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Rh its editor, and he was thus for many years the American writer most widely known and most popular among the rural classes. The circulation of The Daily Tribune was never proportionately great—its advocacy of a protective tariff, prohibitory liquor legislation and other peculiarities, repelling a large support which it might otherwise have commanded in New York. It rose within a short time after its establishment to a circulation of 20,000, reached 50,000 and 60,000 during the Civil War, and thereafter ranged at from 30,000 to 45,000. After May 1845 a semi-weekly edition was also printed, which ultimately reached a steady circulation of from 15,000 to 25,000.

From the outset it was a cardinal principle with Greeley to hear all sides, and to extend a special hospitality to new ideas. In March 1842 The Tribune began to give one column daily to a discussion of the doctrines of Charles Fourier, contributed by Albert Brisbane. Gradually Greeley came to advocate some of these doctrines editorially. In 1846 he had a sharp discussion upon them with a former subordinate, Henry J. Raymond, then employed upon a rival journal. It continued through twelve articles on each side, and was subsequently published in book form. Greeley became personally interested in one of the Fourierite associations, the North American Phalanx, at Red Bank, N. J. (1843–1855), while the influence of his discussions doubtless led to or gave encouragement to other socialistic experiments, such as that at Brook Farm. When this was abandoned, its leader George Ripley, with one or two other members, sought employment from Greeley upon The Tribune. Greeley dissented from many of Fourier’s propositions, and in later years was careful to explain that the principle of association for the common good of working men and the elevation of labour was the chief feature which attracted him. Co-operation among working men he continued to urge throughout his life. In 1850 the Fox Sisters, on his wife’s invitation, spent several weeks in his house. His attitude towards their “rappings” and “spiritual manifestations” was one of observation and inquiry; and in his Recollections he wrote concerning these manifestations: “That some of them are the result of juggle, collusion or trick I am confident; that others are not, I decidedly believe.”

From boyhood he had believed in a protective tariff, and throughout his active life he was its most trenchant advocate and propagandist. Besides constantly urging it in the columns of The Tribune, he appeared as early as 1843 in a public debate on “The Grounds of Protection,” with Samuel J. Tilden and Parke Godwin as his opponents. A series of popular essays on the subject were published over his own signature in The Tribune in 1869, and subsequently republished in book form, with a title-page describing protection to home industry as a system of national co-operation for the elevation of labour. He opposed woman suffrage on the ground that the majority of women did not want it and never would, and declared that until woman should “emancipate herself from the thraldom to etiquette,” he “could not see how the ‘woman’s rights theory’ is ever to be anything more than a logically defensible abstraction.” He aided practical efforts, however, for extending the sphere of woman’s employments. He opposed the theatres, and for a time refused to publish their advertisements. He held the most rigid views on the sanctity of marriage and against easy divorce, and vehemently defended them in controversies with Robert Dale Owen and others. He practised and pertinaciously advocated total abstinence from spirituous liquors, but did not regard prohibitory laws as always wise. He denounced the repudiation of state debts or the failure to pay interest on them. He was zealous for Irish repeal, once held a place in the “Directory of the Friends of Ireland,” and contributed liberally to its support. He used the occasion of Charles Dickens’s first visit to America to urge international copyright, and was one of the few editors to avoid alike the flunkeyism with which Dickens was first received, and the ferocity with which he was assailed after the publication of his American Notes. On the occasion of Dickens’s second visit to America, Greeley presided at the great banquet given him by the press of the country. He made the first elaborate reports of popular scientific lectures by Louis Agassiz and other authorities. He gave ample hearing to the advocates of phonography and of phonographic spelling. He was one of the most conspicuous advocates of the Pacific railroads, and of many other internal improvements.

But it is as an anti-slavery leader, and as perhaps the chief agency in educating the mass of the Northern people to that opposition through legal forms to the extension of slavery which culminated in the election of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, that Greeley’s main work was done. Incidents in it were his vehement opposition to the Mexican War as a scheme for more slavery territory, the assault made upon him in Washington by Congressman Albert Rust of Arkansas in 1856, an indictment in Virginia in the same year for circulating incendiary documents, perpetual denunciation of him in Southern newspapers and speeches, and the hostility of the Abolitionists, who regarded his course as too conservative. His anti-slavery work culminated in his appeal to President Lincoln, entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” in which he urged “that all attempts to put down the rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause” were preposterous and futile, and that “every hour of deference to slavery” was “an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union.” President Lincoln in his reply said: “My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery. . . . What I do about slavery and the coloured race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. . . I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.” Precisely one month after the date of this reply the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

Greeley’s political activity, first as a Whig, and then as one of the founders of the Republican party, was incessant; but he held few offices. In 1848–1849 he served a three months’ term in Congress, filling a vacancy. He introduced the first bill for giving small tracts of government land free to actual settlers, and published an exposure of abuses in the allowance of mileage to members, which corrected the evil, but brought him much personal obloquy. In the National Republican Convention in 1860, not being sent by the Republicans of his own state on account of his opposition to William Seward as a candidate, he was made a delegate for Oregon. His active hostility to Seward did much to prevent the success of that statesman, and to bring about instead the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. This was attributed by his opponents to personal motives, and a letter from Greeley to Seward, the publication of which he challenged, was produced, to show that in his struggling days he had been wounded at Seward’s failure to offer him office. In 1861 he was a candidate for United States senator, his principal opponent being William M. Evarts. When it was clear that Evarts could not be elected, his supporters threw their votes for a third candidate, Ira Harris, who was thus chosen over Greeley by a small majority. At the outbreak of the war he favoured allowing the Southern states to secede, provided a majority of their people at a fair election should so decide, declaring “that he hoped never to live in a Republic whereof one section was pinned to the other by bayonets.” When the war began he urged the most vigorous prosecution of it. The “On to Richmond” appeal, which appeared day after day in The Tribune, was incorrectly attributed to him, and it did not wholly meet his approval; but after the defeat in the first battle of Bull Run he was widely blamed for it. In 1864 he urged negotiations for peace with representatives of the Southern Confederacy in Canada, and was sent by President Lincoln to confer with them. They were found to have no sufficient authority. In 1864 he was one of the Lincoln Presidential electors for New York. At the close of the war, contrary to the general feeling of his party, he urged universal amnesty and impartial suffrage as the basis of reconstruction. In 1867 his friends again wished to elect him to the Senate of the United