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Rh GREELEY, HORACE (1811–1872), American statesman and man of letters, was born at Amherst, New Hampshire, on the 3rd of February 1811. His parents were of Scottish-Irish descent, but the ancestors of both had been in New England for several generations. He was the third of seven children. His father, Zaccheus Greeley, owned a farm of 50 acres of stony, sterile land, from which a bare support was wrung. Horace was a feeble and precocious lad, taking little interest in the ordinary sports of childhood, learning to read before he was able to talk plainly, and the prodigy of the neighbourhood for accurate spelling. Before Horace was ten years old (1820), his father became bankrupt, his home was sold by the sheriff, and Zaccheus Greeley himself fled the state to escape arrest for debt. The family soon removed to West Haven, Vermont, where, all working together, they made a scanty living as day labourers. Horace from childhood desired to be a printer, and, when barely eleven years old, tried to be taken as an apprentice in an office at Whitehall, New York, but was rejected on account of his youth. After three years more with the family as a day labourer at West Haven, he succeeded, with his father’s consent, in being apprenticed in the office of The Northern Spectator, at East Poultney, Vermont. Here he soon became a good workman, developed a passion for politics and especially for political statistics, came to be depended upon for more or less of the editing of the paper, and was a figure in the village debating society. He received only $40 a year, but he sent most of his money to his father. In June 1830 The Northern Spectator was suspended. Meantime his father had removed to a small tract of wild land in the dense forests of Western Pennsylvania, 30 m. from Erie. The released apprentice now visited his parents, and worked for a little time with them on the farm, meanwhile seeking employment in various printing offices, and, when he got it, giving nearly all his earnings to his father. At last, with no further prospect of work nearer home, he started for New York. He travelled on foot and by canal-boat, entering New York in August 1831, with all his clothes in a bundle carried over his back with a stick, and with but $10 in his pocket. More than half of this sum was exhausted while he made vain efforts to find employment. Many refused to employ him, in the belief that he was a runaway apprentice, and his poor, ill-fitting apparel and rustic look were everywhere greatly against him. At last he found work on a 32mo New Testament, set in agate, double columns, with a middle column of notes in pearl. It was so difficult and so poorly paid that other printers had all abandoned it. He barely succeeded in making enough to pay his board bill, but he finished the task, and thus found subsequent employment easier to get.

In January 1833 Greeley formed a partnership with Francis V. Story, a fellow-workman. Their combined capital amounted to about $150. Procuring their type on credit, they opened a small office, and undertook the printing of the Morning Post, the first cheap paper published in New York. Its projector, Dr Horatio D. Shepard, meant to sell it for one cent, but under the arguments of Greeley he was persuaded to fix the price at two cents. The paper failed in less than three weeks, the printers losing only $50 or $60 by the experiment. They still had a Bank Note Reporter to print, and soon got the printing of a tri-weekly paper, the Constitutionalist, the organ of some lottery dealers. Within six months Story was drowned, but his brother-in-law, Jonas Winchester, took his place in the firm. Greeley was now asked by James Gordon Bennett to go into partnership with him in starting The Herald. He declined the venture, but recommended the partner whom Bennett subsequently took. On the 2nd of March 1834, Greeley and Winchester issued the first number of The New Yorker, a weekly literary and news paper, the firm then supposing itself to be worth about $3000. Of the first number they sold about 100 copies; of the second, nearly 200. There was an average increase for the next month of about 100 copies per week. The second volume began with a circulation of about 4550 copies, and with a loss on the first year’s publication of $3000. The second year ended with 7000 subscribers and a further loss of $2000. By the end of the third year The New Yorker had reached a circulation of 9500 copies, and had sustained a total loss of $7000. It was published seven years (until the 20th of September 1841), and was never profitable, but it was widely popular, and it gave Greeley, who was its sole editor, much prominence. On the 5th of July 1836 Greeley married Miss Mary Y. Cheney, a Connecticut school teacher, whom he had met in a Grahamite (vegetarian) boarding-house in New York.

During the publication of The New Yorker he added to the scanty income which the job printing brought him by supplying editorials to the short-lived Daily Whig and various other publications. In 1838 he had gained such standing as a writer that he was selected by Thurlow Weed, William H. Seward, and other leaders of the Whig Party, for the editorship of a campaign paper entitled The Jeffersonian, published at Albany. He continued The New Yorker, and travelled between Albany and New York each week to edit the two papers. The Jeffersonian was a quiet and instructive rather than a vehement campaign sheet, and the Whigs believed that it had a great effect upon the elections of the next year. When, on the 2nd of May 1840, some time after the nomination by the Whig party of William Henry Harrison for the Presidency, Greeley began the publication of a new weekly campaign paper, The Log Cabin, it sprang at once into a great circulation; 40,000 copies of the first number were sold, and it finally rose to 80,000. It was considered a brilliant political success, but it was not profitable, and in September 1841 was merged in the Weekly Tribune. On the 3rd of April 1841, Greeley announced that on the following Saturday (April 10th) he would begin the publication of a daily newspaper of the same general principles, to be called The Tribune. He was now entirely without money. From a personal friend, James Coggeshall, he borrowed $1000, on which capital and the editor’s reputation The Tribune was founded. It began with 500 subscribers. The first week’s expenses were $525 and the receipts $92. By the end of the fourth week it had run up a circulation of 6000, and by the seventh reached 11,000, which was then the full capacity of its press. It was alert, cheerful and aggressive, was greatly helped by the attacks of rival papers, and promised success almost from the start.

From this time Greeley was popularly identified with The Tribune, and its share in the public discussion of the time is his history. It soon became moderately prosperous, and his assured income should have placed him beyond pecuniary worry. His income was long above $15,000 per year, frequently as much as $35,000 or more. But he lacked business thrift, inherited a disposition to endorse for his friends, and was often unable to distinguish between deserving applicants for aid and adventurers. He was thus frequently straitened, and, as his necessities pressed, he sold successive interests in his newspaper. At the outset he owned the whole of it. When it was already firmly established (in July 1841), he took in Thomas McElrath as an equal partner, upon the contribution of $2000 to the common fund. By the 1st of January 1849 he had reduced his interest to 31 shares out of 100; by July 2nd, 1860, to 15 shares; in 1868 he owned only 9; and in 1872, only 6. In 1867 the stock sold for $6500 per share, and his last sale was for $9600. He bought wild lands, took stock in mining companies, desiccated egg companies, patent looms, photo-lithographic companies, gave away profusely, lent to plausible rascals, and was the ready prey of every new inventor who chanced to find him with money or with property that he could readily convert into money.

In September 1841 Greeley merged his weekly papers, The Log Cabin and The New Yorker, into The Weekly Tribune, which soon attained as wide circulation as its predecessors, and was much more profitable. It rose in a time of great political excitement to a total circulation of a quarter of a million, and it sometimes had for successive years 140,000 to 150,000. For several years it was rarely much below 100,000. Its subscribers were found throughout all quarters of the northern half of the Union from Maine to Oregon, large packages going to remote districts beyond the Mississippi or Missouri, whose only connexion with the outside world was through a weekly or semi-weekly mail. The readers of this weekly paper acquired a personal affection for