Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/173

Rh the publication of a new weekly campaign paper, The Log Cabin, it sprang at once into a great circulation; 48,000 copies of the first number were sold, and it finally rose to 90,000. It was considered a brilliant political success, but it was not profitable. On April 3, 1841, Greeley announced that on the following Saturday 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, Mr James Coggeshall, he borrowed $1000, on which capital and the editor's reputation The Tribune was founded. It began with 600 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. In a period of twenty-four years The Tribune divided between its owners the sum of $1,240,000, besides a surplus of $381,939 earned and invested in real estate and improved machinery. The average annual dividend on each share (representing of the property) was $516.66. Greeley's 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 clearly established, he took in Thomas M'Elrath 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 2, 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 the autumn of 1851 Greeley merged his weekly papers, The Log Cabin and The New Yorker, into the 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 rural districts beyond the Mississippi or Missouri, whose only connexion with the outside world was through a weekly or semi-weekly mail. The leaders of this weekly paper acquired a personal affection for 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 war for the Union, and thereafter ranged at from 30,000 to 45,000. 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 The Tribune's first year it 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 American Phalanx, at Red Bank, N. J. (1843-50), while the influence of his discussions doubtless led to other socialistic experiments. One of these was that at Brook Farm, which embraced Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne among its members. When this was abandoned, its president, 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 1848 the Fox Sisters, on his wife's invitation, spent some time at his house. His attitude toward their "rappings" and "spiritual manifestations" was one of observation and inquiry; and, while he never pronounced all the manifestations fraudulent, he distrusted most of them, and declared that as yet he saw no good in them, and nothing specially requiring the attention of intelligent men. 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, but aided practical efforts 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 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 Agassiz and other authorities. He gave ample hearing to the advocates of phonography and of phonetic 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 War of the Rebellion, that Greeley's main work was done. Incidents in it were his vehement opposition to the Mexican war as a scheme for more slave 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 1848-9 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 Governor 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 Mr 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