Greeley, Horace

Horace Greeley was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, in 1811, the son of a poor farming family. He moved several times as a child, and he attended school irregularly before taking a job as an apprentice printer in Vermont. While in his teens, Greeley accepted that free trade breeds hardship and poverty and that tariffs should be used to protect American industry. In 1831, he moved to New York City and found intermittent printing jobs before editing the New Yorker. In the late 1830s, Greeley witnessed the collapse of the economy and the resulting pauperism, and he appealed to his readers to “go west” in search of land, economic opportunity, and freedom. By the time he founded the New York Tribune in 1841, Greeley was ...