HORACE GREELEY: Champion of American Freedom by Robert C. Williams (2006)
Horace Greeley was arguably the most famous American social reformer of the mid-19th century. He was the editor and publisher of the New York Tribune, the nation’s largest-circulating newspaper. He was a founder of the Republican Party.
Thurlow Weed, William Seward, Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Grant were among politicians who sought his support. Henry Thoreau and Margaret Fuller were among writers whose early works were published in his newspapers.
Horace Greeley, 1840s
He was loved by masses of the public, but sophisticates of his own day, including many who sought his patronage and support, smiled at him behind his back for his naive idealism, his eccentricities and his lack of polish.
With his hat and long white coat, Greeley did look more like a farmer who’d come into town for supplies than a mover and shaker. In this book, biographer Robert C. Williams seeks to rehabilitate Greeley’s image.
The subtitle refers to a theme of the book, which is that Greeley represented America’s shift from an ideal of liberty, which is personal, to an ideal of freedom, which is universal.
We live in a time when the ideals of both individual liberty and universal freedom have been called in question, so Greeley’s life and ideals are relevant for our own time.
Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and meant it, but what he meant was that he would die rather than give up his own liberty. He did not extend liberty to his human property in enslaved black people.
Greeley believed in freedom for everyone. He wrote in support of every oppressed group he knew about—slaves, women, the poor, the landless, Irish under British rule and rebels against European despots. He was an active supporter of experiments with utopian communities based on equality and free association, of which there were many in the USA in his era.
Born in 1811 in New Hampshire, he was the son of an unsuccessful farmer named Zaccheus Greeley, who moved west after repeated failures and wound up in the extreme western part of New York.
Young Greeley received no schooling and was taught to read by his mother. He educated himself by reading every serious book he could obtain. He was apprenticed to a printer at age 15 and was entirely self-supporting from that time on. This was not unusual in this era.
In 1831, he made his way to New York City. He spent a decade working virtually 24/7 at various jobs, first as a printer, then a journalist and then as an editor and publisher, including publisher of a short-lived magazine he called the New Yorker. He launched the New York Tribune in 1841.
He had met his wife Molly in 1836 in a boarding house dedicated to the ideals of Sylvester Graham—no alcohol, tobacco, coffee or tea and a vegetarian diet.
Their marriage was loving but unhappy. They had seven children, five of whom died young. Greeley cared for his wife, but he cared more for his work, and she was often lonely, depressed and sick.
He supported the Whig Party, which was the party of respectability, in contrast to roughneck Jacksonian Democrats. The Whigs were the predominant party of upper-class and middle-class property owners and also of intellectuals and idealists.
Greeley converted to Universalism as a youth and was an active church member all his adult life.
Universalists taught that God is a loving father who would not condemn any of his children to eternal punishment in Hell, a doctrine thought by many people at the time to threaten the foundations of society.
They believed in religious liberty. They were in the forefront of reform—against slavery, against capital punishment, for labor reform and for temperance.
They were much more popular among farmers, wage-earners and shopkeepers than were the more intellectual Unitarians, which was the demographic to which Greeley himself appealed as editor and writer.
Greeley once wrote, “I believe God’s truth is higher, wider, deeper and longer than all our creeds, and includes what is best in all of them.” Another time he wrote, “I believe Jesus of Nazareth was sent by God to enlighten and save our race, but precisely what and who He was beyond this, I do not know.”
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