Greeley, Horace

Editor of the New York Tribune, Presidential Candidate

As editor of the nation's most widely read newspaper during the Civil War, Horace Greeley exerted a powerful influence on northern public opinion—an influence that was frequently unhelpful to the Lincoln administration.

Born in Amherst, New Hampshire, Greeley came to New York City in 1831 and took jobs with local newspapers until he was able to start one of his own in 1841. Through much hard work over the next two decades, he built the New York Tribune into the nation's most influential newspaper. [Page 331]He was an outspoken Whig and allied himself with Albany Whig powerbroker and fellow journalist Thurlow Weed as well as Weed's close ally, William H. Seward.

During the 1850s Greeley's Tribune took a strong antislavery stand, but its editor began to show his erratic nature. He followed his fellow northern Whigs into the Republican Party, but he became peeved at having received no public office in exchange for his stalwart advocacy of Weed and Seward, and so broke off his alliance with them. When Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas was up for reelection in Illinois in 1858, Greeley exhorted Illinois Republicans to endorse Douglas rather than run a candidate of their own, because Douglas had resisted Pres. James Buchanan's efforts to foist a pro-slavery government on the unwilling voters of the Kansas Territory. When Illinois Republicans ignored Greeley's advice and nominated Abraham Lincoln instead, he used the Tribune's nationwide influence against the prairie lawyer. At the 1860 Republican Convention in Chicago, Greeley supported Missouri slaveholder Edward Bates against the odds-on favorite Seward. The nomination went to Lincoln.

When Lincoln won the election, Southerners began to talk of immediate secession from the Union; Greeley responded in the columns of the Tribune by defending the supposed right of secession. This aroused glee among the Southern fire-eaters and dismay among supporters of the Union. President-elect Lincoln wrote to Greeley, pointing out how destructive his statements were, and by January 1861, the Tribune had changed its tune and was denying the “right to dissolve this Union.”

Within a few months, Greeley was clamoring for aggressive action against the secessionists. Learning that the Confederate Congress was scheduled to convene in Richmond on July 20, 1861, Greeley took up the cry of “Forward to Richmond!” Day after day the Tribune insisted that Union troops must take the city before the Confederate Congress met. Eventually the public pressure that Greeley helped arouse became strong enough to prompt the action he demanded. Lincoln directed Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell to advance, and the result was the Union debacle of First Bull Run. In the wake of that disaster, Greeley was in despair and wrote to Lincoln suggesting that the northern populace was now against the war and that it might be a good idea to give in and grant Confederate independence.

In August 1862, after Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan had failed in his Peninsula Campaign, Greeley addressed an open letter to Lincoln in the pages of the Tribune, titling his missive “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” In it he took the president to task for not being aggressive enough in attacking the institution of slavery. This article elicited Lincoln's famous reply, including the statement, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union.” But, in fact, Lincoln had already made up his mind to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

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