Chapter 5 HORACE GREELEY THE APPEAL TO THE COMMON PEOPLE

To the work of the statesmen and jurists, the agitators and orators, must now be added the contribution of the editors. A loaf of bread represents many elements united in a single body. The sun lends heat, the clouds lend rain, the soil its chemical elements, the air its rich dust, and the result is the wheaten loaf. Not otherwise is it with the moral and political treasure named the Union and the Emancipation of slaves. The soldier boys at the front stayed the advancing tide of rebellion, and flung back from Pennsylvania waves all tipped with fire.

With not less heroism farmer boys at home toiled in the fields to feed and support the boys in blue. Physicians in the hospitals, nurses at the front, lived also and died, caring for crippled heroes. Mothers and daughters, sisters, sweethearts and wives wrought innumerable garments and hospital supplies, while from full hearts giving inspiration or courageously bearing the miseries of bereavement. Orators went forth to incite, ministers brought divine sanctions to inspire men towards patriotism and self-sacrifice. Statesmen supported the leaders by war measures, manufacturers and bankers stood behind the government. But to all these workers must be added the work of the correspondents at the front, with the editors who consecrated the press to liberty.

The power and wealth of the newspaper of to-day is explained, in no small measure, by the battles of the Civil War, that kindled the interest of millions who had never before read the daily newspaper, but who became after the first battle students of God's book of daily events. During those terrible days men slept in dread and wakened in fear as to what might have happened on the Potomac or the Mississippi. Out of these tumultuous conditions the Sunday newspaper was born. Before the battle of Bull Run people of New York and Chicago frowned upon the Sunday newspaper, just as the people of London and Edinburgh to-day will have none of it. But when there were a million men in arms and the whole land trembled with the thunder of cannon and the stroke of battle, anxious parents, fearful wives, knowing that the conflict was on, when Saturday's sun set felt that they could not wait till Monday morning for news from the front.

But if the war did much for the press, newspaper men did much for liberty. To supply the people of the country with news from the field, a veritable army of war correspondents was organized, a telegraphic service was organized and built up, plans were laid that developed into the Associated Press. This telegraphic service became a vast and shining web lying all over this land, with wires that trembled by night and day, flashing out now despair, and now hope, to innumerable hearts. Liberty owes a great debt to the press, for it assembled all the people in one vast speaking chamber, and told them how events were going with the slave and the Union.

If we are to appreciate fully the place of the press during the anti-slavery epoch, we must recall the conditions of American life in the olden time. When the colonies revolted and published their Declaration there were in the United States only forty-three newspapers, most of them weeklies. There were fourteen papers in New England, four in New York State, two in Virginia, two in Carolina and nine in Pennsylvania. The entire forty-three papers, however, held less printed matter than any ten pages of our morning journals. The papers of that time contained no editorials, and were strictly purveyors of the gossip and news of the week, with rude advertisements-now a cut of a horse that had strayed, an apprentice that had escaped, a slave that had run away, enlivened, indeed, by frantic and pathetic appeals for the subscribers to pay up their dues. There were no public libraries, no reading rooms, no inns where men could go on winter evenings and read the papers.

That which starved the newspaper was the lack of facilities for distribution. It cost twenty-five cents to send a letter. Most of the correspondents were widely separated lovers. Romeo, knowing that Juliet would not be able to pay twenty-five cents for his weekly effusion, learned the use of the cypher, and by means of a large circle on the outside of the letter and a pink spot within it succeeded in conveying certain mystic symbols of osculation, that told the story of undying fidelity without paying the postman for the letter that was left in his hands. The old postman who jogged along between Philadelphia and New York spent three days on the trip, and put in his time knitting stockings. John Adams tells us that it took him six days on the coach from Boston to New York, and that he rose every morning long before day, took his seat in the cold, dark coach, and listened to the creaking of the wheels on the snow until two hours after dark until late Saturday night, cold and exhausted, he entered the little inn near Castle Garden. For these reasons no newspaper had any circulation beyond its own county.

The first railroads that helped distribute the newspapers began to be built about 1836, and the first ship to carry our newspapers to England sailed in 1838. The first telegraphic message was sent from Washington to Baltimore in 1844. The first cablegram in the interest of the press was sent in 1858. Meanwhile the people were isolated, starved, being fully conscious that they were like peasants shut in between mountain walls, while they longed to be citizens of the universe. A single illustration from history will explain the isolation of communities at that time:-the news that Jackson had been elected President in early November did not reach his own State of Tennessee until after New Year's Day!

Horace Greeley entered the scene at a great crisis for the people, and was raised up to fill a national need. God had prepared the soldiers to fight for the people, the orators to speak to the people, the physicians to heal the people, the educators to instruct the people. He had raised up the statesmen to make the laws, but the world waited for men to cause knowledge to run up and down the land. The common people found a friend in Horace Greeley. He was born in 1811, in Amherst, Massachusetts, near the very cabin in which his forefathers had settled. God gave him a hungry mind, which literally consumed facts of nature and life. Not John Stuart Mill himself was more precocious than Horace Greeley. He was reading without difficulty at three years of age, and read any ordinary book at five. There never was an hour when he was not the best scholar in the little log schoolhouse, where he suffered the long winter through, scorched if he was on the inside circle next to the fire, or freezing if he was on the outer rim.

Reading was the boy's master passion. Like the locust, he consumed every dry twig and green branch of knowledge. Before he was ten years of age he believed he had read every book that could be borrowed within a radius of six miles. He read the Bible through, every word, when he was five years old; at eleven he had read Shakespeare and Byron. Spelling was at once a taste and an acquisition. The people of his neighbourhood put the child up against other crack spellers in the school districts. It is said that in the old evening spelling-bees, his school-teacher, who had him in charge, had to wake the child up when his turn came around to spell. The trustees of Bedford Academy passed a resolution permitting Horace Greeley, although outside of the district, to enter their school, while a few teachers raised a purse, and made an offer to his father to send the boy to Phillips Exeter Academy. But pride prevented. Horace Greeley's childhood fell on evil days. Men were miserably poor. It was one long warfare with hunger and cold. The ravages of disease among children were really the result of insufficient food in those poverty-stricken times. Although the mortgage on the farm was a mere bagatelle, the father lost the homestead, and became a hired man on fifty cents a day, on which amount he had to feed and clothe his family. This boy worked by day and studied by night. History and politics, poetry and science, formed the staples of his reading and reflection. For two years he pleaded with his father to apprentice him to a printer; the day that the printer refused the boy and showed the poor farmer and his son the door, brought black gloom to his heart, for when the door of the printing office closed before him, the gates of paradise seemed shut forever.

Trained in the school of experience, and a graduate of the university of hard-knocks, at twenty years of age the boy determined to seek his fortune in New York. There are few scenes more pathetic than the spectacle of this friendless boy starting to walk from Erie, Pa., to this metropolis, then a city of only two hundred thousand people. He had a tow head, a bent form, a singular dress, and carried his entire belongings in a little bundle, supported by a walking stick thrown over his shoulder. Partly on foot, partly on the wagon of some farmer, who gave the traveller a lift, partly on the canal boats, Horace Greeley made his way until, after many days, in August, 1831, he landed at the foot of Wall Street.

Not Benjamin Franklin, landing on the wharves of Philadelphia, and buying a fresh roll on which he breakfasted while he went about looking for work, is so fascinating a figure as this simple-hearted, unworldly, artless, unsophisticated youth, with the step of a clodhopper and the face of an angel. Counting his coin, the boy found he had ten dollars left, and straightway took lodgings on West Street, for which he promised to pay two dollars and a half a week. He soon found a job and began to set type on an edition of the New Testament, with marginal notes in Greek and Latin. In two years he had his own printing office, and in 1834 the youth found his place as the editor of the New Yorker, a weekly that first of all took stories and the name of Charles Dickens to the people of New York. He soon carried the newspaper up to nine thousand subscribers, and a gross income of $25,000. Genius makes its own way. The world is always looking for unique ability. Horace Greeley had the art of putting things. He could make a statement that would go to the intellect like an arrow to the bull's-eye. There is always plenty of room for the man who has a gift and can do a thing better than any one else.

But the panic of 1837 bankrupted Greeley, who knew nothing about the business end of his enterprise. He had 9,000 subscribers, but none of them would pay their bills, and the more his paper grew the worse off he was. One day he struck from the roll the names of 2,500 subscribers. A little later he offered to give the entire establishment to a friend, and pay him $2,000 for taking it off his hands, agreeing to work out by typesetting the large debt. Then came an overture from Thurlow Weed and Benedict, and Greeley founded the Log Cabin, a campaign paper advocating the election of General Harrison as president, and sent out the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too." Politics was his passion and delight. An ardent Whig, he loved Henry Clay as an enthusiast, and worshipped him like a disciple. The death of Harrison in 1841, therefore, brought another crisis into Greeley's life. Then he founded the New York Tribune. In later years Horace Greeley used to say that the first half of his life was preparatory to founding the Tribune, and the other half to building up the newspaper that was his pride.

On April 3, 1841, the Log Cabin contained an announcement of the appearance of "a morning journal of politics, literature and general intelligence." It was to be sold for one penny, was to be free from all immoral reports, to be accurate in its statements, impartial in its judgments, unbiassed and unfettered in its opinions. The New Yorker and the Log Cabin were merged in the new journal. The expenses for the first week of the Tribune's existence were $525, and its income $92. Greeley was thirty years old, full of health and vigour, pluck and determination. He never knew when he was defeated, and when events knocked him down, he quietly got up again. In seven weeks the Tribune had a circulation of 11,000. Fertile in resources, full of plans to advertise his journal, he gained 20,000 during a single political campaign. Later he sent carrier pigeons to Halifax to bring home special news. When Daniel Webster was to make an important speech in Albany, he sent a case of type up by the night boat, and when the Albany boat reached New York the report of the speech was all ready to be locked up for the press. When the heart sings, the hand works easily. Work for the Tribune was literally food and medicine for Greeley. His daily stint was three or four columns, besides his correspondence, lectures and addresses. For twenty years he had no vacation and no rest. His one ideal was to make the Tribune an accurate and trustworthy guide for the political thinking of the common people.

What literature was to Burke, what patriotism was to Webster, what all mankind was to Paul, that politics and political writing were to Horace Greeley. Dr. Bacon once said of a secretary of the State Association of Connecticut that he was "possessed of a statistical devil." And Horace Greeley's Tribune Almanac became so great a power that an envious competitor once said that Horace Greeley was possessed of a political devil, who helped him in his statistics on Protection. At last the Tribune became a national organ, an acknowledged power. Horace Greeley began to make history, and in 1860 prevented Seward's nomination for the presidency. It was Greeley's personal preference for Governor Bates of Missouri that made possible the nomination of Abraham Lincoln.

As a reformer, Greeley was an extremist in politics. Whatever he wanted, he wanted on the moment, and had no patience in waiting. He was as uncompromising as Garrison, as insistent as Wendell Phillips, and as bitter in his criticism of Lincoln for postponing emancipation as Theodore Parker himself could have been. When the South seceded Greeley said that we must "let the erring sisters go." He thought that the North could do without the South quite as well as the South could do without the North; that is no true marriage that binds husband and wife together with chains when love has fled away. He urged that if any six States would send their representatives to Washington and say: "We wish to withdraw from the Union," the North had better let those States depart. It was not that Greeley felt it was best to dissolve the Union, but that he loathed the idea of compelling States by force to remain in it.

For a long time he carried the head-lines "On to Richmond" and roused the North into such a frenzy of feeling that he goaded the President, the Cabinet and General Winfield Scott into action before they were ready. Scott was at the head of the army. He was a Virginian, and loved the Old Dominion State with every drop of blood in his veins. The great men of the South on their knees begged Scott to join the South and lead the host of rebellion. Scott answered that he had sworn a solemn oath to defend the Constitution and the country, and made himself an outcast that he might be true to God and the Union. But the cry "On to Richmond" became the cry of an unreasoning multitude of editors and their readers. All unprepared, the advance was ordered and Bull Run was the result. Greeley, being the leading editor of the land, was made the scapegoat-the target of universal criticism. The barbed arrows found his brain, and becoming excited, sleepless and overwrought, Greeley went into an attack of brain fever, from which he recovered only after long time, to register a vow that he would never again discuss the management of the army. Then came his editorials urging emancipation, illustrated by "The prayer of twenty millions," and Lincoln's wonderful reply, written to Greeley, "in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always found to be right." It is honour enough for any editor to have called out Lincoln's letter (August 22, 1862), a letter that placed the President in the first rank as a master of epigrammatic speech, and put in a nutshell the whole position of the government in relation to the war.

Greeley was wrong again in 1864, when he met certain representatives of the South at Niagara Falls and suggested a plan of adjustment for the ending of the war. These so-called peace commissioners, without doubt, used Greeley as a convenient tool, and exhibited him as Don Quixote, riding forth upon a windmill enterprise. But Greeley had the courage of his opinions; threats could not cow him nor blows terrify him, nor scorn and hate drive him from a position which he had taken upon grounds of conscience and sound reasoning.

During the draft riots, in 1863, the mob attacked the Tribune, smashing the windows and doors, and it seemed a miracle that Greeley was not killed. When his friends rescued him the great editor seemed quite unwilling to be forced into a place of safety. "Well, it doesn't matter; I have done my work; I may as well be killed by the mob as die in my bed; between now and the next time is only a little while."

In May, 1867, Greeley signed the bail bond for Jefferson Davis, ex-president of the Confederacy. Burning with anger his friends in the Union League Club of New York called a meeting to expel him. He returned a defiant answer: "Gentlemen, I shall not attend your meeting; I have an engagement out of town and I shall keep it. I do not recognize you as capable of judging 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 and enduring party on the hate and wrath 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 select my going to Richmond and signing that bail bond as the wisest act of my life, and will feel that it did more for freedom and humanity than all of you were competent to do though you lived to the age of Methuselah. Understand, once for all, that I dare you and defy you. So long as any man was seeking to overthrow our government he was my enemy; from the hour when he laid down his arms he was my formerly erring countryman."

In 1872, Greeley became the Republican who was a candidate of the Democratic party for the presidency, and was defeated by Grant. Doubtless he was actuated by the highest sense of duty. He took the stump and spoke in every great city in the North and South, without swerving a hair's breadth in his pacific attitude towards the South, or in his championship of the coloured race. His great work, "The American Conflict," on which he spent ten hours a day for many, many months, had made Greeley a master of all the facts bearing upon the reconciliation of the North and South. He showed almost superhuman endurance during that intense campaign. But Grant had captured the imagination of the people. The old soldiers voted as one solid band, the Republican party was looked upon as the saviour of the nation, and the people doubted Mr. Greeley's fitness for the presidency in a national crisis. He was defeated in November, and went home to watch over his wife during her illness and death. Just before she died, he wrote a friend saying: "I am a broken old man; I have not slept one hour in twenty-four; if she lasts, poor soul, another week, I shall go before her." Sleeplessness brought on brain fever, his old enemy, and on November 29th, the worn-out editor fell on sleep.

His fellow countrymen wakened to realize that the great tribune of the people had left the country poor. His own city rose as one man, in mood of profound grief and affectionate admiration and sympathy. His body lay in state in our city hall the long day through. The poor poured by in unending column, to pay their last tribute to a man who had never betrayed the people. The funeral services were attended by the president and vice-president of the United States, the president-elect, and numerous officials and citizens of distinction. Mr. Beecher made one address and then Greeley's pastor, Dr. Chapin, spoke. Men forgot the wreck of his political fortunes and the tragedy of his later career. He expressed the ambition of his life in the wish "that the stone which covers my ashes may bear to future eyes the still intelligible inscription: 'Founder of the New York Tribune.'"

A Universalist in his religious faith, Horace Greeley believed that right was stronger than wrong, good more powerful than evil, and that there will be in eternal ages no endless perdition for the evil ones of earth, but that God and all the resources of His power and love will here or there compel every knee to bow and every will surrender to the will divine. He earned the right to say at the end of his noble career, "I have been spared to see the end of giant wrongs that I once deemed invincible in this country, and to note the silent upspringing and growth of principles and influences which I hail as destined to root out some of the most flagrant and pervading influences that remain. So, looking calmly, yet humbly, for that close of my mortal career which cannot be far distant, I reverently thank God for the blessings vouchsafed me in the past; and with an awe that is not fear, and a consciousness of demerit which does not exclude hope, await the opening before my steps of the gates of the Eternal World."

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