusetts delegates to support Lincoln.

In these decades Greeley's restless energy was expended in numerous directions, some ill-advised. Though not of rugged health, he seemed indefatigable, sleeping but five or six hours daily, writing much, traveling widely, making speeches, and attending political conferences. For three months in 1848-49 he was a member of Congress, where he introduced a homestead bill and aired the scandal of excessive mileage payments. During 1851 he was in Europe for three months, acting as juryman at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, testifying before a parliamentary committee, and hastily touring the Continent. On entering Italy his first observation was characteristic that the country badly needed subsoil ploughs. Revisiting Europe in 1855, he derived much amusement from a two days' incarceration on a debt charge in a Paris prison. In the summer of 1859 he made a journey to the Pacific Coast, toured California, and returned by way of Panama. These travels furnished material for newspaper letters and the volumes, Glances at Europe (1851) and An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in -----the Summer of 1859 (1860). In addition to these writings he published a volume of lectures called Hints Toward Reforms (1850), and edited a compilation from official records entitled History of the Struggle for Slavery Extension or Restriction in the United States (1856). For years he was a constant lecturer before lyceums, young men's associations, and rural groups, appearing in some winter seasons twice a week. Far less creditable was his thirst for political office. He would have welcomed reelection to Congress in 1850, would have stooped to take the lieutenant-governorship in 1854, and in 1861 was bitterly disappointed by his failure to secure Seward's seat in the United States Senate. In 1863, again a candidate for the Senate, he was again defeated by Thurlow Weed's opposition. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the House of Representatives in 1868 and 1870, and for the state comptrollership in 1869, but won a seat in the state constitutional convention of 1867. These political adventures by no means enhanced his dignity or influence.

Few Americans were more intimately in the public eye than he, and none commanded such a mixture of admiration with affectionate amusement. The oddity of his appearance, with his pink face of babylike mildness fringed by throat-whiskers, his broad-brimmed hat, white overcoat, crooked cravat, shapeless trousers, and white socks, his shambling gait and absent-minded manner, was exaggerated by every caricaturist. His squeaky voice and illegible handwriting became themes of familiar humor. His eccentricities of manner, which sometimes shocked precise men like Bryant, his naivete on many subjects, and his homely wisdom on others, appealed to the millions. Some of his phrases, like "Go West, young man," were universally current. By signing many editorials and by frequently appearing in public he gave his work a direct personal appeal unusual in journalism, and his private life was the subject of much curiosity. He cared nothing for money, and though in later years he received $10,000 annually, this and most of his Tribune stock slipped from him. His charities were endless, and some impostors received thousands of dollars from him (Proceedings at the Unveiling of a Memorial to Horace Greeley, 1915, p. 95). Buying in 1853 a fifty-four acre farm in Chappaqua, New York, he spent many week-ends there, interesting all Tribune readers in his swamp reclamation and crop experiments, and finally publishing What I Know of Farming (1871). Of the seven children born to him, only two daughters, Gabrielle and Ida, lived to maturity; the bereavements made Mrs. Greeley neurasthenic; her housekeeping was characterized by Margaret Fuller as "Castle Rackrent fashion"; and though Greeley's devotion never wavered, his home life was comfortless. He made and kept many friends, especially among women who, like the Cary sisters and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, valued him for his inner and not outer qualities.

The Civil War brought Greeley new tests of sagacity and firmness, which he failed to meet as creditably as he did all tests of courage and patriotism.  From the beginning he was accused of vacillation, though his position had more consistency than appeared on the surface. His primary demand was that no concessions be made to slavery. He sternly opposed the Crittenden Compromise, preferred disunion to any "complicity in slavery extension," and, once hostilities opened, regarded the extinction of slavery as an irrevocable object. His doctrine in 1861 was that if a real majority of Southerners wished to go from the Union they should be allowed to do so, but that the revolt was one of "a violent, unscrupulous, desperate minority, who have conspired to clutch power" (Recollections, p. 398; Tribune, November 9, 16, 1860; November 19, 1861). When war began he supported it with energy, though the unfortunate cry, "Forward to Richmond!" (June 28, 1861), was raised by Dana, not by Greeley. He quickly allied himself with the radical anti-slavery element led by Sumner, Stevens, and Chase, opposing the President's policy of conciliating the border states and demanding early emancipation. Though other newspapers accepted the modification of Fremont's emancipation order, Greeley did not, insisting that Congress or the President resort to a general liberation of slaves. His editorial on emancipation, "The question of the Day" (Tribune, December 11, 1861), declared that "rebels" should have been warned at the outset that they would lose their slaves, that they had no rights to consideration, and that t)1e Union could not "afford to repel the sympathies and reject the aid of Four Millions of Southern people." His rising impatience with Lincoln's policy culminated in his famous signed editorial, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions" (August 20, 1862). This arraigned Lincoln as remiss in executing the Confiscation Act, as unduly influenced by "certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States" (the Blairs), and as offering a "mistaken deference to Rebel slavery." On September 24 the Tribune hailed Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as recreating a nation. Greeley's radicalism involved his journal in bitter warfare with not only the Democrats but also with the Seward-Weed moderates, and the fight, extended to state politics. In 1862 he was acclaimed the principal leader of New York Republicans, but his poor judgment of men and fluctuating principles caused him to lose influence in political circles (De A. S. Alexander, A Political History of the State of New York, III, 1909, p. 91).

Greeley's popular reputation and influence were injured in 1864 by his hesitation to support Lincoln and in 1864-65 by his peace activities. He favored postponing the Republican National Convention on the ground that the party was not united behind Lincoln (letter to New York Independent, February 25, 1864), and declared that Chase, Fremont, Ben Butler, or Grant would make as good a president, while the nomination of any of them would preserve the salutary one-term principle (Tribune, February 23, 1864). As late as August 18 he believed that Lincoln was already beaten, and wrote a friend that " we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow" (New York Sun, June 30, 1889). Not until September 6 did he state in the Tribune that "we fly the banner of Abraham Lincoln for the next Presidency," one dubious story asserting that this announcement followed Lincoln's private differ to appoint Greeley his next postmaster-general.

Even more ill-advised was Greeley's course in regard to peace. During 1863 he advocated mediation by a foreign power, and communicated on the subject with C. L. Vallandigham and the French minister, telling Raymond, " I'll drive Lincoln into it" (J. F. Rhodes, History of the Unite d States, 1893, IV, 222). In July 1864, he attempted to bring about direct peace negotiations. He wrote to Lincoln that he had learned that two emissaries from Jefferson Davis were in Canada with "full and complete powers for a peace"; declared that "our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace; shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood"; and urged Lincoln to make a frank offer of peace (J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 1890, IX, 186). Lincoln shrewdly prevailed upon the reluctant Greeley to go to Niagara Falls to open the negotiations. Greeley exceeded his instructions, but found that the Confederates were without proper powers from their government and asked for further directions. When Lincoln thereupon closed the affair with the ultimatum that he would gladly consider any official proposition which embraced the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, Greeley sent him a reproachful letter, for he believed that the President should have left the door open (Greeley, The American Conflict: ... Its Causes, Incidents, and Results, II, 1866, p. 664). On August 9 he wrote Lincoln that if the "rebellion" could not be promptly crushed the nation faced "certain ruin," begging him to make a fresh peace effort, and making the astounding proposal that if peace could not be made, there be an armistice for one year, "each party to retain, unmolested, all it now holds," and the blockade of the South to be lifted (Nicolay and Hay, IX, 196-97). These and similar views, expressed publicly and privately, created a wide-spread feeling that Greeley's judgment and nerve were deplorably weak.

Greeley's radical political views extended to Reconstruction. Believing in full negro equality, he indorsed not only the Fourteenth but also the Fifteenth Amendment and favored the congressional policies. In 1866 he was again a lion of the state Republican convention, controlled by anti-Johnson radicals. But the intemperate zeal with which the Tribune supported Johnson's impeachment owed more to John Russell Young, the managing editor, than to Greeley, then absent on a final Western trip. Greeley was also liberal enough to favor general amnesty, and called, as in his fine speech at Richmond on May 14, 1867, for the erasure of all sectional antagonism. He seconded the movement this year for Jefferson Davis's release from Fortress Monroe, and on May 13 signed his bond in Richmond. Noisy attacks followed, thousands of subscribers to Greeley's two-volume compilation, The American Conflict, cancelled their orders, the weekly Tribune lost more than half its circulation, and an effort was made in the Union League Club to reprimand him. The Tribune rejoiced in Grant's election, and for two years supported him with uniform cordiality. But, because of his support of the one-term principle and for two other reasons, one rooted in disapproval of Grant's public policies and the other in New York state politics, Greeley steadily cooled toward Grant. As a leader of the Reuben E. Fenton wing in New York politics, he viewed with hostility the rise of the Conkling-Cornell machine under Grant's protection, and resented what he felt to be Grant's unfair apportionment of federal patronage. Conkling's defeat of the Greeley-Fenton group in the state convention of 1871 led to an open split. At the same time Greeley became convinced that the Grant administration was demoralized and corrupt, indifferent to civil-service reform, mistaken in its Santo-Dominican policy, and illiberal toward the South. On May 6, 1871, the Tribune expressed doubt of the wisdom of renominating Grant on September 15 declared flatly against renomination. When independent Republicans pressed the movement for a new party in the congressional session of 1871-72, Greeley encouraged them. He wrote a friend on March 13, 1872, that he would carry the fight against Grant to its bitter end, though "I know how many friends I shall alienate by it, and how it will injure the Tribune, of which so little is my own property that I hate to wreck it" (J. Benton, ed., Greeley on Lincoln, with Mr. Greeley's Letters to Charles A. Dana and a Lady Friend, 1893, p. 211). His career was approaching its tragic climax.

Before the Civil War the Tribune had been Horace Greeley; after the war there was no such close identity. The paper had become a great institution of which his control was but partial. Disbursements by 1871 exceeded a million dollars annually, the whole staff approached 500, and the stock was held by twenty proprietors (Greeley's anniversary article, Tribune, April 10, 1871). Both Greeley's influence and that of the Tribune diminished after the war; the rise of the Associated Press, the multiplication of good local newspapers, and the disappearance of the great slavery issue, reduced their power. Personal editorship was declining. But from time to time Greeley still wrote editorials with his old fire, in what E. L. Godkin called "an English style which, for vigor, terseness, clearness, and simplicity, has never been surpassed, except, perhaps, by Cobbett" (Rollo Ogden, Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin, 1907, I, 255).

As the Liberal Republican movement first developed, Greeley discouraged mention of his name for the presidency; but as the revolt spread and there seemed a likelihood of successful coalition with the Democrats, his lifelong desire for political advancement made him receptive. The reform element in the movement favored Charles Francis Adams or Lyman Trumbull; the politicians who were promoting a coalition favored David Davis or Greeley (A. K. McClure, Old Time Notes of Pennsylvania, 1905, II, 334). When the convention met in Cincinnati on May 1, Greeley had astute supporters, notably Whitelaw Reid and William Dorsheimer, on the scene. The contest narrowed to a struggle between Adams and Greeley, the managers of the latter sprung an effective stampede, and to the consternation of Schurz and other reformers, Greeley was nominated, with B. Gratz Brown as associate. The convention refused to make either nomination unanimous and many delegates departed, feeling wit!) Samuel Bowles. that the ticket had been made by a combination of political idiots and political buccaneers (G. S. Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, 1885, II, 212). Greeley was indorsed by a dispirited Democratic national convention at Philadelphia in July and some state coalitions were effected, but many Democrats bolted because of his former abuse of the party. The low-tariff element represented by the Nation was disaffected, while Schurz joined Greeley only after a reproachful correspondence with him. In an exceptionally abusive campaign, Greeley was attacked as a traitor, a fool, an ignoramus, and a crank, and was pilloried in merciless cartoons by Nast and others; he took the assaults much to heart, saying later that he sometimes doubted whether he was running for the presidency or the penitentiary. In answer to the "bloody-shirt" argument, he brought forward as his chief issue a plea for the reconciliation of North and South by the removal of all political disabilities and the union of both sections for common reforms. In his letter of acceptance he eloquently expounded the idea that both sides were "eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm" (Tribune, May 22, 1872). Retiring from his editorship, he made an active speaking campaign in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, his addresses to the huge crowds being notable for their intellectual strength (James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, II, 1886, p. 534). The October elections made it clear that he could not be successful in November. Yet the magnitude of the defeat was a surprise. Greeley carried only six border and Southern states and received only 2,834,125 of the popular vote against 3,597,13; cast for Grant. Among the chief factors in this disaster were the elaborate Republican organization, the distrust of Greeley by most financial interests, the impossibility of reconciling many Democrats, and the wide popular feeling that his judgment of both men and policies was hopelessly weak. Yet his candidacy had results of permanent value in actually doing much to close the "bloody chasm."

The tragedy of Greeley's death immediately followed the election. After his exhausting campaign tour he had watched with little sleep by the bedside of his wife, who died October 30. He was profoundly hurt by the feeling that he was "the worst beaten man who ever ran for high office." The final stroke came when, on returning to the Tribune, he found that the reins there had passed firmly into the hands of Whitelaw Reid, who had no intention of surrendering them, and that he had practically though not nominally lost the editorship which had been his lifelong pride (Charles A. Daria, "The Last Blow," N. Y; Sun, November 30, 1872). His mind and body both broke, and he died insane on November 29. A shocked nation paid him in death the tribute he had never received while living. His funeral in New York on December 4 was attended by the President, Vice-President, cabinet members, governors of three states, and an unequaled concourse of spectators. His failings were forgotten, while the services he had done the republic as its greatest editor, perhaps its greatest popular educator, and certainly one of its greatest moral leaders, were universally recalled.

[Greeley wrote an autobiography, Recollections of a Busy Life (1868; new eds., 1873, 1930), which offers not only a narrative of the main facts in his car!!er, but also a frank revelation of the forces which influenced his tastes and thought, and which is admirable in its simplicity and concreteness. The best biographies are: W. A. Linn, Horace Greeley: Founder and Editor of the New York Tribune (1903); James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune (1855, 1869, 1872, etc.); and L. D. Ingersoll, The Life of Horace Greeley, Founder of the New York Tribune (1873). Some new facts are added in Don C. Seitz, Horace Greeley, Founder of the New York Tribune (1926). Among treatments from a special point of view are Chas. Southern, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism (1892), and F. N. Zabriskie, Horace Greeley, the Editor (1890). An estimate of Greeley's place in the history of American thought may be found in Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, II, 1927, pp. 247-57. The recollections of associates may be found in C. T. Congdon, Reminiscences of a Journalist (1880); C. A. Dana, "Greeley as a Journalist," in E. C. Stedman and E. M. Hutchinson, A Library of Amer. Lit., VII (1889); and J.C. Derby, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (1884). Lives of John Hay, C. A. Dana, and Whitelaw Reid, and E. D. Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement (1919) should also be consulted. The state of New York published in 1915 the Proc. at the Unveiling of a Memorial to Horace Greeley at Chappaqua, New York, February 3, I9I4- The files of the New York Tribune are indispensable to a study of his life.]

A. N.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 734-741:

GREELEY, Horace, journalist, born in Amherst, H., 3 February, 1811; died in Pleasantville, near New York city, 29 November, 1872. His birthplace is shown in the accompanying engraving. On both sides his ancestors were of Scotch-Irish origin, but had been settled in New England for some generations. His father Zaccheus Greeley, was a small farmer, always poor, and, by the time Horace was ten years old, a bankrupt and a fugitive from state, to escape arrest for debt. Horace was the third child, four followed him, and when the little homestead of fifty acres of stony land at Amherst was lost and his father became a day-laborer at West Haven, Vt., the united exertions of all that were able to work brought the family only a hard and bare subsistence. Horace had been a precocious child, feeble, and not fond of sports, but with a strong bent to books. He could read before he could talk plainly, when he was not yet three years old, and he was soon after the acknowledged chief in the frequent contests of the village spelling-match. He received only a common-school education, and after his sixth year had schooling only in winter, laboring at other times in the field with his father and brothers. When six years old he declared he would be a printer, and at eleven he tried to be apprenticed in the village office. He was rejected then on account of his youth, but tried again, three years later, at East Poultney, Vt., in the office of the “Northern Spectator,” and was accepted as an apprentice for five years, to be boarded and lodged, and, after six months, to be paid at the rate of $40 a year. He learned the business rapidly, became an accurate compositor, gained the warm regard of his employer and of the whole village, showed a special aptitude for politics and political statistics, rose to be the neighborhood oracle on disputed points, took a leading part in the village debating-society, and was intrusted with a portion of the editorial work on the paper. Meantime he spent next to nothing, dressed in the cheapest way, went without a coat in summer and without an overcoat in winter, was laughed at as “gawky” and “stingy,” and sent almost every cent of his forty dollars a year to his father. At last, in June, 1830, the paper was suspended, and young Greeley, then in his twentieth year, was released from his apprenticeship, and turned out upon the world as a “tramping jour printer.” Fourteen months of such experience sufficed. He visited his father, who had now removed to the “new country” near Erie, Pennsylvania, worked with him on the farm when he could not find employment in country printing-offices, sent home most of his earnings, when he could, and at last decided to seek his fortune in New York. With his wardrobe in a bundle, slung over his shoulder by a stick, he set out on foot through the woods, walked to Buffalo, thence made his way, partly on canal-boats, partly by walking the tow-path, to Albany, and then down the Hudson on a tug-boat. With $10 in his pocket, and his stick and bundle still over his shoulder, on 18 August, 1831, he entered the city in which he was to be recognized as the first of American journalists. He wandered for days from one printing-office to another vainly searching for work. His grotesque appearance was against him; nobody supposed he could be a competent printer, and most thought him a runaway apprentice. At last an Irishman at the cheap boarding-house he had found told him of an office where a compositor was needed; a Vermont printer interceded for him, when he was about to be rejected on his appearance, and at last he was taken on trial for the day. The matter assigned him had been abandoned by other printers because of its uncommon difficulty. At night his was found the best day’s work that anybody had yet done, and his position was secure.

He worked as a journeyman printer in New York for fourteen months, sometimes in job-offices, for a few days each in the offices of the “Evening Post” and the “Commercial Advertiser,” longer in that of the “Spirit of the Times, making friends always with the steady men he encountered, and saving money. Finally, in January, 1833, he took part in the first effort to establish a penny paper in New York. His partner was Francis V. Story, a fellow-printer; they had $150 between them, and on this capital and a small lot of type bought on credit from George Bruce, on his faith in Greeley's honest face and talk, they took the contract for printing the “Morning Post.” It failed in three weeks, but they had only lost about one third of their capital, and still had their type. They had therefore become master job-printers, and Greeley never worked again as a journeyman. They got a “Bank-note Reporter” to print, which brought them in about $15 a week, and a little tri-weekly paper, “The Constitutionalist,” which was the lottery organ. Its columns regularly contained the following card: “Greeley and Story, No. 54 Liberty street, New York, respectfully solicit the patronage of the public to their business of letter-press- printing, particularly lottery-printing, such as schemes, periodicals, and so forth, which will be executed on favorable terms.”

Mr. Greeley had renewed his habit of writing for the papers on which he was employed as a compositor. He was thus a considerable contributor to the “Spirit of the Times,” and now, by an article contributed to the “Constitutionalist,” defending the lotteries against a popular feeling then recently aroused, he attracted the attention of Dudley S. Gregory, of Jersey City, the agent of a great lottery association, whose friendship soon became helpful and was long-continued. His partner, Story, died after seven months, and his brother-in-law, Jonas Winchester, was taken into the partnership instead. The firm prospered, and by 1834 Mr. Greeley again began to think of editorship. The firm now considered itself worth $3,000. With this capital and the brains of the senior partner, the “New Yorker,” the best literary weekly then in America, was founded. Shortly before its appearance James Gordon Bennett visited Mr. Greeley and proposed to unite with him in establishing a new paper to be called the “New York Herald.” In declining, Mr. Greeley recommended another partner, who accepted and continued the partnership with Bennett until the “Herald” office was burned, when he retired. The “New Yorker” appeared on 22 March, 1834, sold one hundred copies of its first number, and for three months scarcely increased its circulation from this point over one hundred copies a week. By September, however, it had risen to 2,500. At the end of a year it was 4,500, at the end of the second year 7,000, and of the third 9,500. It was steadily popular with the press and people, and steadily unsuccessful pecuniarily. The first year showed a loss of $3,000, the second year of $2,000 more, and the third year of a further $2,000. Mr. Greeley became widely known and respected as its editor, was able to add to his income by furnishing editorials to the “Daily Whig” and other journals, and within four years had attained such prominence that the tow-headed printer who was mistaken for a runaway apprentice and dismissed from the “Evening Post” office, because the proprietors wished to have “at least decent looking men at the cases,” was selected by William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed as the best man available for the conduct of a campaign paper, which they desired to publish at Albany, to be called the “Jeffersonian.” He continued his work on the “New Yorker,” but went back and forth between New York and Albany each week. The “Jeffersonian,” for a campaign paper, was unusually quiet, calm, and instructive; but it seems to have given the Whig central committee satisfaction, and it still further brought its editor to the notice of the press and of influential men throughout the state. The “Jeffersonian” lasted until the spring of 1839, and Mr. Greeley was paid a salary of $1,000 for conducting it. A few months later the country entered upon the extraordinary popular excitements attending the presidential canvass of 1840, and when Mr. Greeley, prompt to seize the opportunity, issued simultaneously at New York and Albany, under the firm-name of “H. Greeley & Co.,” the first number of a new campaign paper called the “Log Cabin,” it sprang at once into a remarkable circulation; 20,000 copies of the first issue were printed, and this was thought to be an extravagant supply; but it was speedily exhausted. Other editions were called for, and finally, the type having been distributed, the number had to be rese, and in all 48,000 copies were sold. In a few weeks 60,000 subscriptions had been received, and the advance did not cease until the weekly issue had risen to between 80,000 and 90,000 copies—a circulation then absolutely unprecedented. The “Log Cabin” was a vivacious political journal, much more aggressive than the “Jeffersonian” had been, and displaying many of the personal peculiarities of its editor, his quaintness, his homely common sense, and an extraordinary capacity for compact and pungent statement. It printed rough caricatures of Van Buren and other Democrats, gave a good deal of campaign poetry, with music attached, and yet made room for lectures upon the “Elevation of the Laboring Classes.” In all the heat and fury of that turbulent campaign its editor set in one respect an example of moderation not always followed in contests of a much later date. In answer to a correspondent he said flatly: “Articles assailing the personal character of Mr. Van Buren or any of his supporters cannot be published in the ‘Log Cabin.’” Meantime, Mr. Greeley was widely consulted, was appointed on campaign committees, asked to make speeches, and called hither and thither to aid in adjusting political differences. He had become a person of influence and a political factor. He continued his paper for one week after the term promised, in order to send to his readers a complete account of the victory, the election of General Harrison as president, with as full returns of the vote as possible. After an interval of a few weeks it was resumed as a family political paper, and continued until it was able, on 3 April, 1841, to announce that “on Saturday, April 10th instant, the subscriber will publish the first number of a new morning journal of politics, literature, and general intelligence. ‘The Tribune,’ as its name imports, will labor to advance the interests of the people and to promote their moral, social, and political well-being. The immoral and degrading police reports, advertisements, and other matter which have been allowed to disgrace the columns of our leading penny papers will be carefully excluded from this, and no exertion spared to render it worthy of the hearty approval of the virtuous and refined, and a welcome visitant at the family fireside. Horace Greeley, 30 Ann street.”

Until this time Mr. Greeley had acquired great reputation, but no money. In spite of the brilliant success of the “Log Cabin,” and the general esteem for the “New Yorker,” neither had ever been profitable, and their editor, always talked of as “able, but queer,” began also to be recognized as lacking in business qualifications. He gave credit profusely, loaned money when he had it to almost any applicant, made his paper sometimes too good for the popular demand, and had no faculty for advertising his own wares. Once, when admitting that his paper was not profitable, he frankly said: “Since the ‘New Yorker’ was first issued, seven copartners in its publication have successively withdrawn from the concern, generally, we regret to say, without having improved their fortunes by the connection, and most of them with the conviction that the work, however valuable, was not calculated to prove lucrative to its proprietors. ‘You don't humbug enough’ has been the complaint of more than one of our retiring associates; ‘You ought to make more noise, and vaunt your own merits. The world will never believe you print a good paper unless you tell them so.’ Our course has not been changed by these representations.”

Mr. Greeley, although eccentric enough in his appearance and habits, had thus far developed but few eccentricities of thought. He was temperate almost to the verge of total abstinence, partly, no doubt, from taste, partly also, perhaps, from his observations on the intemperate habits common about his father's early home in New Hampshire. He was opposed to slavery, but rather deprecated northern interference: approved of the colonization society, and opposed anti-slavery societies at the north. He believed prohibition impracticable, but was warmly in favor of high license. He was vehemently in favor of a protective tariff, and always, as he expressed it, “an advocate of the interests of unassuming industry.” He had been captivated by vegetarian notions, and was for a short time an inmate of a Grahamite boarding-house. There he met Miss Cheney, a young teacher from Connecticut, who was making a short stay in New York, on her way to North Carolina. She was a highly nervous, excitable person, full of ideas, prone to “isms,” and destined to have a strong and not always helpful influence on his life. He continued the acquaintance by correspondence, became engaged, married her in North Carolina, and made a short wedding-journey, of which his first visit to Washington was the principal feature. About the same period he contributed a good many verses to the “Log Cabin”—“Historic Pencillings,” “Nero's Tomb,” “Fantasies,” “On the Death of William Wirt,” etc. They are not destitute of poetic feeling, but in later years he was never glad to have them recalled. In 1859, learning that Robert Bonner, of the “New York Ledger,” proposed to include them among representative poems in a volume to be made up from authors not appearing in Charles A. Dana's “Household Book of Poetry,” Mr. Greeley wrote: “Mr. Bonner, be good enough—you must—to exclude me from your new poetic Pantheon. I have no business therein, no right and no desire to be installed there. I am no poet, never was (in expression), and never shall be. True, I wrote some verses in my callow days, as I suppose most persons who can make intelligible pen-marks have done; but I was never a poet, even in the mists of deluding fancy. . . . Within the last ten years I have been accused of all possible and some impossible offences against good taste, good morals, and the common weal; I have been branded aristocrat, communist, infidel, hypocrite, demagogue, disunionist, traitor, corruptionist, and so forth, and so forth, but cannot remember that any one has flung in my face my youthful transgressions in the way of rhyme. . . . Let the dead rest! and let me enjoy the reputation, which I covet and deserve, of knowing poetry from prose, which the ruthless resurrection of my verses would subvert, since the unobserving majority would blindly infer that I considered them poetry.”

In establishing the “Tribune,” Mr. Greeley had considerable reputation; wide acquaintance among newspaper men and practical politicians, one thousand dollars in money borrowed from James Coggeshall, and the promise from another source of a thousand more, which was never realized. He had employed, some time before, at $8 a week, a young man fresh from the University of Vermont. This young man, Henry J. Raymond, now became his chief assistant in the conduct of the new paper, and gradually a considerable force of people of similar fitness gathered about him, the paper always having an attraction for men of intellect and scholarly tastes. In the early years it thus enjoyed the services of George William Curtis, William Henry Fry, Charles A. Dana, Margaret Fuller, Albert Brisbane, Bayard Taylor, Count Gurowski, and others. Of its first number, 5,000 copies were printed, and, as Mr. Greeley said, “with difficulty given away.” About 600 subscribers had been procured through the exertions of his personal and political friends. Being published at first at one cent a copy, it was regarded as a serious rival by the cheap papers, and the “Sun” especially undertook to interfere with its circulation by forbidding its newsboys to sell the new paper. The public considered this unfair, and the “Tribune” was greatly helped. In four weeks it reached a circulation of 6,000; in four weeks more its circulation had risen to the limit of the press, being between 11,000 and 12,000. Its business management was chaotic, but by July the chances for a permanent success were so clear that Thomas McElrath, a business man of excellent standing, was taken in as an equal partner. A weekly issue was projected, and on 20 September the “New Yorker” and the “Log Cabin” were merged in the first number of “The New York Weekly Tribune,” which soon attained considerable circulation and ultimately became a great political and social force in rural communities, particularly in the period of the anti-slavery discussion prior to and during the war for the Union. From this time forward Mr. Greeley's business prosperity was secure, but the “Tribune” might easily have been far more successful from the mere money point of view if its editor had been less outspoken and indifferent to the light in which the New York public might regard his opinions. The controlling influences in the city were then largely favorable to free-trade: but he made the “Tribune” aggressively protectionist. A commercial community was necessarily conservative, but the “Tribune” soon came to be everywhere regarded as radical. New York had close business connections with the south, but the “Tribune” gradually became more and more explicit in its anti-slavery utterances. The prevailing religious faith among the better educated classes was orthodox; Mr. Greeley connected himself almost from the outset with a Universalist church. He aimed always to practise the utmost hospitality toward new ideas and their exponents, so that people soon talked of the “isms” of the “Tribune.” Sympathizing profoundly with workingmen, he was led constantly to schemes for bettering their condition, and became interested in the theories of Fourier. Before the “Tribune” was a year old he had discussed the subject of “Fourierism in France” in an article beginning thus: “We have written something, and shall yet write much more, in illustration and advocacy of the great social revolution which our age is destined to commence, in rendering all useful labor at once attractive and honorable, and banishing want and all consequent degradation from the globe. The germ of this revolution is developed in the writings of Charles Fourier.” In March, 1842, he began publishing, under a contract with a number of New York Fourierites, one column daily on the first page of the “Tribune” on Fourierite topics, from the pen of Albert Brisbane. The theories here advanced were also occasionally defended in the editorial columns. Mr. Greeley became a subscriber to one or two Fourierite associations, notably that of the “American Phalanx” at Red Bank, New Jersey, and occasionally addressed public meetings on the subject. When the famous Brook Farm experiment was abandoned, its chief, George Ripley, sought employment on the “Tribune,” and was soon its literary editor. Another of its members, Charles A. Dana, became in time the “Tribune's” managing editor. Another, Margaret Fuller, contributed literary work and occasional editorials, and lived in Mr. Greeley's family; and another, George William Curtis, was also employed. In 1846 Henry J. Raymond, who had now, owing to some disagreement, left the “Tribune” and become a leading editor on the “Courier and Enquirer,” saw that Fourierism offered an inviting point for attack upon the “Tribune.” Mr. Greeley, whose conduct of the paper was always argumentative and pugnacious, responded to some criticism by challenging Mr. Raymond to a thorough discussion of the whole subject, in a series of twelve articles and replies, to be published in full in all the editions of each paper. Mr. Raymond accepted, and made therein his first wide reputation in New York. Mr. Greeley's articles were undoubtedly able, but he was not so adroit a fencer as his opponent, and he had the unpopular side. The discussion left on the public mind the impression that Mr. Raymond was the victor, and the Fourierite movement from that date began its decline in America. Mr. Greeley was always careful to mark his dissent from many of Fourier's propositions. In the discussion Mr. Raymond endeavored to force him into the position that no man can rightfully own land (substantially the doctrine of which Henry George has since been the apostle), but Mr. Greeley indignantly repudiated it. In later years he dwelt upon the principle of association as the only one in Fourier's scheme that particularly attracted him; and in the form of co-operation among working-men this always received his zealous support. 

The rappings and alleged spiritual manifestations of the Fox sisters at Rochester early attracted attention in the “Tribune,” and were fairly described and discussed without absolute incredulity. In 1848, at Mrs. Greeley's invitation, the Fox sisters spent some time in his family as his guests. He listened attentively to what they said, inquired with interest into details, but hesitated to accept doctrine of actual spiritual communications, at any rate failed, he said, to see that any good of them. Nevertheless, the open-minded readiness that he displayed in investigating this, any other new subject presented to him, led to identification for some time in the public mind that as effective a weapon as could be used against the “Tribune” in commercial and conservative New York to call it a Fourierite and spiritualistic organ. With all his radicalism, however, there were two subjects on which, then and throughout life, he was steadily conservative. He constantly defended the sanctity and permanence of the family relation, and protested against anything in legislation, or public practice tending to break down the sanction of the Sabbath as a day of rest.

Meanwhile, the “Tribune” prospered moderately and almost continuously, and if Mr. Greeley had not been hopelessly incapable in business matters, should soon have placed him in a position of comfortable independence. In twenty-four years it invested from its earnings $382,000 in real estate and machinery, and divided among its owners a sum equal to an annual average of over $50,000. But Mr. Greeley inherited his father's tendency to reckless indorsements for his friends, was readily imposed upon by adventurers, and found it easier to give a dollar to every applicant than to inquire into his deserts. In spite of an income liberal for those days, he was thus often in serious straits for money, lived in an extremely plain if not always economical fashion. Presently, as his property became more valuable, he contracted the habit of money for immediate necessities by parting with some of it. After it was clear to practical that the “Tribune” was a success, he sold of it to Thomas McElrath for $2,000. By the time it was seven years old he owned less than a third of it. In 1860 his interest was reduced to twentieths, in 1868 to less than one tenth, and by 1872 he actually owned only six shares out of the hundred into which the property was then divided. Meantime, though always hampered by his business ideas, the property had advanced in until in 1867 he was able to sell at $6,500 a share, and his last sale was at $9,600. The price the daily “Tribune” was kept at one cent until the beginning of its second volume, when it was advanced to two cents for a single number, or nine a week. It then had 12,000 subscribers, and did not lose 200 of them by the increase in price. A year later it had reached a circulation of 20,000, and advertisements were so numerous that frequent supplements were issued. After a time the price was again advanced to three cents, and finally to four. The circulation rose to a steady average of 35,000 to 40,000, and there were periods of extraordinary interest, especially during the civil war, when for months it reached from 60,000 to 65,000. The weekly edition, being free then from competition, with strong weekly issues in the inland cities, gained a wide circulation throughout the entire north, being probably more generally read for some years in the northern states and territories than any other one newspaper. During political canvasses it sometimes reached a total circulation of a quarter of a million copies, and often for years ranged steadily above 100,000 copies a week. A semi-weekly edition was begun for the benefit of weekly readers enjoying mail facilities that led them to want their news oftener, and this edition ultimately attained a steady circulation of from 15,000 to 20,000 copies.

First Whig, then Anti-slavery Whig, then Republican, the “Tribune's” political course was generally in accord with the more popular and aggressive tendency of these parties. But it was also a highly individualized journal, constantly representing many opinions advocated by its editor irrespective of party affiliations, and sometimes against them. He held that the worst use any man could be put to was to hang him, and for many years vehemently opposed capital punishment. He favored the movement for educating women as physicians, and sought in many ways to widen the sphere of their employments. But he opposed woman suffrage unless it could be first shown that the majority of women themselves desired it. He assailed repudiation in every form, north or south, and was the bitterest critic of the repudiating states. In practice a total abstinent, he always favored the repression of the liquor traffic, and, where possible, its prohibition. He did not believe prohibition possible in states like New York, and there he favored high license and local option. He thought popular education had been directed too much toward literary rather than practical ends, sum and earnestly favored the substitution of scientific for classical studies. He gave the first newspaper reports of popular lectures by Prof. Louis Agassiz and other eminent scientists; but he thought ill of theatres, and in the early days of the “Tribune” would not insert their advertisements. He encouraged the discussion of a reformed spelling; but, while allowing the phonetic system to be commended in his columns, refused to adopt it. He gave much space to accounts of all co-operative movements among laborers, and sought to encourage co-operation in America as a surer protection for labor than trades-unionism. He sought to remain on good terms with the latter, and even accepted the first presidency of Typographical Union No. 6; but when subsequently, under this union, to a strike was ordered in his office to prevent the insertion of an advertisement for printers by a rival paper, he gave notice that thenceforward he would tolerate no trades-union meddling, should mind his own business, and require them to mind theirs. He was a warm friend to every movement in behalf of the Irish people, and particularly for the restoration to them of a greater measure of self-government. He advocated judicious but liberal appropriations for internal improvements, and was conspicuous in urging government aid for the construction of the first Pacific railroad. He strove to diffuse knowledge of the west and promote its settlement, giving much space to descriptions of different localities, and making removal to the west his panacea for all sorts of misfortune and ill-luck in the east. He actively encouraged one of his agricultural editors to establish a colony in Colorado on land that could be cultivated only by irrigation, and was proud that the successful town founded by this colony was called by his name, and that its first newspaper bore as its title the “Greeley Tribune,” in an enlarged facsimile of his own handwriting. He had personally a great fondness for farming, but little success at it, though he derived great comfort and recreation from his experiments on the farm that he bought at Chappaqua, thirty-three miles north of New York, where his family resided in the summer, and where for many years he spent his Saturdays chopping down or trimming his trees, and occasionally assisting at other farm labor. He favored an international copyright. He constantly watched for new men in literature, was one of the first editors in America to recognize the rising genius of Dickens, and copied a sketch by “Boz” in the first issue of his first newspaper. He was one of the earliest in the east to discover Bret Harte, and perhaps the earliest to recognize Swinburne. He held frequent public discussions—one with Samuel J. Tilden and Parke Godwin on protection, another with Robert Dale Owen on marriage and divorce. He frequently addressed, in his editorial columns, open letters to distinguished public men, promptly printed replies if any came, and was apt to follow these with a telling rejoinder. Thurlow Weed, Benjamin F. Butler, Oliver P. Morton, John J. Crittenden, Samuel J. Tilden, and many others, were thus singled out. He was fond of taking readers into his confidence. Thus he published details of his experiments in farming, and printed serially a charming autobiography. He announced his intended movements, particularly his trips to Europe and through the west. The latter proved an ovation, especially in the territories and in California. Being arrested once in Paris as a director of the American world's fair, at the suit of a disappointed French exhibitor, he published a graphic and amusing account of his imprisonment in Clichy. He admired Fenimore Cooper, and yet was involved in the series of libel suits instituted by that novelist, through a letter (written by Thurlow Weed) published anonymously in the “Tribune”; whereupon he pleaded his own case, and promptly published an amusing report of the trial and the adverse verdict. Sometimes, especially in discussion, he was less good-humored. In an angry letter to a state officer about some public documents advertised in the New York “Times,” he referred to its editor as “that little villain, Raymond.” Replying to a charge against him by the “Evening Post” of some corrupt association with the slave interest, he began, “You lie, villain, wilfully, wickedly, basely lie.” A subscriber in Aurora, New York, discontinued his newspaper on the ground of Greeley's opposition to William H. Seward, and angrily said his only regret in parting was that he was under the necessity of losing a three-cent stamp to do it. Greeley published the letter with this reply: “The painful regret expressed in yours of the 19th inst. excites my sympathies. I enclose you a three-cent stamp to replace that whose loss you deplored, and remain, Yours placidly.” Quaint letters like this, the oddities of his excessively crabbed handwriting, peculiarities of dress, his cravat (apt to be awry), his white coat, his squeaky voice, his shuffling manner, came to be universally known, and only seemed to add to the personal fondness with which his readers and a large portion of the general public regarded him. He became, in spite of almost every oratorical defect, a popular speaker, always in demand, and always greeted with the loudest applause on whatever occasion, social, educational, reformatory, or political, he appeared. As early as January, 1843, he was announced as a lecturer on the subject of “Human Life,” the advertisement being accompanied with the request, “If those who care to hear will sit near the desk, they will favor the lecturer's weak and husky voice.” He was afterward able to make this weak and husky voice heard by mass meetings of thousands, and by the delivery of lectures throughout the west he often more than doubled in a winter the annual salary that he received from the “Tribune.” But he went, whenever he could, wherever he was asked, whether paid or not. He was always ready to write for other people's papers, too, sometimes for pay, because he needed the money, but almost as readily without it, because he craved new audiences.

In 1848 he was elected to the National house of representatives, to fill a vacancy for three months. Regarding as an abuse the methods then pursued by congressmen in charging mileage, he published a list of the members' mileage accounts. This caused great indignation, which was heightened by the free comments on congressional proceedings contributed daily to the “Tribune” over his signature. Thus he said that if either house “had a chaplain who dared preach of the faithlessness, neglect of duty, iniquitous waste of time, and robbery of the public by congressmen, there would be some sense in the chaplain business; but any ill-bred Nathan or Elijah who should undertake such a job would be kicked out in short order.” He broke down the mileage abuse. He also introduced the first bill giving homesteads, free, to actual settlers on the public lands. In 1861 he was a candidate for U. S. senator against William M. Evarts, defeating Evarts, but being defeated in turn by the combination between Evarts's supporters and a few men favoring Ira Harris, of Albany, who was elected. In 1864 he was one of the Republican presidential electors. In 1867 his friends again put him forward for the senate, but his candor in needlessly restating the views he held on general amnesty, then very unpopular, made his election impossible. The same year he was chosen delegate-at-large to the convention for revising the state constitution. At first he took great interest in the proceedings, but grew weary of the endless talk, and finally refused either to attend the body or draw his salary. Two years later he was made the Republican candidate for state comptroller, at a time when the election of the ticket was known to be hopeless, and in 1870 he was again nominated for congress by the Republicans in a hopelessly Democratic district, where he reduced the adverse majority about 1,700, and ran largely ahead of the Republican candidate for governor. On the death of Charles G. Halpine (“Miles O'Reilly”), he accepted an appointment to the city office that Halpine had held, and discharged the duties gratuitously, turning over the salary to Colonel Halpine's widow. With one notable exception, this completes his career as office-holder or candidate for office.

Mr. Greeley's hostility to slavery grew stronger from the beginning of his editorial career. In 1848 he was intense in opposition to the Mexican war, on the ground that it was intended to secure more slave territory. In 1852 he sympathized with the Free-soil movement, and disapproved of the Whig platform—“spat upon it,” as he said editorially—but nevertheless supported the Whig candidate, General Winfield Scott, because he thought that better than, by supporting a ticket that he knew could not be elected, to risk the success of the Democrats. In 1856 he was an enthusiastic supporter of John C. Frémont, and during the next four or five years may be said to have been the chief inspiration and greatest popular leader in the movement that carried the Republican party into power. He was indicted in Virginia in 1856 for circulating incendiary documents—viz., the “Tribune.” Postmasters in many places in the south refused to deliver the paper at all, and persons subscribing for it were sometimes threatened with lynching. Congressman Albert Rust made a personal assault upon him in Washington, and no northern name provoked at the south more constant and bitter denunciation. Throughout the Kansas-Nebraska excitement the “Tribune” was constantly at a white heat, and its voluminous correspondence and ringing editorials greatly stimulated the northern movement that made Kansas a free state. Still, he favored only legal and constitutional methods for opposing the aggressions of slavery, and brought upon himself the hostility of the Garrison and Wendell Phillips abolitionists, who always distrusted him and often stigmatized him as cowardly and temporizing.

Up to this time the popular judgment regarded Seward, Weed, and Greeley as the great Republican triumvirate. But in 1854 Mr. Greeley had addressed a highly characteristic letter to Governor Seward complaining that Seward and Weed had sometimes used their political power to his detriment, and shown no consideration for his difficulties, while some of Seward's friends thought Greeley an obstacle to the governor's advancement. Having labored to secure a legislature that would send Mr. Seward to the U. S. senate, it seemed to him “a fitting time to announce the dissolution of the political firm of Seward, Weed, and Greeley by the withdrawal of the junior partner.” The letter showed that the writer was hurt, but it was not unfriendly in tone, and it ended thus: “You have done me acts of valued kindness in the line of your profession; let me close with the assurance that these will be ever gratefully remembered by Yours, Horace Greeley.” Governor Seward's friends claimed that on account of Greeley's disappointment as an office-seeker, as shown in this private letter, he had resolved to prevent Seward's nomination for the presidency in 1860. Mr. Greeley denied this emphatically, but declared that he did not think the nomination advisable, and that in opposing Seward he discharged a public duty, in utter disregard of personal considerations. At any rate, he did oppose him successfully. The Seward men prevented his reaching the National convention as a delegate from New York; but he secured a seat as delegate from Oregon in place of an absentee, and made such an effectual opposition to Mr. Seward that he may fairly be said to have brought about the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. In the canvass that followed, the “Tribune” was still a great national force. Immediately after the election Mr. Greeley said: “If my advice should be asked respecting Mr. Lincoln's cabinet, I should recommend the appointment of Seward as secretary of state. It is the place for him, and he will do honor to the country in it.”

When the civil war approached. Mr. Greeley at first shrank from it. He hoped, he said, never to live in a Union whereof one section was pinned to the other by bayonets. But after the attack on Fort Sumter and the uprising at the north he urged the most vigorous prosecution of the war, to the end that it might be short. He chafed at the early delays, and the columns of his paper carried for weeks a stereotyped paragraph, “On to Richmond!” demanding the speediest advance of the National armies. Rival newspapers hastened in consequence to hold him responsible for the disaster at Bull Run, and his horror at the calamity, and sensitiveness under the attacks, for a time completely prostrated him. He subsequently replied to his critics in an editorial, which became famous, headed “Just Once,” wherein he defended the demands for aggressive action, though denying that the “On to Richmond” paragraph was his, and saying he would have preferred not to iterate it. Henceforth he would bar all criticism on army movements in his paper “unless somebody should undertake to prove that General Patterson is a wise and brave commander.” If there was anything to be said in Patterson's behalf, he would make an exception in his favor. He continued to support the war with all possible vigor, encourage volunteering, and sustain the drafts, meantime making more and more earnest appeals that the cause of the war—slavery—should be abolished. Finally he addressed to President Lincoln a powerful letter on the editorial page of the “Tribune,” which he entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” He made in it an impassioned appeal for the liberty of all slaves whom the armies could reach, and said: “On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the rebellion, and at the same time uphold its inciting cause, are preposterous and futile; that the rebellion, if crushed out to-morrow, would be renewed within a year if slavery were left in full vigor; that army officers who remain to this day devoted to slavery can at best be but half-way loyal to the Union; and that every hour of deference to slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union. I appeal to the testimony of your ambassadors in Europe. It is freely at your service, not mine. Ask them to tell you candidly whether the seeming subserviency of your policy to the slave-holding, slavery-upholding interest is not the perplexity, the despair of statesmen and of parties; and be admonished by the general answer.” This appeal made a profound impression upon the country, and drew from the president within two days one of his most characteristic and remarkable letters, likewise published in the “Tribune.” Mr. Lincoln, after saying that “if there be perceptible in it [Mr. Greeley's letter] an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right,” continued: “My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery. . . . What I do about slavery and the colored race I do because I believe it helps to save this Union, and what I forbear I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. . . . I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere should be free.” The emancipation proclamation was issued within a month after this correspondence.

In 1864 Mr. Greeley became convinced that the rebels were nearer exhaustion than was thought, and that by a little diplomacy they could be led into propositions for surrender. He accordingly besought the president to send some one to confer with alleged Confederate commissioners in Canada. Mr. Lincoln finally sent Mr. Greeley himself, subsequently despatching one of his private secretaries, Colonel John Hay, to the spot to watch the proceedings. It was found that the so-called commissioners had not sufficient authority. The negotiations failed, and Mr. Greeley's share in the business brought upon him more censure than it deserved. As soon as the surrender did come he was eager for universal amnesty and impartial suffrage, and he thought the treatment of Jefferson Davis a mistake. When, after imprisonment and delay, the government still failed to bring Mr. Davis to trial, Mr. Greeley visited Richmond and in the open court-room signed his bail-bond. This act provoked a storm of public censure. He had been writing a careful history of the civil war under the title of “The American Conflict.” The first volume had an unprecedented sale, and he had realized from it far more than from all his other occasional publications combined. The second volume was just out, and its sale was ruined, thousands of subscribers to the former volume refusing to take it. On the movement of George W. Blunt, an effort was made in the Union League club to expel Mr. Greeley. This roused him to a white heat. He refused to attend the meeting, and addressed to the president of the club one of his best letters. “I shall not attend your meeting this evening. . . . I do not recognize you as capable of judging or even fully apprehending me. You evidently regard me as a weak sentimentalist, misled by a maudlin philosophy. I arraign you as narrow-minded blockheads, who would like to be useful to a great and good cause, but don't know how. Your attempt to base a great enduring party on the heat and wrath necessarily engendered by a bloody civil war is as though you should plant a colony on an iceberg which had somehow drifted into a tropical ocean. I tell you here that, out of a life earnestly devoted to the good of human kind, your children will recollect my going to Richmond and signing the bail-bond as the wisest act, and will feel that it did more for freedom and humanity than all of you were competent to do, though you had lived to the age of Methuselah. I ask nothing of you, then, but that you proceed to your end by a brave, frank, manly way. Don't sidle off into a mild resolution of censure, but move the expulsion which you purposed and which I deserve if I deserve any reproach whatever. . . . I propose to fight it out on the line that I have held from the day of Lee's surrender. So long as any man was seeking to overthrow our government, he was my enemy; from the hour in which he laid down his arms, he was my formerly erring countryman.” The meeting was held, but the effort at any censure whatever failed.

Mr. Greeley did not greatly sympathize with the movement to make the foremost soldier of the war president in 1868, but he gave General Grant a cordial support. He chafed at the signs of inexperience in some of the early steps of the administration, and later at its manifest disposition to encourage, in New York, chiefly the wing of the Republican party that had been unfriendly to himself. He disapproved of General Grant's scheme for acquiring Santo Domingo, and was indignant at the treatment of Charles Sumner and John Lothrop Motley. The course of the “carpet-bag” state governments at the south, however, gave him most concern, and brought him into open hostility to the administration he had helped to create. In 1871 he made a trip to Texas, was received everywhere with extraordinary cordiality, and returned still more outspoken against the policy of the government toward the states lately in rebellion. Dissatisfied Republicans now began to speak freely of him as a candidate for the presidency against General Grant. Numbers of the most distinguished Republicans in the senate and elsewhere combined in the formation of the Liberal Republican party, and called a convention at Cincinnati to nominate a national ticket. Eastern Republicans, outside of New York at least, generally expected Charles Francis Adams to be the nominee, and he had the united support of the whole revenue reform and free-trade section. But Mr. Greeley soon proved stronger than any other with western and southern delegates. On the sixth ballot he received 332 votes, against 324 for Adams, a sudden concentration of the supporters of B. Gratz Brown upon Mr. Greeley having been effected. Immediate changes swelled his majority, so that when the vote was finally announced it stood: Greeley, 482; Adams, 187. In accepting the nomination, which he had not sought, but by which he was greatly gratified, Mr. Greeley made the restoration of all political rights lost in the rebellion, together with a suffrage impartially extended to white and black on the same conditions, the cardinal principle of the movement. His letter ended with this notable passage: “With the distinct understanding that, if elected, I shall be the president, not of a party, but of the whole people, I accept your nomination in the confident trust that the masses of our countrymen, north and south, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has too long divided them, forgetting that they have been enemies in the joyful consciousness that they are and must henceforth remain brethren.”

Mr. Greeley's nomination at first caught the popular fancy, and his canvass promised for a time to resemble that of 1840, in the enthusiastic turmoil of which he had first risen to national prominence. But, contrary to his judgment (though in accordance with that of close friends), the Democrats, instead of putting no ticket in the field, as he had expected, formally nominated him. This action of his life-long opponents alienated many ardent Republicans. The first elections were considered in his favor, and when in the summer North Carolina voted, it was believed that his friends had carried the state. The later official vote, however, gave the state to the Grant party, and from that time the Greeley wave seemed to be subsiding. At last, on appeals from his supporters, who thought extraordinary measures needful, he took the stump in person. The series of speeches made in his tour, extending from New England through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, evoked great enthusiasm. All sides regarded them as an exhibition of brilliant and effective work unprecedented in that generation. But they were not enough to stem the rising tide. Mr. Greeley received 2,834,079 of the popular vote, against General Grant's 3,597,070; but he carried none of the northern states, and of the southern states only Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas.

He had always been more sensitive to attacks and reverses than the public imagined, and now the strain proved too great. The canvass had been one of extraordinary bitterness, his old associates reviling him as a turn-coat and traitor, and some of the caricatures being unparalleled for their ferocity. His wife, always feeble, and of late years suffering greatly from a combination of nervous and other diseases, fell ill while he was absent on his tour. On his return he watched almost continuously for weeks at her bedside, and he buried her in the closing weeks of the canvass. For years he had been a sufferer from insomnia; he had necessarily lost much sleep, and during and after his wife's illness he scarcely slept at all. He was not disappointed in the election, for he had known for weeks that defeat was inevitable. Nor did this act, though generally disapproved by his friends, weaken his friendships. Henry Ward Beecher wrote: “You may think, amidst clouds of smoke and dust, that all your old friends who parted company with you in the late campaign will turn a momentary difference into a life-long alienation. It will not be so. I speak for myself, and also from what I perceive in other men's hearts. Your mere political influence may for a time be impaired, but your own power for good in the far wider fields of industrial economy, social and civil criticism, and the general well-being of society, will not be lessened, but augmented.” But Mr. Greeley's nervous exhaustion resulted in an inflammation of the upper membrane of the brain. He resumed his editorial duties, but in a few days was unable to continue them. He remained sleepless, delirium soon set in, and he died on 29 November, 1872.

The personal regard in which he was held, even by his bitterest opponents, at once became manifest. His body lay in state in the city hall, and a throng of many thousands moved during every hour of the daylight through the building to see it. The president, vice-president, and chief justice of the United States, with a great number of the leading public men of both parties, attended the funeral, and followed the hearse, preceded by the mayor of the city and other civic authorities, down Fifth avenue and Broadway. John G. Whittier described him as “our later Franklin,” and the majority of his countrymen have substantially accepted that phrase as designating his place in the history of his time, while members of the press consider him perhaps the greatest editor, and certainly the foremost political advocate and controversialist, if not also the most influential popular writer, the country has produced. In 1867 Francis B. Carpenter painted a portrait of Mr. Greeley for the “Tribune” association; a larger one, executed by Alexander Davis, was exhibited in the Paris salon, afterward became the property of Whitelaw Reid, and is now (1887) in the “Tribune” counting-room. At the time of Mr. Greeley's visit to Rome, Hiram Powers made a portrait bust, and at a later date Ames Van Wart executed one in marble, on a commission from Marshall O. Roberts. The bronze bust in Greenwood cemetery was presented by the printers of the United States. John Q. A. Ward is now (1887) completing a colossal sitting figure, to be cast in bronze and placed at the entrance of the “Tribune” building. The accompanying portrait is from an excellent photograph by Bogardus. Mr. Greeley's works are “Hints Toward Reforms” (New York, 1850); “Glances at Europe” (1851); “History of the Struggle for Slavery Extension” (1856); “Overland Journey to San Francisco” (1860); “The American Conflict” (2 vols., Hartford, 1864-'6); “Recollections of a Busy Life” (New York, 1868; new ed., with appendix containing an account of his later years, his argument on marriage and divorce with Robert Dale Owen, and miscellanies, New York, 1873); “Essays on Political Economy” (Boston, 1870); and “What I Know of Farming” (New York, 1871). He also assisted his brother-in-law, John F. Cleveland, in editing “A Political Text-Book” (New York, 1860), and supervised for many years the annual issues of the “Whig Almanac” and the “Tribune Almanac.” Lives of Horace Greeley have been written by James Parton (New York, 1855; new eds., 1868, and Boston, 1872); L. U. Reavis (New York, 1872); and Lewis D. Ingersoll (Chicago, 1873). There is also a “Memorial of Horace Greeley” (New York, 1873). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 734-741.



GROW, Galusha Aaron (August 31, 1822-March 31, 1907), politician, radical republican. 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, pp. 30-31:

GROW, GALUSHA AARON (August 31, 1822-March 31, 1907), politician, fifth of the six children of Joseph and Elizabeth (Robbins) Grow, of English stock, was born in Ashford, now Eastford, Windham County, Conn. His father died when Galusha was four and his mother took her family to Voluntown, Conn., where her father, a Revolutionary veteran, was a farmer and inn-keeper. Galusha had the usual life of a chore boy with a little schooling in the winter and the activities of his grandfather's tavern for variation. About 1834 his mother, an enterprising woman, decided to go west into Pennsylvania to seek her fortune. Her father gave her some of his property, and thus provided she and her family joined a party which went by boat to Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and then overland to the Tunkhannock Valley where settlements were being opened up. Here she bought 400 acres near Glenwood, and twelve-year-old Galusha settled down with his brother to farm this tract. His mother soon opened a store and as business increased the family began to deal in lumber. Galusha made a number of journeys down the Susquehanna to Port Deposit with lumber consignments and at fourteen was entrusted with a schooner load of lumber to take to Annapolis or further south for sale. In 1838 he attended the Franklin Academy at Harford, Pennsylvania, kept by Willard Richardson, and in 1840 entered Amherst College, graduating in 1844 with an enthusiastic interest in politics. He made his political debut that year campaigning for Polk and after the campaign began the study of law, first in the office of Governor Cleveland of Connecticut and then with F. B. Streeter, of Montrose, Pa. After his admission to the bar in 1847 he went into partnership at Towanda with David Wilmot [q.v.]. In the course of this partnership Wilmot's political fortunes received a temporary check in 1850 when the more conservative Democrats put up a candidate in opposition. In order to prevent a split in the party these two opponents agreed to withdraw in favor of a third man whom Wilmot should name. Grow was the man and he took his seat forthwith in the Thirty-second Congress, as its youngest member.

His frontier experiences had made him familiar with the exactions of land-speculators and the sufferings of the frontiersmen from their rapacity. Also, his study of Blackstone had impressed him with the doctrine that occupation and use provided the only valid claim to the ownership of land. In Congress, therefore, he manifested immediate interest in the question of the public lands. His first set speech was on the subject of man's right to the soil, and he joined the group who were urging that the government be more generous in its policy of land distribution. In his second term he introduced a bill providing that every applicant be given a quarter section, but in the famous homestead controversy of that Congress it was not his measure that passed the House.

Many congressmen with frontier interests, of whom Grow was one were restive under the control which the co-operative element, mainly Southerners, exercised over legislation, and when the question of repealing the Missouri Compromise arose, determined that the time had come for a new alignment. As a result, conferences were held in Washington during the early part of 1854 attended by Democratic and Whig congressmen from the free states for the purpose of making new arrangements for political action. In these conferences Grow was a conspicuous figure. He was imposing, measuring six feet two inches; his strength had been gained as a " bark-spudder" and was considerable. He lacked any sensitivity which might have made another hesitate to bear the brunt of the new struggle, and his habits were reliable for he was a dyspeptic bachelor who lived apart from the convivial world. Consequently, he could be counted on to take the offensive at any time, and this strength and coolness made him one of the most aggravating of the new Republicans, one who could easily goad an impulsive Southerner to desperation and took delight in doing so. Thus equipped, he took his place beside Campbell, Banks, Giddings, and their associates, in the rough and tumble of the turbulent congressional sessions just prior to the Civil War. He won notoriety for his brush with L. M. Keitt [q.v.], and on one occasion made use of a bodyguard and was bound over to keep the peace. During these sessions he was also active in defeating various schemes of speculators and in urging the creation of new territories. When secession cleared the House of the Southern members, the Republicans at length could initiate a program, and when the special session of the war Congress came together in July 1861, Galusha Grow was elected speaker. During his term in this office he had the pleasure of seeing the homestead measure for which he had so long labored enacted into law. This was the crowning event in his career, for the Pennsylvania legislature had rearranged the congressional districts so that he now lived in a Democratic stronghold, and he was defeated for reelection in the disastrous year 1862.

For thirty years he spent his time striving ineffectually to return to politics in the face of Cameron's hostility. He was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1864, 1884, and 1892, serve d as chairman of the state committee in the late sixties, and in the Hayes Administration declined the Russian mission. He was active in various business enterprises, lumber, oil, and railroads, even going to Texas for four years as president of the Houston & Great Northern Railroad (1871-75). Finally he did succeed in coming back to political prominence. In 1893 'Willi am Lilly, congressman-at-large from Pennsylvania, died, and as Grow's biographer says, "Through the accident of Quay being in Florida, tarpon fishing, the organization did not promptly give orders to crush him" (p. 279), and Grow was elected. He served through four Congresses as a picturesque veteran, still actively interested in extending homestead legislation and acquiring new territory; he was a veritable Nestor in the House. Upon his retirement in 1903 Andrew Carnegie placed him upon his pension list and he went back to Glenwood to think over the past and dictate his memoirs. A frontiersman, he had labored earnestly to destroy the frontier and provide opportunity for individuals to develop the resources of the nation.

[J. T. DuBois and Gertrude S. Mathews, Galusha A. Grow (1917), partially drawn from Grow 's fragmentary autobiography; Congressional Globe, 32- 37 Congress, Congressional Record, 53- 57 Congress; speech on the homestead question, delivered Mar. 30, 1852, in the Globe, 32 Congress, 1 Session, App., pp. 424- 28; G. M. Stephenson, The Political History of the Public Lands, 1840-62 (1917); Edwin Maxcy, "Galusha A. Grow, Father of the Homestead Bill," Overland Monthly, July 1908; Who's Who in America, 1906-07; Pub. Ledger (Phila.), April 1, 1907.]

R. F. N.

Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.